Victor Davis Hanson‘s latest column at National Review Online exposes the absurdity of progressives’ efforts to disavow the positive achievements of historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson because they owned slaves.
There are lots of strange paradoxes in the current frenzied liberal dissection of past sins.
One, a historic figure must be near perfect in all dimensions of his or her complex life to now pass progressive muster. That Jefferson is responsible for helping to establish many of the cherished human rights now enshrined in American life apparently cannot offset the transgression of having owned slaves.
Two, today’s moral standards are always considered superior to those of the past. Ethical sense supposedly always improves with time.
However, would the American society of 1915 have allowed a federally supported agency such as Planned Parenthood to cut apart aborted fetuses to sell infant body parts?
Ivy League–enrollment figures suggest that some of these universities have capped the number of Asian students. Is this really much different than the effort to curtail Jewish enrollment at Ivy League schools in the 1920s?
Three, the sins of the past were hardly all committed by racist, sexist, conservative white men.
Under the new morality, should we not also condemn the Aztec king Montezuma as a Hitler-like war criminal? No society prior to the Nazi Third Reich had so carefully organized and institutionalized the machinery of mass death that each year executed tens of thousands of sacrificial human captives from conquered neighboring tribes. Perhaps San Diego State University should stop using the nickname “Aztecs” for its sports teams, given the fact that the Aztecs practiced slave-owning, human sacrifice, and ritual cannibalism.
The Zulus are often portrayed as saintly indigenous people, brutally colonized by rapacious British imperialists. That’s not quite the whole story. Earlier in their pre-British history, the Zulus’ King Shaka adopted the sort of military imperialism and internal police state that would have made Joseph Stalin proud. By the time of his death in 1828, Shaka’s army had killed more than 1 million Africans through systematic imperial conquest and mass executions.
