Friday, August 10, 2018

A Little Counterprotest



The prospect of seeing Confederate Battle Flags and Swastikas on parade anywhere in Washington DC this weekend is a scandal that is deeply shocking and profoundly shameful.  I hope the Unite the Right rally will be small, but no matter what the size, the fact that people who should know better countenance this or look the other way is a gift to our enemies and a humiliation in the eyes of the world.  Our Beloved Leader at best will look the other way, but more likely will make some kind of endorsement.  That a President of the United States could do anything other than react with outrage at Confederate and Nazi flags flying outside his own windows insults the memory of all the war dead from 1861 - 1865, and from 1941 - 1945.  He couldn't do worse even if he spit on the tombs of the Unknowns.

The Confederate flag represents the right to buy, sell, and own human beings.  The Confederacy had every intention of spreading the plantation system and its slavery westward, and into Cuba and Latin America.  They planned to revive the Atlantic Slave Trade upon winning the Civil War.  Appeals to white supremacy were a way of duping poor whites into supporting the interests of rich plantation owners.  "Rich man's war, poor man's fight!" was a slogan created by Confederate soldiers.

The swastika and the Nazi movement it represented was about killing or enslaving all of humankind except a self-selected few.

So here is my little counter-protest.  These are the people I will remember this weekend, people who were all a lot less ambivalent in the face of evil.




William Harvey Carney, 
the first African American to be given the Congressional Medal of Honor



Henry Augustus Monroe, 
a drummer boy with the Massachusetts 54th Infantry who saved lives at the Battle of Fort Wagner by beating out instructions to troops.



Surviving members of the Massachusetts 54th Infantry Regiment after the Battle of Fort Wagner




Robert Gould Shaw, 
commanding officer of the Massachusetts 54th Infantry, killed in the Battle of Fort Wagner and thrown into a common grave with his men by Confederate soldiers.



Frederick Douglass




Elijah Lovejoy



William Lloyd Garrison



Harriet Tubman




Sojourner Truth




President Abraham Lincoln



Ulysses Grant



Mary Todd Lincoln







Alexander Gardner, Recovering the Dead from the Battlefield of Cold Harbor, photograph, 1865


***


The Tuskegee Airmen



American paratroopers, France, 1944




Flag of the Polish Resistance



Polish Resistance Fighters





Flag of Jewish Partisans


I think we can retire the tired old canard about Jews going like sheep to the Holocaust slaughter.


Jewish Partisans from the Vilnius Ghetto



Bielski Partisans



Smoke from the destruction of the Treblinka death camp by a prisoner uprising.




Flag of the French Resistance






French Resistance fighters









Flag of the Italian Partisans



Italian Partisans

Remembering especially my friend Elio Franchi who was a veteran of the Partisans.



Flag of the Dutch Resistance



Dutch Resistance fighters with captured German weapons.




German Resistance flag



The White Rose; Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst





Edelweiss Pirates



Ethiopian Resistance fighters, 1944



Greek Resistance fighters



A Danish Resistance fighter



Filipino Resistance fighters



The Viet Minh with Ngo Giap, 1944 




Felix Nussbaum, self portrait



Mordecai Anielewicz, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising



Ariadna Scriabina, founder of Armeé Juive




Willem Arondeus, 
an openly gay man, an artist who joined the Dutch Resistance.  The Nazis executed him after he successfully destroyed a Gestapo records office.


 Dietrich Bonhoeffer



Hans Von Dohnanyi


Bernhard Lichtenberg




 Martin Niemöller




Elie Wiessel



Masha Bruskina, a Soviet partisan fighter



August Landmesser (the only one not saluting)




Ann Frank




 Alan Turing




George Orwell




Josephine Baker







Hannah Arendt




General Dwight Eisenhower




 Eleanor Roosevelt



President Franklin Roosevelt



Prime Minister Winston Churchill






Guido Reni, Saint Michael


"Almighty God, who created us in your image: Grant us grace fearlessly to contend against evil and to make no peace with oppression; and, that we may reverently use our freedom, help us to employ it in the maintenance of justice in our communities and among the nations, to the glory of your holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen."
-- Prayer for Social Justice from the Book of Common Prayer














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