Please Remove My Name . . .
By Valerie Protopapas
October 17, 2022
For those who “follow” history, there are names from ancient Egypt that resonate. We have King Tutankhamen (King Tut) of archeological discovery fame, Rameses the Great who may – or may not – have run afoul of Moses and his plagues and another pharaoh, who is known because of his wife, Queen Nefertiti. She in turn is known by virtue of a bust done during her life showing a woman of such exquisite beauty that she retains her glory and her “name” to this very day. Her husband, however, is virtually unknown. Almost no relics or mention of him remain. We don’t know where he is buried and his history was blotted out by his enemies after his death. Akhenaten – for that was his name – fell from favor. Indeed, he did not just fall from favor, he was anathematized. At his death, his enemies – and they were many – did all they could to prevent his name from passing on and only the merest accidents of
fate allowed us to learn of his life at all. What, you might ask, did Akhenaten do to incur such wrath? He rejected Egypt’s premier god, Amon Ra and embraced the sun god Aten, even changing his name from Akhenamon to Akenhaten. This was enough to damn him forever in the eyes of the priests of Amon Ra and they carried out his erasure from history so well that in the 21st Century, we have no idea where he is buried or even where his Queen, the beautiful Nefertiti lies.Things do change over time, and especially what we call the “names of things” when those “things” are named after cultural figures appearing in history or myth. For instance, our planets bear the names of Roman deities – Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. Of course, our planet received a far more plebian designation, Earth. Oh, well! You can’t win them all! Obviously, in the course of time, names change for any number of reasons but usually within any set period in history, barring great social upheaval, the names by which things are known, remain with us over the years. For instance, the names of our states haven’t changed even going back to colonial times. Virginia remains Virginia and Massachusetts, Massachusetts. Of course, there are contrary examples as, for instance, New Amsterdam became New York with the exchange of governance from Holland to England.
Another example of names being changed for social reasons can be found in efforts to memorialize people of note. Hence, an airport in New York City named “Idlewild” became Kennedy in tribute to a martyred President while Washington’s airport became Reagan in tribute to that leader. But usually, in our particular culture we do not indulge in large scale “renaming” of things unless it is considered necessary and that necessity usually has to be of considerable importance. Yet there is no doubt that any momentous social movement tends to also affect the “naming process” not only for new places and things, but for those already named. For instance, during the post-Civil War period known as “The Grand Bargain,” soldiers on both sides worked to reconcile with former enemies by recognizing and commemorating their shared sacrifice as both North and South sought political and cultural reconciliation. The “Bargain” was relatively simple: both sides acknowledged that the other fought bravely and with honor and that their heroes, monuments and symbols were worthy of respect. Southern graves were found in Federal cemeteries such as Arlington, the former home of the Lee family stolen by the Federal Government when the tax laws were changed in an attempt to coerce General Lee to come into that city to pay his taxes – and be arrested for treason, of course! Arlington, being in Virginia, a State no longer in the federal union at the time, was not subject to federal taxes but as the armies of that government held the territory on which Arlington stood, legality became irrelevant as so often happened in the so-called “Civil War.”
In any event, if it stuck in the “craw” of former Yankees to acknowledge the worthiness of their Southern foes, it actually choked most in the South who had to admit to the supposed “honorable warfare” of their foes and that it was for the best that they had been defeated. This outcome had been warned against by Southern hero, General Patrick Cleburne who wrote:
“Every man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too late… It means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for derision… It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.”
Cleburne was correct. Robbed by the Grand Bargain of the opportunity to make known the horrors visited upon Southerners including the use of total warfare designed to destroy the culture and people of the South, by the middle of the Twentieth Century, the narrative of the war was reduced to the lies and propaganda of Lincoln and the Radicals. Indeed, it was used to at best conceal and at worst excuse and validate the treasonous assault on the South after the constitutionally legal secession first of the Cotton States and then of those remaining Southern States who refused to participate in the federal war that the United States Constitution defined as treason:
“Treason against the United States, shall
consist ONLY in levying War against them, or in adhering to their
Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
Article III, Section 3, United States Constitution
According to the above, not only were Lincoln and his government traitors, but so was every man who put on the blue and in other ways participated in the illegal war against the South.
Fortunately, General Robert E. Lee did not live long enough to suffer the lies of The Grand Bargain. However, before his death, Lee entertained as his guest at Washington College, Governor Fletcher S. Stockdale of Texas. Lee was always very scrupulous about what he did and especially about what he said knowing that the Federal government watched him closely as a bell weather of Southern thought that might require possible action on the part of that government. As a result, he never let down his guard so it was very strange that before the two men left his office, Lee quickly closed the door and spoke rapidly and quietly to his guest:
“Governor, if I had foreseen the use those people designed to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand.”
