Bacon's Rebellion

by Donald Smith

I’ve written a lot about the Congressional Naming Commission (CNC). In my opinion, the CNC has expressed contempt, and even disgust, for the legacy of people who served for the Confederacy. I base that assessment largely on the opinions and judgments the CNC declared in the Preamble to its Final Report. That Preamble is reprinted, in its entirety and without editing, below:

“There is much the United States should commemorate about the American Civil War

The Civil War turned a slaveholding republic into a champion of liberty, equality and freedom, and our nation has continually expanded its definition and defense of those values ever since – both between its shores and throughout the world. Through the courageous service and sacrifice of more than two million United States Soldiers from 1861 to 1865, what could have been our nation’s end became, instead, our second American Revolution. It made our Union more perfect. The American Civil War was, as Abraham Lincoln immortalized at Gettysburg, “a new birth of freedom.” 

Yet this rebirth and revolution came at a terrible price. Between those fighting for the United States and those fighting against them, an estimated 620,000 Americans died in the conflict, and the war’s total casualties numbered around 1.5 million. The conflict was deadly, devastating, and destructive: on a per capita basis, the Civil War was eight times more lethal for Soldiers and 10 times deadlier for all Americans than World War II. In absolute numbers, the Civil War killed more Americans than the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and all other conflicts before the Vietnam War combined.  (more…)

by Donald Smith

On the periphery of Rome, not far from the Vatican, stands a towering obelisk named for Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator and ally of Adolf Hitler. On a recent visit to the city, my taxi driver knew exactly where it was and found nothing remarkable about a request to go there.

The Mussolini Obelisk, standing watch over the Foro Italico sports complex, served as the starting point for my atypical tour of the Eternal City’s ‘fascist architecture.’ At the very outset, our tour group asked our guide: Why has the Mussolini Obelisk not been removed from what appears to be a place of honor?

For an American visitor, it was the obvious question. We have become accustomed to the removal of the likenesses of Confederate generals and even Christopher Columbus from public places. But it was not a difficult question for our guide to answer: ‘In Italy, we view it as history.’ Efforts to remove it had fizzled.

The loss that comes from laundering the past was made clear to us in the historical lesson our tour group received that day — a lesson that would have been impossible if cancel culture, American-style, had prevailed.

This is the beginning of “Italy’s Non-Cancel Culture,” an article by Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.  Husock’s article appeared in early April.  In late April, Elon Musk went on Real Time With Bill Maher and discussed the “woke mind virus” that’s infecting nearly everything nowadays.  Musk talked about his own experience with “cancel-culture, American style.”   (more…)