a recurring historical impulse to break or destroy images for religious or political reasons. For example, in ancient Egypt, the carved visages of some pharaohs were obliterated by their successors; during the French Revolution, images of kings were defaced.
Image source: Gallery Glance: “Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt” at Pulitzer Arts Foundation by Alice Thorson for KC Studio (March 19, 2019), captioned, ““Akhenaten and His Daughter Offering to the Aten” (ca. 1353-36 B.C.E.), New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, Amarna Period, reign of Akhenaten. Made for a temple in Hermopolis Magna, Egypt. Limestone, pigment, 8 x 20 x 1 1/4 inches. (Brooklyn Museum)”]
In Isms and Ologies, Arthur Goldwag writes (page 238) that the French and Russian revolutions “unleashed some notable acts of icon smashing”. Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China’s communist dictatorship involved iconoclasm of an entire culture going back thousands of years.
Today, the term is more loosely applied so that we have cultural icons in the form of public intellectuals, comedians, fictional characters in literature, film and even commercial product labels.
Commercial icons which have recently been whitewashed in the iconoclastic sense of the term.
Note, by the way, that from the viewpoint of Jungian psychology, icons are links (*wink*) to archetypes. Public intellectuals and cultural leaders may embody the Heirophant archetype. Consider dispensers of wisdom and law such as Moses with the 10 commandments and Jordan Peterson with his 12 rules for life.
Comedians channel the fool archetype, also known as the trickster, and so does Peterson, to be fair, in his refusal to play by the rules of oppressive authority on the issue of compelled speech. Speaking of which, is that, beside him on display on a table in the photo below, a ceremonial mask of Coyote, the trickster?
Jordan Peterson and the Hierophant. Note what may be a representation of the trickster on display beside Peterson.
In the original sense of the word, icons are depictions of the sacred. In some cases, an icon is considered to be a “miraculously created image” and is “accorded special veneration”4.
Devotees use icons to connect with the divine through prayer, imagination and meditation.5 This is true also of mandalas and yantras which are to the East what icons are to the West, functionally speaking.
Image source: Mandala from Encyclopedia Britannica.
Literally and figuratively, there are iconoclasts who believe in iconoclasm and iconophiles who oppose iconoclasm6.
CONCERNING the MOTIVES of ICONOCLASTS
Iconoclasm concerns moral outrage. Iconoclasts can be said to be part of the outrage mob. Whether they think of themselves as left or right wing, they are more authoritarian than libertarian in that they presume to impose their will upon others. They seek to destroy public icons that members of the public would rather be preserved. They lack regard for the rights of individuals. Rather than choosing to turn their heads from icons, they instead rob that choice from others.
Iconoclasm inevitably involves power, using force against others, against the other.
In the past as in modern times, there tends to be both cloistered academics who profess doctrinal rationalizations for iconoclasm and those on the street willing to engage in the actual acts of iconoclasm; the vandalism and destruction.
However, extensive video content of modern iconoclasts strongly suggests that they are not actually motivated by the moral reasoning of their teachers as much as something more impulsive and savage.
most people who claim to be offended aren’t really offended. They’re just trying to silence you out of a sort of weird display of psychological sadomasochism. They feel - they’re projecting their feelings of worthlessness and impotence on others and trying to make them take knee in the name of broader social movements that they often are not actually part of. So, you know, white person they’re not actually BLM. They don’t benefit from BLM. They understand this. But they’re still going to use BLM to try to brow beat you into castigating yourself as a Nazi and apologizing frequently even if they are a white, upper class, gated community dweller, which they tend to be. It’s mostly a bunch of trust fund college kids.
Let’s look at Harry Potter and we’ll get a great example…
He goes on to explain that in the late 1990s and early 2000’s, there was a moral outrage over the Harry Potter material based on Christian ideology (children, they were afraid, would sell their souls to Satan and become wizards and witches) and that now there is moral outrage over Harry Potter stuff based on regressive left ideology. See the section on J.K. Rowling. He points out that the later group have become the former, their parents,
only a weird even less savoury inversion of them. Where they wanted you to go to church and they were worried that you would worship Satan, now you’re worried that somebody who cuts their dick off is going to get offended because of a Harry Potter book. Again, most of these people have a limited familiarity with the topic other than the fact that they heard that J.K. Rowling was transphobic. Why? Because she believes in biological gender. She understands that Y chromosomes exist. So she’s a very problematic far-right individual.
He says that most of those who claim to be outraged are
just part of the outrage mob. It gets them off. They’re sadomasochists. They have something sexually perverted about them. They are mentally ill, deranged, every single one of them. If they actually believe what they’re pushing, then they’re goddamn psycho and if they don’t believe what they’re pushing then it’s a form of fetishism. It’s actually a form of psychological projection. Again, they feel weak and impotent so they’re trying to heap abuse on other people to silence them because it gets them off. In some of these cases, it’s a literal sexual response.
He may be wax hyperbolic for comedic effect but again, he comes back to,
it’s just to keep up appearances. Most of them are just disingenuous…
It does indeed seem to be about power, whether or not iconoclasts admit it or even have the ability to realize it. Whereas an iconoclast may see those who oppose the destruction of icons to necessarily be iconophiles, in reality one can oppose that destruction out of principle. That is, without being an iconophile, one can stand on the principle that people should not be deprived of the means to choose whether or not to revere icons.
It does not seem as if iconoclasm is about wanting freedom from being forced to enjoy icons but rather it seems to be about depriving others of the freedom to enjoy icons. That’s an authoritarian motive, conscious or not.
But it also seems to be about the drive to oppose the other, that which one identifies as being against (and that which one projects all that they deny in themselves onto). Naturally, this often involves what one sees their parents as representing.
Notice, however, that a millennial who may feel iconoclastic urges against Rowling’s work out of resentment against their baby boomer parents and what they feel they represent (the view that Rowling holds regarding transgender issues) which they see as being blasphemous against their ‘woke’ ideology whereas their baby boomer parents may have felt iconoclastic urges against Rowling’s work because they saw it as being blasphemous against their Christian ideology.
ICONS in CYBERSPACE
In 1991, I think, my high school offered it’s first computer graphics course. We used a more rudimentary version of Paint. We were taught that we had to use the mouse to move the arrow across the virtual desktop to the icon for Adobe Paint and to double click.
Icons on your desktop that you click on. Think about that.
Just as we can have an icon of Mary or Ganesha on top of our real desk that we might use to link us to that which they represent, we can have virtual icons on our virtual desktop to link (*wink*) us to that which they represent.
