Now They Are Coming After the Pioneers
The public display of “woke” sensitivity is certainly contagious, and this virus has infected all levels of academic and corporate worlds. There are no issues too trivial to be affected, including team mascots and logos. Marietta College, a small liberal arts college in Ohio, has recently announced to its alumni that the College’s Pioneer mascot and logo are “under review” in light of “recent events.” This “review” is a symptom of a much larger story.
It is not too difficult to figure out just what are these “recent events,” as manifested by the current war on the name Redskins and on the monuments that include those of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The name Pioneers may soon join the forbidden ranks of Redskins. Apparently, any respect for those of European ancestry who first ventured into the Ohio River valley may now be unacceptable for a college that once proudly referred to itself as the Pioneers.
In and of themselves, any team’s nickname, logo, and mascot, are not very important. Who really cares if the team is called the Pioneers or whatever? Unfortunately, this proposed “review” by the College has a much broader, nationwide context, and is being driven by those who would radically transform and thereby diminish American society.
Stalin may have been a crude mass murderer, but he was cunningly perceptive. He recognized that an important element for the domination of the present is the control of the past. A ruler simply rewrites the past as necessary, airbrushes the pictures, turns persons into non-persons, all in a manner that justifies the agenda, no matter what or how brutal. This is an especially useful tactic if you accept the fantasy that history is necessarily progressive, and that there is “a right side of history” as Barak Obama used to assert.
The American Left has learned Stalin’s tactic well. Delegitimize the American past as incurably evil, convince people that there was nothing admirable in American system, fill the textbooks and lectures with the pathological dishonesty of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, and any defense of contemporary American institutions and practices becomes next to impossible for those who don’t know better. Continue reading “”