This quote whose truth has been denied by our establishment “historians” appeared in the book, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney. I personally believe it to be correct and to be Lee’s true feelings on the matter. But because of the Grand Bargain, from the latter part of the 19th, through the first half of the 20th Century, the heroes of the South and their monuments, flags and treasures were treated with respect and in many cases, reverence by their former enemy. Indeed, the Confederate battle flag was a symbol of Eastern bloc resistance to the Soviet Union before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The death of the Grand Bargain was a direct result of the concern raised by many including Thomas Jefferson regarding the burgeoning Negro population in the country. Jefferson despised the institution of slavery but when the matter of emancipation was raised – mostly in the South as the North had few blacks – he was forced to ask the eternal question, “But what shall we do with the Negro?” For this question there was no clear answer at the time. To begin with, most of the ”Northern” – including Middle and Western – States refused the Negro entrance into those states under what was called “Black Codes.” The matter of “emancipation” was nothing akin to what we have been told today! For while there was a definite hierarchical relationship between the races in the South – with whites on the top, of course – that relationship was amiable. Indeed, there was considerable affection between the races as was proved when many slaves died in the service of their white masters’ families when the Yankees came.
In the North, on the other hand, blacks were so despised that often their bodies were disinterred from white cemeteries! The idea that the North was filled with those who loved and pitied slaves while the South was filled with those who hated blacks and ill-used them, is a great lie. On the other hand, as the black population continued to grow in the South, the rest of the country was becoming alarmed that eventually that population could not be contained in the South alone slavery or no slavery and would spread into the new territories. Societies arose, North and South, to answer this seemingly unanswerable question. Colonization, either back to Africa or Central or South America – a matter that had already been initiated under President Monroe – became widespread. Abraham Lincoln himself devoutly wished to remove the Negro from the United States and he was not alone. But as long as blacks were prevented from moving North in any numbers, the matter remained unaddressed as the more numerous Northerners were unaffected by the situation.
Of course, after the Civil War, the North used the black to destroy the white people and culture of the South, using the naïve and ignorant “freedman” and the government’s own “klan,” the Union League, to punish an already devastated white population. In other words, the United States government created the bitterness and hostility between the races in the South that had not previously existed, making the inter-racial relationship as hostile in Dixie as it had always been in the North and as blacks were still a “minority” – even in the South as a whole – this did not bode well for their future anywhere.
But the matter did not remain as it had in the 1900s. As the nation became involved in the First World War, the manufacturing centers in the North found themselves deprived of manpower. Since whites were being drafted, the only pool of manpower left were the blacks and for the first time in history, these needed workers were allowed to move North. Soon, the problems of race that the rest of the country was satisfied to allow to exist in the South became a problem for those in the North as well – and this changed everything. After Reconstruction, the use made of the freedman forever changed the relationship between the races in the South and with the return of power to those States, everything was done to separate the races. Of course, “segregation” as it became known was already in force in the North but it was generally ignored as there were statistically few blacks involved. Eventually this Southern response to the race issue was formalized by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in which the Court laid out its “separate but equal” doctrine concerning the way of life for blacks within the larger white culture.
And there the matter stood until the middle of the 20th century with the rise of the “civil rights movement.” Undoubtedly, had the “slavery” issue been settled peacefully even with a war that was more about the rights of the sovereign States vs. the central or so-called “federal” government,” than chattel slavery, the situation between the races might have been far more amicable than they were by that time. However, anyone who has any knowledge of the behavior of far too many blacks in the society down to today cannot escape the fact that, unlike other minorities, many blacks simply did – and do not – live according to the same moral and ethical standards as the rest of the culture. Statistically, blacks have always had a much higher rate of criminal activity – often extremely violent (see Nat Turner) – than is found in the rest of the population – white and non-white alike. Slavery kept this matter nonproblematic because the slave was not free to indulge in activity that would have led to crimes that were frequently violent to the extreme (again, see Nat Turner!).
