COMMENTARY It’s not about statues – it’s about freedom

I recently wrote an opinion piece on free speech in which I concluded that when free speech is suppressed and one group dictates what is “true,” the result is totalitarianism. We are currently watching that nightmare unfold in our nation.
Americans believe in free speech. A recent Rasmussen poll reported that, “Americans agree freedom of speech is under assault, but strongly insist that they are prepared to defend that freedom even at the cost of their lives if necessary.” Those are strong words.
The poll reported that 85 percent of American adults think giving people the right to free speech is more important than making sure no one is offended by what they say. Only 8 percent think it’s more important to make sure no one is offended.
Why is it that the mainstream media and many of our legislators and jurists seem so obsessed with the 8 percent?
With overwhelming support for free speech, just 28 percent of those polled believe they have true freedom of speech today. This is hardly surprising and it is a ringing indictment of the environment in which we live.
Free speech is being suppressed in many ways and I would like to discuss two of them, the first supporting the second: the control of information and the destruction of objects.
Media giants control information. That control is being concentrated more and more each time another merger takes place, eliminating competition and placing control in fewer hands. Advancing technology allows broader and more precise filtering, limiting access to only selected information. Information is either not reported, or falsely reported with impunity, and false “realities” are constructed.
When all else fails, media giants simply “disconnect” sites or people with whom they disagree, as Google recently did with one of its own employees. We saw this repeatedly during the presidential campaign. Watch and see what the media does not report about the recent Antifa attacks in Berkeley, Calif. When general discourse is manipulated, it is no longer free. It becomes one-sided and we move closer to totalitarian control.
This brings us to the current debate over Confederate statues. Objects represent a form of speech, and destroying objects, in this case statues, because of what someone perceives they represent, is a form of denial of free speech. It is no different than book burning. Is the war on statues a proxy war by the left? If people think the statues of Confederate heroes are being removed because they are symbols of racism or slavery, I would suggest they are probably mistaken.
As a point of history, in a letter by Robert E. Lee to his wife, quoted by Jeffrey Folks, Lee called slavery “a moral and political evil.” Lee emancipated slaves, built schools for them and facilitated passage to Liberia. Lee was offered command of both the Northern and Southern armies and chose to defend state’s rights, his home and his home state, not slavery as an institution. Fewer than 20 percent of southerners owned slaves in 1860, and defending slavery was not a primary motivation for the Civil War for most in the South.
Why the war on statues and the war on southern history and identity? It’s all political. It’s all about 2018 and 2020. The idea is to create a false narrative that everything about the South and southerners is evil. Why? The South voted for President Trump, so the Americans who voted for Trump are evil, Trump is evil, both must be removed. The statues are the symbolic connection, the representation of evil.
Eradication of monuments won’t stop with Confederate generals because the generals are not important by themselves. There are two statues in Washington that are surely on the “must topple” list because George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slaveholders and must be expunged from history. While they are at it, other slave-holding founders and presidents include Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James Polk and Zachary Taylor. Woodrow Wilson refused to suppress Ku Klux Klan activity. Franklin Roosevelt ordered segregation in the military. Lyndon Johnson opposed civil rights legislation most of his career. Bill Clinton came from a slave-holding family.
While they are tearing down statues, don’t forget to tear down any statue of the late West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd. Byrd was the exalted cyclops of the Klan.
My point is there is no logical stopping point because the process itself is illogical. This is what suppression of freedom of speech looks like in action. Why is this happening when the overwhelming majority of Americans support free speech? What happens when the leftists show up at Washington & Jefferson College? Are we silent because we are being brainwashed and conditioned by the media’s onslaught?
It is time the 85 percent of us speak out, my friends. It is time to stop this assault on our freedom by the leftist elite.
I’ll conclude with a passage from George Orwell’s “1984”: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day-by-day and minute-by-minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Ball is a Peters Township councilman and the vice chairman of the Washington County Republican Party.