Guest Columns
The Truth is a Precious Commodity
Truth remains, whether people acknowledge it or not. The civil disorder in several American cities is an attack on truth.
Hello this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today I will be talking about the growing levels of anarchy and violence in America. In addition, we will look for the truth and examine why it is sometimes hard to grasp.
Quarantine update
For the Castle Family this is week five post quarantine and so far so good. But there are ominous storm clouds hanging over my city. We hear calls from city council members to go back to stage one lockdown. Which would be death to many if not most businesses. In times like these I really miss the family daughter, who is safe. But she is just a face on the computer screen thousands of miles from us. I don’t know when if ever flights from her island will be permitted. So we pray for her and we wait.
Strange happenings – and a direct attack on truth
There are some very strange things happening in America today. Statues of people who built nations and who achieved great things are being toppled by people who have never accomplished anything in their lives. I’m not talking about Robert E. Lee here, folks, because it has gone far beyond Confederate generals. It started with monuments to Confederate dead and the Confederate battle flag and has progressed to anything by white Europeans.
See this photo essay on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, as it looked three and a half years ago. Sadly it has become the epicenter of violent activity today. – Ed.
List of monuments mobs or bureaucrats have removed or destroyed
Here is just a partial list of monuments recently removed, destroyed, or defaced by either an angry mob or by an unelected bureaucrat who just made the decision to do it without consulting any voters:
- George Washington
- Thomas Jefferson
- Phillip Schuyler
- Caesar Rodney
- Abraham Lincoln
- Ulysses S. Grant
- Juniperro Serra
- Juan de Onate
- William McKinley
- Robert E. Lee1
- Christopher Columbus
- Stand Watie
- Miguel Cervantes
- Queen Isabella of Castile
- Diego de Vargas
- Francis Scott Key
- The Texas Rangers
- Orville Hubbard
- Jerry Richardson
- The Richmond, Virginia Police
- Delaware Law Enforcement
- Oregonian Pioneers
- Oregonian Pioneer Mothers
- John Sutter
- Theodore Roosevelt
- Raoul Wallenberg
Why do cities allow appalling attacks on truth
Cities across America and Europe have allowed mobs to pull down vandalize and destroy statues of historical figures from different walks of life. Cities could stop it if they choose to, but no one in the media is asking them why. The statue of Raoul Wallenberg in his native Sweden donated by Jews who survived the holocaust was torn down and destroyed. No one presumed to be white or to represent Western Civilization has been spared.
President Trump, upset because of vandalism of Iconic monuments in the nation’s capital, including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and the World War Two memorial, signed an executive order allowing federal authorities to arrest and prosecute those who vandalize federal property. Whether out of genuine concern or just virtue signaling to his base, one cannot say. In any case, Washington, D.C. is a federal protectorate. So no such order was necessary for federal authorities to act.
Doubts about this tactic of failing to defend truth
Some city mayors are starting to have second thoughts about allowing anarchy in their cities. At first, they seemed to have some degree of sympathy and even admiration for the goals of the mobs. But these things have a way of escalating and becoming all consuming. I suppose they learned the hard way that just because you are down with the cause does not mean the cause is down with you. In addition, lots of private tax paying citizens get caught up in the mob’s effort to destroy civilization.
The Minneapolis experience
In Minneapolis where this all started, people used to be able to live peaceful middle America lives – but no more. Now the city competes with Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle, as a haven for crime. Not just any crime but crimes of violence, especially murder. When it stayed in minority neighborhoods, as in Chicago the city was apparently willing to put up with it. But now it is all over the progressive enclave of Minneapolis.
In downtown Minneapolis, where I have spent many days, visiting friends, attending ball games and attending the Ron Paul Convention in 2008, white liberals hunker down, afraid that the violence and despair they have encouraged elsewhere will finally reach them. The politically correct say, “you want us to kneel, OK we’ll kneel.” Their subservience has not and will not keep the violence at bay. Each day they seem to find new methods of revolting, subservient groveling. But nothing seems to work, because the mob has another agenda that it doesn’t mention, and it is insatiable.
Wanting to defend your home is a privilege?
Mayor Jacob Frey, millennial head of Minneapolis, has certain views of what the mob’s goals are, and he is all for them. But he must now deal with the reality of mob violence out of control. Lisa Bender, President of the City Council is the person quoted as saying that if your home is broken into perhaps it’s time the privileged felt what the marginalized have been feeling. So she takes the view that if you are lucky enough to have a job in her city and you acquire a mortgage and work hard for years to service that mortgage, you somehow owe that home to privilege.
Prior history – the truth is not in her
Lisa was a privileged child from a white, affluent family who sent her to the University of California at Berkeley. She admits her privilege and apparently spends her time trying to atone for it. How? By allowing mobs to burn and loot the city for which she is responsible. She normally occupies her time by turning Minneapolis highways into bike paths. So that in the couple of months it is not snowing in Minnesota, people will feel free to ride bicycles.
Seattle mayor plays truth or dare
In Seattle, Mayor Jenny Durkan encouraged a mob of terroristic anarchists to take control of six blocks at the center of Seattle. That once great city turned into a war zone and a walled off prison for a bunch of violent lunatics. At first, the mayor was quite proud of it, often referring to the occupation as the summer of love. The lunatics declared their six blocks as a separate nation without any police. although many of them carried semi-automatic rifles. The Mayor told the nation that she was tolerant of them because they were opposing racial inequality and police brutality.
Breakdown of the summer of love
Now she says that she is “negotiating to bring the Capital Hill Occupied Protest zone to an end.” The violence including accusations of murder and rape among the summer of love forced her hand.
The cumulative impacts of the gatherings and protests and the nighttime atmosphere and violence has led to increasingly difficult circumstances for our business and residents.