Icons on our devices link (*wink*) us to something transcendent, in the sense of virtually existing in cyberspace, we click on icons to pilot7 us from where we are into what we want to access, as religious icons are designed to do.
Mandalas and yantras are also “instruments” intended to open a window (*wink*), allowing us to steer8 into sacred space.
The destruction of icons is probably only slightly older than the creation of icon.
“History is full of examples of iconoclasm,” writes Lucinda Dirven who teaches ancient history at the University of Amsterdam9. In Isms and Ologies, Arthur Goldwag writes (page 237),
The Biblical patriarch Abraham was literally an iconoclast when, as legend tells us, he destroyed the idols his father had carved.
Muhammed, too, was an iconoclast. Dirven writes that
The theological reasoning of this iconoclasm is the Second Commandment of the prophet Moses: ‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth’ (Exodus 20: 4). The making of statues is forbidden because people may fall into idol worship, which happened when the Israelites made a golden calf in the Sinai desert (Exodus 32: 1-33).
The commandments of Moses are written in the Bible and in the Quran. This explains why from time to time iconoclasm re-emerges in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In some periods the ban is extended to imagery of all living creatures, but it mostly concerns representations of deities. But not all religious groups exercise the same strictness when it comes to making statues of gods. Sometimes it is allowed to make representations of gods if they are not worshiped. Occasionally a group holds a literal interpretation of Holy Scriptures and rejects depictions of divine beings altogether. For example, at the end of the 4th century CE when Christianity became the sole official religion in the Roman Empire, fanatic Christians destroyed many non-Christian sanctuaries.
And during the 8th and 9th centuries, Christian advocates and opponents of religious imagery twice battled against each other in the Byzantine Empire. As a result, almost all art from the early years of Christianity was destroyed in the East. Large-scale destruction of statues also occurred in later centuries. In northern Europe, followers of John Calvin destroyed countless Catholic statues during the iconoclastic movement of 1566. They argued these statues were remnants of heathen beliefs that were at odds with Christianity.
Nicolas Poussin – The Adoration of the Golden Calf.
Dirk van Delen (c. 1604/1605–1671), Iconoclasts in a church
The Chludov Psalter (9th century)
Look close a the last image above and you will see a depiction of iconoclastic white-washing. We will explain further on.
In the Byzantine Empire, at least, iconoclastic cancel culture may have been enacted by the government under pressure applied by the woke to appease minorities. According to OER,
Open hostility toward religious representations began in 726 when Emperor Leo III publicly took a position against icons; this resulted in their removal from churches and their destruction. There had been many previous theological disputes over visual representations, their theological foundations and legitimacy. However, none of these caused the tremendous social, political and cultural upheaval of the Iconoclastic Controversy.
Some historians believe that by prohibiting icons, the Emperor sought to integrate Muslim and Jewish populations. Both Muslims and Jews perceived Christian images (that existed from the earliest times of Christianity) as idols and in direct opposition to the Old Testament prohibition of visual representations.
conceived to stimulate thought on the power of monuments and what drives their destruction
and that
demonstrates how seemingly random acts of destruction and defacement were deliberate actions intended to undermine the strength of objects viewed as vehicles of powerful spiritual energy.
She writes that one of the co-curators said that the exhibit affords “a window” (pun not intended) through which to view these defaced icons “as instruments of political and cultural power”.
The term itself is closely associated with this destructive human impulse as it reared its’ ugly head in the Byzantine world in a period not unlike our own insofar as there was public debate over and demand for the destruction of icons by activists and by law10.
In the Byzantine world, Iconoclasm refers to a theological debate involving both the Byzantine church and state. The controversy spanned roughly a century, during the years 726–87 and 815–43. In these decades, imperial legislation barred the production and use of figural images; simultaneously, the cross was promoted as the most acceptable decorative form for Byzantine churches.11
This is sometimes referred to as the Iconic Controversy12 which is described as
a dispute over the use of religious images (icons) in the Byzantine Empire in the 8th and 9th centuries. The Iconoclasts (those who rejected images) objected to icon veneration for several reasons, including the Old Testament prohibition against images in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:4) and the possibility of idolatry. The defenders of the use of icons insisted on the symbolic nature of images and on the dignity of created matter.13
Sadly,
Very few early Byzantine icons survived the Iconoclastic period14
In other words, they had a sort of cultural revolution themselves in which some of their own icons were, using terminology from Orwell’s 1984, were sent down the memory hole, replaced and thereby rectified.
In many cases, icons were “plastered over”15 or “overpainted”16 with a mix of water and powdered chalk or powdered lime, in other words, whitewash - they were literally “whitewashed”17.
I remember a lesson in iconoclasm in Art History I in college wherein we looked at a slide of a depiction of an iconoclast using a mop head on an especially long pole to reach and whitewash an icon painted high up on a wall. There are indeed historical depictions of iconoclasts in action with a pot for the whitewash and a mop or giant paint brush. Below are two examples.
This is a detail of the Chludov Psalter (9th century) that we saw above. Notice the pot what is essentially a paint brush that is about to be used to white-wash an icon. Source: Art History I - Module 12: Byzantine - Iconoclasm by OER Services (no date), captioned, “Khludov Psalter (detail), 9th century. The image represents the Iconoclast theologian, John the Grammarian, and an iconoclast bishop destroying an image of Christ. (State Historical Museum, Moscow)”
Here is an other detail of the Chludov Psalter wherein one can better see the instrument used to white-wash. Perhaps it’s head is a sea sponge. Image source: Iconoclasm by Art History Glossary, captioned, “John VII, iconoclast Patriarch of Constantinople, erasing an image of Christ. The Chludov Psalter. Ninth century. State Historical Museum, Moscow, MS. D.129.”
As we mentioned, there was iconoclasm in the French revolution and, more recently, the communist revolution in Russia and communist China’s Cultural Revolution.
The later, officially titled the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was carried out by young people, college students and the like, who marched around, dressed alike, acting like a paramilitary group, vandalizing and destroying icons, art, cultural artifacts and anything that would indicate the past. Like Antifa, they had a name for those who engaged in these activities, the Red Guard, and as with Antifa, iconoclasm escalated to physical violence and as with Antifa in leftist run cities, the authorities were generally told to stand back as this playground army of play-acting soldiers, this communist mob, these street terrorists destroyed and shed blood.
