Last week, The Baron du Toit wrote a very timely, for me anyway, post about the controlling of historical facts and supplied this saying from Orwell
He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.
The reason this was so timely in my case is that my previous county of residence, King County (Home of the Crooked Election), has recently changed the namesake of the county from former U.S. Vice President William Rufus DeVane King to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
They are now about to change the logo of the county from the “Crown and Circle” in the upper left hand corner of their webpage to some sort of image of MLK.
The main reasons given for this is that former V.P. William King was a slave owner as well as being a rather esoteric historical personality and MLK was THE civil rights figurehead of the fifties and sixties.
I was thinking about reminding the people who though up this idiocy that the namesake of our entire state was also a slave owner, but didn’t want to have to worry about living in “The State of Kennedy” (or Carter, or Marx, or Lenin or, well, you get the idea).
I decided that I would rather remind the selected individuals that MLK was a multiple adulterer. Not exactly a personality trait that most consider admirable. King also prefered to judge people on their character, rather than the color of their skin, which would go directly against the Affirmative Action substitute program that the state has dropped on the universities when too many asian students filled up the roster at the Univeristy of Washington after Affirmative Action was made illegal by the overwhelmingly passed Citizen’s Initiative 200 a few years back. They call it the “Holistic Student Selection Process” or some such pap and doesn’t only use actual academic standards into account, instead, selected university staff members get to review how much “Adversity” the student has overcome.
I’m sure my letter found what is commonly called “The Round File” within the first paragraph.
I guess that my point here is that with the name and logo change almost complete, a part of Washington’s history, while not pretty, will be swept aside, while a new addition to the history of the state, viewed in rose tinted glasses will be glossed over and only partially told.
Maybe I should start calling it “A Brave, New State” ?
Historical revisionism is a necessary adjunct to any form of dictatorship, whether it be on the left or the right. Both Hitler and Stalin burned books.
The surest sign that any democracy is under attack is the mere appearance of historical revisionism, or to use the French word (revanchism), which I like better, because it has an evil sounding personality descriptor, “revanchist(e)” to go with it.
In Oregon, the revanchists suffered only one setback in their program, the failure to rename the Fremont (I-405) bridge. They got their way on revising THE ENTIRE MAP OF OREGON with a simultaneous removal of references to the word “squaw”. They removed Squaw Creeks, Squaw Peaks and others, and renamed all the roads contiguous or serving those places.
When the revanchists take the stage, and get their way, the requirement to remove them by force follows soon on.
Go to the range.
If they change the namesake of Washington State to something more politically correct, I’m pulling for Freddy “Boom Boom” Washington.