Let’s attempt to interpret her progressive words. What she said was that she is getting so much pressure from:
- Business about lost tourism dollars, and from
- Residents afraid of the violence and third world conditions
that she simply had to act.
Lucky the President didn’t take back the city when she wouldn’t
I wonder what negotiating to bring the protest zone to an end means. My guess is that it means let’s find out how much money it takes to make all these highly principled anarchists go back to their parent funded ivy league universities. The President was right in his decision not to get involved in Seattle. That is a quagmire that is better left to local authorities and not a matter for federal troops.2 If Jenny Durkin wants to turn her city into a third world Seattlestan the people who vote can judge.
Dangers of cleansing history
The tearing down of monuments and the cleansing of history are big mistakes that we are making right now. Number one, when you erase history you don’t know where you have been. And if you don’t know where you’ve been you don’t know who you are. Number two, the cleansing of history is the act of a conqueror imposing his will on conquered people. Napoleon Bonaparte said that the chief spoil of war was being able to write the history. For these reasons and more we should never surrender our history.
The kneeling problem
Along the same lines, but perhaps even worse, is the act of kneeling to show contrition, support for a cause or just virtue signaling to others. Kneeling is an act of submission to the authority of others. The army which has surrendered kneels symbolically and literally before its conquering general. The conquered hand their guns to the conqueror because they are now helpless and completely at the mercy of the conqueror. Will he be merciful, or will he be cruel? It’s up to him/ The act of kneeling is also an act of the acceptance of slavery. The one who kneels is indicating his acceptance and acknowledgment of his status of slave. My advice to any American is to kneel before God but not before man.
Truth remains
The truth is so very important. And unless we are willing to face it and to examine it to determine if it really is the truth, we will never solve our problems. We certainly do not like to look at the truth and sometimes we avoid it at all costs. But if we do, how can we know the real source of our problems? Would we really prefer to base our lives, our futures, our children’s futures on lies from a media with an agenda of which we may not even be aware? Sometimes we evade the truth because we are afraid of what it may say about us. Perhaps it will reveal an answer to our problems that we consider worse than the problem. But nevertheless there it is unchanging.
Reality doesn’t depend on the perceiver
Reality is something that is also hard for us to admit at times. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once said,
Reality is what continues to exist whether you believe in it or not.
That is the best description of reality that I have heard. An example would be the question of whether God exists. The fact that you may choose not to believe in the existence of a creator God who is personal and who has a claim on your life has nothing to do with whether God exists or not. We may lie to ourselves all we want. But, in the end, reality is there right in front of us ever present and unchanging. It is at least unchanging until we face it with a determination to change it.
Information war against truth
Another reason for all this racial and political division at least bordering on hatred is because it is a tactic of the relatively cold war in which we are now engaged. Right now, the warfare is primarily one of information, but it could go kinetic at any time. The people who conquered Seattle were apparently trying to provoke kinetic warfare, but did not succeed. That’s probably why they made a big internet and mainstream news show of distributing AR-15 rifles to their members. I guess firing an AR-15 in combat is something they teach at Harvard now.
Despite many attempts to provoke one, the kinetic war has not started. One way to prevent open kinetic warfare is to continually accept any demand and then grovel before those making the demands. The result of that tactic is that demands never stop; they just progress to the next level. That brings me to the information war, which we are losing by using the tactic I just mentioned.
Demands go to the next level
An example of just progressing to the next level of demands would be after the destruction of the monuments I mentioned earlier, one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter, Shaun King, said that Jesus had to go as well. Yes, that’s right; no more statutes of a white European that we choose to call Jesus. Not just the statues though, because they exist mainly in the catholic faith, but other symbols as well such as stained-glass windows. I’m actually glad that he did that. Because perhaps it will be enough to awaken black churches and Christian leaders that an information war is raging.
The brutal truth – many black lives do not matter to the activists
I wonder if black lives really do matter to the political left. What about pregnant black mothers and the babies they carry inside them? Do they matter? An estimated 90,000 black babies were killed by abortion in America last year. Do they matter? What about the young black males killing each other at the alarming pace of about 25,000 per year? Do they matter? My guess is that they do not fit within the parameters of the information war now raging.
Then we have the group calling itself Antifa which stands for anti-fascist. If you are not with them then you must be a fascist. They call their enemies defined as non-believers Nazis and fascists. But they are primarily financed by the resources of a Nazi collaborator who bragged and laughed about helping the Nazis steal the assets and lives of his fellow Jews on a YouTube interview.
Summing up
Finally, folks, never let go of the truth. It is a rare commodity these days and is even hated by many people. But is there as long as we remember that it once mattered.
At least that’s the way I see it.
Until Next time folks,
This is Darrell Castle.
Editor’s Notes:
1 This does not refer to the Robert E. Lee Monument on Monument Avenue. At last report a Richmond judge indefinitely enjoined the Governor from taking it down and putting it in storage. But that has not stopped an unruly mob from defacing it and other monuments in NSFW ways. Some demonstrators have shot Richmond Police officers with paintballs. So now, further gatherings in Lee Circle are subject to the same restrictions as were “Unite the Right” demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia three years ago.
2 At its inception, the six-block protest zone advertised itself as an Autonomous Zone. It therefore pretended to be a breakaway country. Which had its own chief executive, one Raz Simone. Who laid and collected taxes, secured the border with his armed militia, and boldly – or insolently – declared that he and his forces constituted the police.
Never once did he raise his hand against anyone doing violence to anyone else in his domain. Perhaps only because the denizens changed the name from “Autonomy Zone” to “Organized Protest” did the President feel he could let that pass without military intervention. But he famously warned the mayor: “Take back your city, or I will!”
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