This was to drag the Chinese Communist Party further left. Moderate leftist politicians were replaced with radical leftists. This may call to mind the fact that regular Democrat party politicians are being replaced by members of the national socialist (rendered nationalsozialistische or Nazi in German) party known as the Democratic Socialists of America such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.18
It may amuse one to note that one of the official goals of the Cultural Revolution was
to provide China’s youths with a revolutionary experience; and to achieve some specific policy changes so as to make the educational, health care, and cultural systems
more equitable.19 Sound familiar? Isn't that what these street terrorist Antifa's are doing - pretending that they revolutionaries, while actually just throwing toddler fits but still managing to shed blood while the leftist authorities stand back and let them destroy statues, monuments and so on?
Also, as with Antifa, there were many factions of the Red Guard, not all with totally aligned stances, and no one official overarching Red Guard. So, one could say that the Red Guard was just an idea, not an organization.20
In 1970, the Weathermen (renamed Weather Underground), who were basically the Baby Boomer' generation’s Antifa, blew up one of the few commissioned molds21 of one of the most famous of all statues, The Thinker22. The following is from the Cleveland Museum of Art (2013)
One of Auguste Rodin's most famous works, The Thinker was part of a commission for the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. Although the museum was never built, the commission for the doors was begun, though never completed. The Gates of Hell is considered one of Rodin's masterworks.
Rodin worked for approximately ten years on the conception, construction, and arrangement of the Gates of Hell. Each of the main figures included was originally designed to represent one of the main characters in hell in Dante's epic poem of 1321, The Divine Comedy. The Thinker, initially intended to represent Dante himself, was originally positioned by Rodin at the top of the doorjamb, contemplating the scene below.
To quote from Bruce Christman in The Journal of the American Institute for Conservation (1998),
The Cleveland Museum of Art's The Thinker has a unique history in relation to the other original casts supervised by Rodin. In 1970, the museum's Thinker was blown up by radical protesters.
…in 1970, Cleveland's Thinker was blown up by radical protesters, one of the last acts of civil unrest that marked the turbulent 1960s.
In the early morning hours of March 24, 1970, dynamite was placed between the legs of The Thinker. The results were devastating (fig. 3). The base and the lower part of the legs were annihilated, and the remaining sculpture was knocked off of its pedestal. The Thinker lay face down, apparently contemplating Hell much more directly. The blast sent pieces of bronze flying, causing damage to the building approximately 20 yards away. The bronze doors of the museum were dented, and the marble columns were chipped. This damage can be seen to this day. Pieces of bronze were even found on the roof. According to the Cleveland Police Department, this act of terrorism was conducted by a radical Weatherman group operating in Cleveland. Members of the group later moved to New York City, where they were killed making explosives.
Fig. 3. 1970 photograph of The Thinker after the bombing
Fig. 3. 1970 photograph of The Thinker after the bombing
After much consideration, the decided that to repair it would mean recasting it at any rate, so they decided to keep it as it was after the explosion.
The sculpture was then mounted on a bronze armature and placed on a tall granite pedestal with the inscription “The Thinker / by Auguste Rodin / Gift of Ralph King / (and in smaller letters) Damaged 24th of March 1970.”
There was little emotional reaction from the press and public to the museum's decision to place the damaged sculpture on view outside the museum (fig. 4). Nearly all of the newspaper articles repeated the events of the bombing matter-of-factly and reported the museum's decision to place the damaged sculpture on view, citing the museum's reasoning. Interestingly most of the real reaction dealt with the incomprehensible and irrational act of the bombing itself. There was much concern about public safety.
Fig. 4. 1974 photograph of The Thinker as it was remounted after the bombing
According to Arthur Goldwag on page 237 of his book Isms and Ologies (2007).
The Taliban’s destruction of the massive Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, fifteen-hundred-year-old statues carved into cliff faces, is one of the most notable acts of iconoclasm of our own day
Image source: Should Afghanistan's Bamiyan Buddhas be rebuilt? by NBC News (November 29, 2017), captioned, “Women walk past the cliffs that once held the giant Bamiyan Buddhas. They were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.Rahmat Gul / AP file”
Lucinda Dirvin writes in Iconoclasm in the ‘Islamic State’ for Friends of Astor Vol. III. No. 8. (August 2015) that in the Spring of 2015,
ISIS posted several videos on the Internet showing militants destroying centuries-old artifacts and buildings in northern Iraq, the region that since the summer of 2014 belongs within their so-called ‘caliphate.’ The first video showed iconoclasts destroying artifacts in the archaeological museum of Mosul, Iraq’s second most important museum after the National Museum in Bagdad. In later recordings we saw them assaulting Nimrud and Hatra, the primary archeological sites from where the museum artifacts originated.
Destruction of artifacts at the Mosul museum.
Destruction of artifacts at the Mosul museum.
Destroying Assyrian relief at Nimrud.
The world reacted in shock to this deliberate destruction of Iraqi heritage and many fear this is only the beginning of ruthless destruction of all archaeological sites in IS territory. But why ISIS is deliberately destroying cultural heritage? The media frequently suggests that this is nothing but barbaric behavior, senseless destruction without any thought or reason other than religious fanaticism. The truth is far more complicated. This is not the first time that statues and buildings have been destroyed on such a scale. History is full of examples of iconoclasm. While none of these historical events is identical to what is currently happening in the Middle East, they do show that iconoclasm is often the result of religious, political and economic factors.
Destruction at Nimrud.
Destruction at Nimrud.
Idol worship
In the recent videos, a theologian of Islam (ulema) explained that the statues are being destroyed because they are ‘shirk’: expressions of idol worship and polytheism that must be eradicated. The cleansing of Islam of any foreign and corrupting elements is an important element of the jihadist ideology of ISIS. In an attempt to emulate the prophet Muhammed, who destroyed statues of idols, ISIS wants to eradicate all forms of religious expression that are not in line with their interpretation of Sunni Islam.
She goes on to explain how the 2nd Commandment prohibits the creating of representations of anything in heaven or on the earth or in the water so as to prevent idolatry.
Destruction at Hatra.
Destruction at Hatra.
Dirvin also writes,
Battle against shirk
In the 18th century, a new fundamentalist and conservative movement arose within Sunni Islam: Wahhabism. Followers of the preacher Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab cleansed the Arabian peninsula of all Jewish, Christian and Islamic elements that did not fit their strict, statue-less doctrine. Wahhabism lies at the heart of contemporary Saudi Arabia and is a source of inspiration for extremist militant groups such as Al Qaeda, al-Shabaab, the Taliban and ISIS. In all of these groups we find instances of iconoclasm. In 2008, the terrorist group al-Shabaab destroyed sanctuaries and Sufi graves in the Somali city of Kismayo. They also tore down an old church that had been abandoned for years. In 2012, Al Qaeda and Ansar Dine destroyed more than half of all the Sufi sanctuaries in Timbuktu in Mali. Skeptics say that the fight against shirk or idol worship cannot be the true reason for demolishing ancient statues, because these statues haven’t been worshipped for centuries. This is correct, but the fact that believers are emulating the Prophet is undoubtedly appealing and greatly contributes to the recruiting power of these actions.