But whatever and whoever was to blame for the situation as it existed at the time of the rise of the “Civil Rights Movement,” the simple fact is that the movement was anything but “spontaneous.” Rather, the race situation in the United States was seen (correctly) by the Soviet Communists as an ideal weapon to use against the West. Europe at the time did not have “the race issue” at least until the Left was able to fill that area of the white world with non-white “immigrants.” Communism is a cancer, and like a cancer, it takes advantage of weakness in the body politic of its intended victim. “Race” was a decided weakness in America and was used so by the Communists. The so-called “Civil Rights Movement” was originated, supported and promoted by Communists. Well known activists like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks were “instructed” in their operations by communists. The NAACP, a foremost “black” organization was started by white Communists who acted in leadership roles until sufficient black Americans could replace them.
The strategy itself was given a tremendous boost by Communist Leon Trotsky, who, after helping Lenin create the Soviet murder machine that killed somewhere between one and four million people, was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 after losing a power struggle with Josef Stalin. However, before fading into the pages of history, Trotsky accomplished one last thing in 1930 that would arguably cause more damage to the West than did Stalin himself. He invented a word that would empower the enemies of the West to redefine those loyal to their people, their cultural traditions and their way of life evil, and to send the government, the educational system and the mass media on a crusade until Trotsky’s term – “racist” – became the defining expression in our present history. Constantly repeated and bolstered by revisionist historians falsely portraying the white man as the sole perpetrator of slavery and genocide in the world, this racial tool has been continued until the West submitted to the entire Trotskyist internationalist agenda without a single shot being fired.
The final stages of this outrage are playing out now, with racial double standards created here in America at the expense of American whites as well as the creation of “racism” and “hate speech” offenses in Europe targeting the indigenous (white) population. Meanwhile, the Canadian and Australian governments have implemented “multiculturalism” as official state policy at the expense of the pre-existing Canadian and Australian cultures. Most obvious in this war, of course, is the huge wave of third-world “immigration” into the West supported by all Western governments in order to radically change the makeup and culture of “white” nations, and threatening their original populations with becoming minorities in their own countries within just a few decades.
Of course, this easily explains the rise of the demand to change the names of places and/or things from people who the present system declares unworthy of acknowledgement or celebration. Hence, Richmond’s marvelous “Monument Avenue” is denuded of monuments – at least of monuments of the worthy – and what replaces those removed is not worth the effort. One example is the removal of the beautiful monument to Confederate General James Ewell Brown (JEB) Stuart that once graced that Avenue. It was replaced with a “monument” directly copied from Stuart’s showing a black dressed in the garb of the ghetto including hoodie, leather jacket, sneakers and dreadlocks. The sculptor, a black man, called his work “Rumors of War” but others who have seen it have christened it “The Horse Thief.”
Now if whole monuments can be removed, how easy is it to change the name of a road or a bridge or even a town. The Mosby Heritage Area in Virginia, named for Col. John Singleton Mosby, the most effective guerrilla fighter of the Civil War, is now known as simply The Heritage Area. Apparently, our current “Karens” and “Kevins” can choose whose “heritage” they wish to glorify! Not only are statues and flags being removed locally, apparently Washington, D.C. – our “Capitol” that has not yet removed that name, though it is coming, I’m sure! – is thinking about digging up the Confederate dead lying in Arlington – you remember, General Robert E. Lee’s home stolen from him during the war! – as well as removing any and all Confederate monuments throughout the country. The latest “renaming” crusade apparently involves those military bases that bear the name of Confederates such as Forts Bragg, Benning, Gordan, A. P. Hill, Hood, Lee and Pickett to name just a few. In consequence, many especially from the South are up in arms regarding these long considered “changes of names.” And, I must admit that in the beginning, I, too, though not a Southerner, was offended. It was stupid and since the very reason given was that those men were traitors, it was not only stupid, it was wrong. Actually, if the military removed the names of traitors from its bases, those removed would have fought against the South, not for it.
However, in a relatively short time, I have come to know far more about our current “government” including its military and what I know makes me wonder greatly if men like Lee or Stuart or Longstreet or Jackson would want their names associated with our current government and military! Indeed, they all had the opportunity to fight and even, in Lee’s case, to lead “the federal military” in 1861 – and they chose not to do so. During the Grand Bargain, those decisions were relegated to the past in the hopes that, as John Mosby once put, all the wrongs of the war would be “relegated to oblivion.” It seems, however, that the American government has chosen to reignite the passions that led the people and states of the South to seek separation from a government and people that no longer represented either their interests or their ethics. Anyone today who has any understanding of what once represented the Republic of the Founders know that that Republic died in 1861 and what came out of that war was a government and a way of life contrary to the best that America once represented. And as that is now the case, were I one of those noble men whose names have been presented for removal, I would myself request, “Please remove my name from your facility as I choose not to be associated with it, even after my death.”
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