The destruction of historical and archaeological cultural heritage is widely reported by the western media and this creates the impression that ISIS is mainly targeting historical monuments. But the destruction of the cultural heritage of other religious groups is far more extensive. ISIS destroys statues and buildings because they want to ‘cleanse’ Islam from shirk; they target monuments from other religious groups, such as Christians, Yazidis and ‘deviant’ Islamic groups, like Sufis and Shia Muslims. In some cases historically important structures are destroyed, such as the monument of the Armenian genocide in Deir ez-Zor…
Perhaps they would rather that people are not reminded of the Armenian genocide which, by the way, was waged by a group of Turkish Muslims called theYoung Turks.
Image source: Encyclopedia Britannica, captioned, “Armenian Genocide Bodies in a field, a common scene across the Armenian provinces in 1915”.
Image source: Encyclopedia Britannica, captioned “Armenian Genocide: massacre at Erzincan Human remains from the massacre at Erzincan, a site now in eastern Turkey”
Is it a coincidence that there is a propaganda outlet that bears the name the Young Turks whose main host, Cenk Uygur is Turkish who has denied the genocide of Armenians waged by the Young Turks (who were Turkish) and whose secondary host, Anna Kasparian, is an Armenian?
…the 8th century Assyrian church in Tikrit, and the tomb of the prophet Yunis (Jonah) in Mosul. The majority of the countless churches, mosques, graveyards and libraries that have been destroyed by ISIS are not very old and have little to no value in terms of art. But this does not diminish their importance.
Tomb of Nebi Yunus, the prophet Jonah, after its destruction.
Timbuktu shrine being destroyed.
Heine
The systematic cultural cleansing that ISIS is performing in its territory shows that religious iconoclasm often has political motives as well. Cultural cleansing is often paired with ethnic cleansing and correlates to territorial claims. The prophetic words of the German poet Heinrich Heine ‘wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen’ (Where books are being burned, there will eventually be burned people too) have come true many times since he wrote in 1821, and are still very true in this day.
During the Armenian genocide that began 100 years ago, the Turks not only killed over 1.5 million Armenians but they razed their churches and monasteries as well. During the Holocaust the Nazis destroyed countless synagogues and cemeteries in the course of murdering six million Jews. As the Khmer Rouge killed some two million Cambodians during the 1970s they also destroyed many Buddhist sanctuaries in Cambodia. Christian Serbs destroyed thousands of mosques in the nineties in Kosovo, where they also killed and chased away numerous Muslims. The acts of ISIS are very similar; not only are they destroying monuments of people that do not accept ISIS’ doctrine, they also murder them or chase them from their native lands. Now that they are gone and their houses and places of worship destroyed, it is as if they never lived within ISIS’ new ‘caliphate.’ ISIS’ wide distribution of horrific videos showing the massacre of captives reinforce the message that only orthodox Muslims will survive in the ‘caliphate.’ Cultural and ethnic cleansing is a way to claim political power within a certain territory, as well as control over history.
Economic motives
Thus far only religious and political motives have been adduced to explain ISIS’ iconoclasm. But there are also economic considerations. Trading antiquities on the black market is one of ISIS’ largest sources of income after oil. Selling cultural heritage is also a form of iconoclasm, because objects are being removed from their place of origin. Again, it is not the first time that such things happen. A prime example is the many icons that were removed from Russian churches after the 1918 Revolution and ended up in western collections and museums. Buddhist art from Tibet that flooded the western marked after China invaded in 1950 is another sad example.
Taller Buddha of Bamiyan before and after destruction by Taliban.
Baiting a response
Despite the many outbreaks of iconoclasm throughout history, deliberate and public destruction of historical cultural heritage seems to be an aspect of iconoclasm that has only occurred in the last fifty years. This is directly correlated to the importance of heritage to western countries. More countries are starting to realize the importance of history and historical objects for the identity of a ‘people,’ a country, or to humanity as a whole. But the more importance we ascribe to artefacts, the more ISIS will continue their iconoclasm to attract as much attention as they can in the western media. The videos that ISIS spreads over the Internet and the fierce reactions to them show that at least some of this iconoclasm is targeted against the west.
By rejecting western norms and values, ISIS creates its own identity that is in opposition to everything the west stands for. A similar situation occurred in 2001, when the Taliban blew up the two enormous Buddha statues in the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan. Like ISIS’ destructions, this was a carefully planned action announced many weeks in advance. Western attempts to prevent the destruction by pointing out the cultural importance of the Buddha’s, had the complete opposite effect. The value that these statues had to the west made them idols that had to be destroyed to the Taliban.
ICONOCLASM in CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL WARFARE
Of course, there are icons in the strict sense and there are cultural icons. Some have transitioned from one to the other. Some have lost their iconic power and are now mere historic relics. We don’t destroy historic relics just because we despise what they represent.
Or do we?
Confederates monuments were cultural icons for a time. As society evolved, they became historic relics reminding us of crueller times. Monuments displayed to honour figures like Robert E. Lee lost their iconic status to all but a few Democrats in white hoods.23
Source Biz Pac Review. Captioned: “This could have been your president: Hillary Clinton’s longtime mentor was celebrated Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan leader. (Image: Twitter)”
Some to whom monuments have been erected - such as Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Columbus - remain mainstream cultural icons. Yet these and others have been attacked by iconoclastic democrats and social justice warriors in recent years.
In 2017 I published my video Evil Statue Destroyed in which I juxtapose images of Muslim extremist iconoclasts and left-wing extremist iconoclasts
The Charlottesville rally was, as it was meant to be, explosive. And in the aftershock came a wave of monument-fever. In Durham, N.C., anti-right protesters pulled down a second Confederate statue. In the same week, in Baltimore, Md., on an order from city hall, workmen hoisted four Confederate statues onto flatbed trucks and drove them off into the night.
The statue of Christopher Columbus overlooking Manhattan’s Columbus Circle has long been a focus of protest for its historical association with the genocide of indigenous Americans.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times
The iconoclastic impulse spread north to New York, where Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged to review a number of controversial monuments, not necessarily Civil War-related, that stood on city property. He called together a group of historians and artists together to take on the task.
. . .
The Christopher Columbus monument at Columbus Circle has long been a focus of protest for its historical association with the genocide of indigenous Americans. Yet it was erected, in part, to counteract a later persecution on New World soil, this one against Italian-American immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries.
A statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims, on Fifth Avenue in East Harlem, commemorated a doctor regarded as the father of modern gynecology. His fame came at the expense of enslaved black women on whom he operated, sometimes without consent. It will be moved to the cemetery where Sims is buried.Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times
Addition, rather than subtraction, was the prescribed move by the mayor’s commission. This includes leaving the statue of Columbus untouched but installing a new monument, dedicated to Native American cultures, nearby.
Later in the article, referring to a statue of Teddy Roosevelt, they write,
In a 2016 protest, some 200 activists operating under a collective named Decolonize This Place, temporarily shrouded the statue with a black parachute. Last fall, a collective called Monument Removal Brigade spattered its base with blood-red paint.
Like a torch-wielding mob-member with a psychotic smile, the New York Times adds,
These days, when we need to be as politically alert as possible, anything that gets us into the street, and keeps the reality-check called history in sight, is healthy.
They’re basically trying to incite riots. Again, this is the New York Times widely regarded as reliable. We live in an insane, contemptibly stupid, nauseating society.
Douglas Murray writes in The War on the West (2022),24
“REFRAMING” OUR HISTORY
There have been many efforts to rewrite the history of the West in recent years. But few have been as high profile or as pronounced in their intent as a project launched by the New York Times in August 2019. “The 1619 Project” could have been launched by any number of institutions (such as a university), but for it to be launched by a newspaper - and one which is still sometimes referred to as the paper of record - is highly unusual. For the project was not a piece of reportage. It was an attempt to reframe, and rewrite, the founding story of America. That wasn’t what critics said about it. It is what the project’s founders said about their own project.
Douglas Murray explains that the introductory piece was written by Nikole Hannah-Jones and that she won a Pulitzer Prize for it. I hold in my hand the 590 page book The 1619 Project - A New Origin Story created by the same Nikole Hannah-Jones (copyright 2021) and it was published by The New York Times Company. If you were to read this book, you might ask yourself why a so-called ‘news’ paper was involved in such a thing. At any rate, Murray goes on for some pages about the, shall we say, lack of merit of the 1619 Project before writing that,25
the most interesting thing with the 1619 Project was what happened when it moved from the page onto the street. In June 2020, when protests and riots followed the killing of George Floyd, the New York Post ran an opinion piece saying, “America is burning.” It described how rioters had already set fire to police stations and restaurants, had looted shops across the country, and were now coming for statutes, including George Washington’s, which had just been torn down in Oregon. “Call them the 1619 riots,” the author wrote. (footnote 15) Hannah-Jones noticed this and took to social media to accept the compliment. Call them the 1619 riots? “It would be an honor,” she said, as the country was burning. “Thank you.” (footnote 16)
Basically, this is a mainstream propaganda outlet, the New York Times, considered to be a reliable source of news, basically calling for riots! This is “the news”? Riots often involve murder. They are radical, violent, extremist degenerates working at a mainstream propaganda outlet basically calling for death and destruction, arson, riots, rape, murder. These are the sort of people that healthy societies extract like tumours. But here they are in charge of programming the masses with what is basically sabotage of America.
We’re supposed to take these radical yet ma as objective sources of news? NO. They are the enemy. They set themselves up to be our enemy. They gnaw at the foundations while we sleep. They brainwash our college students with lies. They groom our children while we watch TV. They infiltrate, spread undetected, metastasize; they are cancer and you are the only thing that can stop them. FUCK these people, their hate, their lies and their violence! We need to shame these people, expose them for who they are until they slink away and go back to hiding under the rocks from which they crawled out of in the first place!
Murray continues,
THE 1619 RIOTS
Just as it is striking how swiftly obscure ideas can spill out from academia, so it is striking how swiftly ideas pumped out in the media can make their way onto the streets. Around the time that the 1619 Project came along, America was clearly ripe for a reframing by those opposed to nearly every aspect of its founding. In 2020, a survey showed that by that year 70 percent of self-identified "liberals" wanted to rewrite the US Constitution into one "that better reflects our diversity as a people."(footnote 17)
Basic tenets of American history that Right and Left had agreed on until now, and which had for generations united Americans of every background, were suddenly subjects of fundamental disagreement. Nowhere was this was this clearer or more visceral than in the spate of statue toppling that burst out from the summer of 2020 onwards. For in no time, that movement shifted its attention from contested figures in American history to every single figure at the heart of the American experiment, from the founders onward.
It started at the contested margins with the Confederates. In the days that followed the death of George Floyd, the city of Birmingham, Alabama, removed a Confederate monument erected 115 years earlier. In Alexandria, Virginia, the authorities removed the Appomattox statue erected by the united Daughters of the Confederacy in 1889. Across the country, similar actions were taken. The University of Alabama announced that it would remove several plaques dedicated to Confederate soldiers who had attended the school. And in Jacksonville, Florida, after a Confederate statue commemorating the Jacksonville Light Infantry was vandalized, a crew of cranes moved in during the early hours of the morning and took the statue apart. There were not many objections to all of this. Few people wished to defend the maintenance of Confederate statues. And even fewer wished to do so in the immediate aftermath of a horrible, apparently racist, killing. But the authorities and crowds that started on the Confederate statues soon found it very hard to know where their icnoclasm should stop.
The statues of Christopher Columbus were a major focus of their ire. Though this was hardly the first time that the explorer had been in the sight line of anti-Western activists. During the 1990s and 2000s, there had been eruptions of anti-Columbus sentiment in America. But all of this picked up in 2020, with statues of Columbus being assaulted and pulled down across the country. During the great iconoclastic rage that year, statues of Columbus were either torn down by crowds or preemptively removed by authorities in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Boston, Minnesota, Virginia, and dozens of other places across America.
As the days went on and the crowds searched for more and more stone victims, they got ever nearer to the holy spots of American history. Within under a month after George Floyd’s death, a crowd in northeast Portland pulled down a statue of George Washington and graffitied it with the words “You’re on native land” and “Genocidal colonist.” They also marked it with the letters “BLM.” Plus, the date “1619".” On that occasion, the crowd also set fire to the statue’s head, draped it in an American flag, and then set that on fire too. During the same period, a crowd pulled down a statue of Thomas Jefferson outside a high school named after him, spray-painted him with the words “slave owner,” and also wrote the name George Floyd over him.
Soon it was George Washington’s turn again, with a statue of him being covered in red paint and then torn down in the downtown area of Los Angeles. In San Francisco, it was Ulysses S. Grant who was targeted, with a crowd assaulting the monument to the president who led the Union armies in defeating the Confederacy. And it was by this stage that it looked as though all American history was in the crosshairs. The statue of Spanish Missionary Father Junipero Serra was soon torn down in Los Angeles, as was that of Francis Scott Key, the lyricist of “The Star Spangled Banner.”
So comprehensive was the destruction in some cities that the authorities were frantically removing statues to try to get ahead of the crowds. After assaults on statutes of Abraham Lincoln in other parts of the country, the authorities in Boston announced that they would take apart and remove their statue of Abraham Lincoln and a freed slave which stood in Park Square. While at Hofstra University in New York, the university authorities moved a statue of Thomas Jefferson on the campus in response to a “Jefferson has got to go” movement. In 2018, the university authorities had rejected student calls for Jefferson to be removed. But a little over a month after George Floyd’s death, the authorities removed it of their own volition.
One of the students behind the campaign to remove Jefferson said that the removal, and relocation, of the statue was not enough, but that at least it would stop her parents having to spend “sleepless nights worrying that their eldest daughter would be lynched by white supremacist groups validated by Hofstra’s decision to not remove the sculpture.” (footnote 18)
It seemed in that moment as though American history in the round was being erased. Statutes of Confederates were coming down, but so were those of Union leaders. People who had owned slaves were coming down, as were those who never owned a slave. Statues of those who were in favor of slavery were coming down but so were those of people like George Washington, who came to oppose slavery and freed his slaves. And it wasn’t just the founders, but almost everybody who came after them who was being treated in this way. At Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs announced that it was dropping Woodrow Wilson from its name. Until then, Wilson had been best known for his peace plan for Europe at the end of World War I and for being the instigator behind setting up the League of Nations. But now, like everybody else, he stood accused of “racist thinking,” and so he university where he had studied and been president before reaching a higher office decided it had no further use for his name. The death of George Floyd was offered as explanation for speeding up a consultative exercise that had been going on for some years.
A new way of thinking about and looking at America had washed through the country.
Or, one could argue, a swarm of sabotage swept the nation. Further on, Murray writes that this way of thinking is,
completely self-destructive. For if the land you are on is simply stolen, the Founding Fathers were simply “slave owners,” the Constitution needs to be rewritten, and no figure in your history deserves respect, then what exactly holds this grand quarter-millennial project together?
On pages 124-125, Murray writes,
When the BLM movement spilt out from America into Britain in May and June 2020 the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square immediately became one of the focal points for protestors. The statue was repeatedly graffitied and otherwise defaced. At one stage, a BLM banner was taped around the statue’s waist and the statesman’s name was crossed out with black spray paint. Then, beneath “Churchill,” the words “was a racist” were added in more black paint. It was in reporting this protest that the BBC ran the headline “27 Police Officers Injured during Largely Peaceful Anti-racism Protests.” A headline only bettered in our time by CNN, a month later, having its reporter standing in front of a burning city with the tagline “Fiery, but Mostly Peaceful Protests.”
Such was the sensitivity around the BLM attacks on the wartime leader’s statue that it was soon boarded up and then completely encased in a metal box so that protestors could not get at it. A spokesperson for the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, promised that the status of the statue would remain “under review” by the Greater London Authority and Met police. During a visit to London be Emmanuel Macron in June, the shamefaced British authorities took down the coverings around Churchill’s statue. The French president’s visit was to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of General de Gaulle’s appeal to French people to resist the Nazi occupation of their country. So the British authorities may have been aware of the impression it would give if, eighty years after that occasion, London could not even display a statue of its wartime leader.
But no sooner was Churchill allowed out than he was defaced again. In September, the words “is a racist” were added to the base of the statue, this time in yellow paint. And nor were such attacks limited to the United Kingdom. In the heart of Churchill Square, in Edmonton, Canada, is a life-size statue of Churchill unveiled by his daughter in the 1980s. In June 2021, it was the turn of this statue to be attacked. Activists poured red paint over the figure so that it dripped down the bronze and covered everything from the statue’s face to its base. One local activist who had previously called for the statue’s formal removal responded by saying, “Here’s an idea - maybe let’s not celebrate, commemorate, and otherwise memorialize warmongers and genocidal maniacs. Stick him in a museum where he belongs with a proper chronicling of his views and atrocities.” (footnote 62)
The best that the local mayor in Edmonton could do in response to the attack was to say: “I don’t know the intent behind the vandalism, but I know historical monuments and sculptures, here and elsewhere, are at the heart of an emotional debate regarding what legacies and stories we venerate as a society. I believe there are more productive ways to move society along towards a more inclusive and uplifting future.”
On pages 129-132, under the heading “STATUES”, Murray writes,
The mayor of London - Sadiq Khan - announced the setting up of a commission to look into what statues and monuments might need to be removed across London. The Robespierre-ian title of the commission was “The Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm.” The likely conclusions of the commission could be guessed at fairly easily. Its members included a “community builder” who had claimed that white supremacy was a uniquely British thing and that the United Kingdom is “the common denominator in atrocities across the world.” There was also someone who had already expressed her approval of “guerrilla style” statue removal, (footnote 67) and another member who had distinguished himself in the past by turning up to a service at Westminster Abbey where he had heckled the arch-bishop of Canterbury and the Queen before threatening to punch a black security guard as he was being removed. (footnote 68)
A finely unbalanced panel, in other words.
. . .
…this desire to mock the West’s holy places seems almost unassuageable. And it has spread everywhere. In Canada, during the BLM summer, crowds had already pulled down a statue of Sir John Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister and nearest thing the country has to a founding father. In the summer of 2021, there was a revived burst of this anti-Western iconoclasm. Until 1982, Canada had celebrated Dominion Day on the first of July. But “Canada Day” was deemed to be more inclusive, and that agreement almost held until 2021, when the anti-Canada feeling inside Canada was growing. Another statue of Macdonald was pulled down and then, on the day itself, crowds of people gathered on Parliament Hill to chant “Shame on Canada.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered the flying of the national flag at half mast. And across the country, protesters seemed keen to rip out any and all monuments to the country’s Western past. A statue of explorer Sir James Cook was pulled down and then in Winnipeg huge crowds armed with ropes and hooks pulled the vast throned statue of Queen Victoria off her plinth. They performed the same ritual act of vengeance on a statue of the present monarch, Queen Elizabeth. In only a few years, a day of celebration of Canada’s confederation as a country had turned into an opportunity for an orgy of anti-Canadian-ness.
During this strange stampede in Canada, as in so many other cases, the whole history of the country and wider West became strangely perverted. Both truths and lies were exaggerated and then spun along through a cycle of outrage. Assumptions of obvious guilt were made, followed by a scouring search for culprits to blame. Always the indictable force is the West, and the institutions and ideas that have made up the West. History becomes the history of Western sins. And ignorance reigns not only over anything good the West ever did but over anything bad that anyone else has ever done.
Under the heading “WHY DO THEIR GODS NOT FALL?” (page 174), Murray writes about the hypocrisy of the fact that monuments to Karl Marx, the top icon of communists the world over, have almost entirely been spared Iconoclasm. Why would Marx be the target of anti-racist iconoclasts? Well, he wouldn’t be, because he’s a leftist icon. But he would be if they weren’t hypocrites.
Murray provides a plenty of conclusively damning quotes from Marx’s private letters and public lectures. See the section on Marx here in the Culture War Encyclopedia for that. Murray also writes about Michel Foucault, an other leftist icon, who has not suffered iconoclastic attacks either, despite allegedly being a racist sexual predator. See the section on Foucault for the details. Murray ties together these hypocrisies regarding Marx and Foucault and the issue of iconoclasm moreover by stating,
Like the double standard over Marx's racism, this fact is suggestive. For it would surely be different if it had worked the other way around. If one of the twentieth century's great conservative thinkers had been revealed to have travelled to the developing world in order to rape young boys on a tombstone in a graveyard at night, it might be considered suggestive. The political left would likely be unwilling to let it slide by completely. Nor would they be willing to pass up the opportunity to extrapolate some extra lessons. They might say that this habit was revealing of a wider conservative mindset. That it revealed pedophilic, rapist, racist tendencies at the heart of Western thought. They might even try to point out that a whole cultural movement or societal tendency was tarred by association with this nocturnal and noxious habit. But with Foucault, no such thing has happened. He remains on his throne. His work continues to spill out. And nobody to date seems to think there is anything especially telling about one of the founding icons of the anti-Westernism of our time having found personal pleasure in purchasing native children of foreign countries to satisfy his sexual desires.
It is in such omissions and double standards that something crucial can be discerned. Which is that what is happening in the current cultural moment is not simply an assertion of a new moral vision but the attempted imposition of a political vision on the West. One in which only specific figures – whom the West had felt proud of – are brought low, the only figures who will still remain on their pedestals (both real and metaphorical) are those figures who were most critical of the West. Meaning that the only people left to guide us would be the people who will guide us in the worst possible directions.
Keeping in mind that that it was the New York Times that championed the 1619 Project, consider their piece Reconsidering the Past, One Statue at a Time, from June 16, 2020, (updated June 25, 2020), in which they write,
A crew removed the statue of Juan de Oñate from outside the Albuquerque Museum in Albuquerque on Tuesday.Credit...Adria Malcolm for The New York Times
The boiling anger that exploded in the days after George Floyd gasped his final breaths is now fueling a national movement to topple perceived symbols of racism and oppression in the United States, as protests over police brutality against African-Americans expand to include demands for a more honest accounting of American history.
In Richmond, Va., a statue of the Italian navigator and colonizer Christopher Columbus was spray-painted, set on fire and thrown into a lake.
And in Albuquerque, tensions over a statue of Juan de Oñate, a 16th-century colonial governor exiled from New Mexico over cruel treatment of Native Americans, erupted in street skirmishes and a blast of gunfire before the monument was removed on Tuesday.
Across the country, monuments criticized as symbols of historical oppression have been defaced and brought down at warp speed in recent days. The movement initially set its sights on Confederate symbols and examples of racism against African-Americans, but has since exploded into a broader cultural moment, forcing a reckoning over such issues as European colonization and the oppression of Native Americans.
. . .
The calls to bring down monuments have spanned far and wide, in large cities like Philadelphia and rural places like Columbus, Miss., touching both relatively obscure historical figures and deeply revered cultural symbols.
In Raleigh, N.C., the statue of a former newspaper publisher who was also a white supremacist was removed on Tuesday. In Sacramento, a tribute to John Sutter, a settler famous for his role in the California gold rush who enslaved and exploited Native Americans, was taken down this week. And in Dallas, construction crews recently removed a statue of a Texas Ranger, long seen as a mythical figure in Texas folklore, amid concerns over historical episodes of police brutality and racism within the law enforcement agency.
Note that we don’t know if these characterizations are fair, but coming from this source, they are certainly not reliable. They continue,
The push has largely been welcomed by activists from the Black Lives Matter movement who see Confederate and other monuments as reminders of the oppressive history that created the reality they are battling today.
A statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, was toppled by protesters in Richmond, Va., last week.Credit...Parker Michels-Boyce/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The head of a statue of Christopher Columbus was pulled off in Boston last week amid protests over the killing of George Floyd.Credit...Brian Snyder/Reuters
In Sacramento, a tribute to John Sutter, a settler famous for his role in the California gold rush who enslaved and exploited Native Americans, was taken down this week.Credit...Daniel Kim/The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press
. . .
At least 114 Confederate symbols were removed in the years after a white supremacist killed nine people at a historic African-American church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, according to a 2019 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Columbus statues from Boston to Miami have been brought down or defaced by protesters. A large Columbus statue was defaced with red graffiti in Kenosha, Wis., and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York defended a towering monument to the explorer at Columbus Circle in Manhattan.
In Philadelphia, supporters went to court to block the removal of a Columbus statue after another statue, of Frank L. Rizzo, a former mayor known for discriminatory policies, was removed by the city this month in the middle of the night. “You just can’t let the mob rule,” said George Bochetto, a lawyer who filed the petition.
Tensions over the Oñate monument came to a boil Monday night in Albuquerque, when dozens of protesters engaged in shouting matches, some seeing the brutal Spanish governor as a symbol of repression, while others saw him as a positive symbol of a time before Anglos came to dominate the Southwest. Then a group of white militia members, on a self-appointed mission to protect the statue, showed up with guns.
In the mayhem that ensued, a man pulled out a weapon and shot one of the protesters, critically injuring him.
Note the utter lack of consideration for what the majority may want. In the USA, such things as whether or not a statue should remain untouched, placed in a museum or destroyed is to be determined by the constituents, not by mobs who selfishly impose their will upon the public.
The pedestal on which the statue of Edward Colston previously stood has become a central focal point in Bristol, providing a platform for debate, support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and for photo opportunities.Credit...James Beck for The New York Times
. . .
After protesters dumped paint on a statue of Leopold II in the city of Antwerp and then set it afire two weeks ago, other Leopold statues have been vandalized
. . .
A damaged sculpture of the former Belgian King Leopold II in Antwerp, Belgium, on June 4.Credit...Bart Biesemans/Reuters
Since June 11, when a British monument to the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston was toppled by protesters and tossed into the harbor in Bristol, England, dozens of statues of historical figures associated with colonialism and slavery have been pulled down, beheaded, scorched or removed from their plinths — in Britain, Belgium, New Zealand and the United States.
A picture from the Bristol City Council shows the statue of Edward Colston being retrieved from the harbor there on June 11.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Bristol City Council has already dredged the statue of Colston out of the harbor, and the city’s mayor, Marvin Rees, announced that it would be put in a museum.
Statues and monuments that have long honored racist figures are being boxed up, spray-painted — or beheaded.
Christopher Columbus in Miami.Credit...Carl Juste/Miami Herald, via Associated Press
The statues have stood for more than a century in some places. Some are cast in bronze, others carved in stone. And all over the world, as protests against racism and police violence have renewed attention on legacies of injustices, people have been asking: Does this statue still need to be here?
The answer from some protesters has been a resounding no.
Again, let us remember, we are talking about a few who presume to force their preferences upon all. They continue,
In dozens more cities, those that still stand have been marked with graffiti
Again, are politicians who are supposed to represent the people actually carrying out the will of the people? Have they been convinced by the squeaky wheel that the majority of the wheels agree? Are they just virtue-signalling? Do they even care?
A statue of Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Va., on June 10.Credit...@Thicketoftrash, via Associated Press
The Wickham statue in Richmond on June 6.Credit...Alexa Welch Edlund/Richmond Times-Dispatch, via Associated Press
In St. Paul, Minn., and elsewhere, Columbus came down.
Evan Frost/Minnesota Public Radio, via Associated Press
On June 10, less than a day after the Columbus statue in Richmond came down, a 10-foot bronze sculpture of Columbus was toppled outside the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., after a group of protesters tied ropes around the statue’s neck and yanked it from its pedestal.
The Capitol is about 10 miles from where a Minneapolis police officer pinned his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes.
Wait. What? Did you catch that? Did you see how they just shoved George Floyd in there to trigger emotion and override reason? Again, maybe they are not so much a respectable source of news as they are cancerous propaganda. That wasn’t exactly subtle, was it? Without skipping a beat, they continue,
In Boston, the head of a statue of Columbus in the city’s North End neighborhood was removed the same day.
In Miami and Kenosha, Wis., statues of Columbus were painted. In Columbus, Ohio, Mayor Andrew J. Ginther said the explorer’s statue on the south side of City Hall would be removed and placed in storage. The Columbus Dispatch reported that there were also plans to remove the Columbus statue outside Columbus State Community College.
In Washington, Andrew Jackson still stands.
Protesters attempting to pull down the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square near the White House.Credit...Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Jackson, the seventh president, owned slaves and put into place policies that forced Native Americans from their land, with some 15,000 people dying on the Trail of Tears.
In England, slave traders were removed.
Robert Milligan in London.Credit...John Sibley/Reuters
Edward Colston in Bristol on June 7.Credit...Ben Birchall/Press Association, via Associated Press
Protesters toppled a bronze statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol Harbor on June 7, forcing Britain to consider how to confront its racist history.
. . .
Two days later, the statue of Robert Milligan outside of the Museum of London Docklands was removed by the local authorities.
In Dallas, a statue of a Texas Ranger was put in storage.
Juan Figueroa/The Dallas Morning News, via Associated Press
In Dallas, construction crews recently removed a 12-foot-tall bronze statue of a Texas Ranger, long seen as a mythical figure in state folklore, amid concerns over historical episodes of police brutality and racism within the law enforcement agency. It had stood in the main lobby of the city’s Love Field airport since 1963.
ICONOCLASM in COMMERCIAL ENTERTAINMENT
Throughout the Culture War Encyclopedia are some examples of iconoclasm in commercial entertainment and I will be adding lots more over time, linking them below as I go. So subscribe! Also, if you can think of some that I did not list below, please tell me in the comments. Thanks.
Rosanne (the character, the TV show and the actress Rosanne Barr)
Scooby Doo
Tinkerbell
J.R.R. Tolkien
“Vampire Lestat”
ICONOCLASM in CORPORATE BRANDING
Throughout the Culture War Encyclopedia are examples of iconoclasm with regard to corporate branding. I will be adding lots more over time, linking them below as I go. Again, comment if you can think of any I have not yet listed. Thanks.
Aunt Jemima
Cream of Wheat
Land ‘O’ Lakes
Mrs. Butterworth
Uncle Ben
CALLING for COMMENTARY
There are two cultural commentators who come to my mind as being uniquely qualified to comment on iconoclasm in history and today - Martina Markota and Tarl Warwick (AKA Styxhexenhammer666). They lecture and write on art and occult history and both have been targets of cancel culture.26 Both will have their own sections here in the Culture War Encyclopedia.
Because icons, in the traditional sense, occupy the intersection of art history and mysticism, input on this matter from Markota and Warwick would be greatly valued here.
Watching the following part of this video in which Markota can be seen covering herself over in an opaque white liquid, one wonders if she was emitting a dog whistle about whitewashing in the iconoclastic sense of the term.
But seriously, Martina Markota has a lecture series Art Through the Ages (here and here). In MIDDLE BYZANTINE ART HISTORY with Martina Markota, beginning at about 18:51 she dives into a bit of history regarding iconoclasm. However, it would be illumination if she were to make a reaction video to this very essay which could be embedded here in and updated version. We could included it in our upcoming video version of this report.
Styxhexenhammer666 (Tarl Warwick) has edited and published a great number of historical books on the occult and related subject matter. As far as I can see, however, he has not published anything on iconoclasm. Nor has he released a video with "icon" in the title, at least for some years27. His insight into the iconoclasm of today with the occult and memetic aspects thereof as well as his perspective as a counter cultural icon whom cancel culture tries to eradicate would be valued as well. Perhaps he can make a reaction video as well.
Yes, I will be sending them both requests. I will be sure to announce any such updates, so be sure you are subscribed. Please share too!
