Hello everyone and welcome to the special Friday edition of Thoughtcrime Thursdays, the weekly column where we explore the world of fictional dystopia as a critique on our current society. This week’s installment has been postponed to today because I’ve been taking exams all week!
This week, we are plunging headlong into controversy in order to discuss Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Truth, and the recent removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans.
In the early hours of Thursday, May 11, a statue of Jefferson Davis was removed from Mid-City in New Orleans. Beginning around 2:30 am, the city instigated the removal process, which was carried out by unmarked workers wearing helmets, body armor, and masks.
The statute of Jefferson Davis is the second of four monuments set to be removed pursuant to an effort spearheaded by the city’s mayor, Mitch Landrieu. In a 4:30 am press release linked above, the city denounced the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” and vowed to remove the monuments, which Mayor Landrieu claims celebrate a “legacy of slavery and segregation.”
The history and causes of the Civil War are immensely complicated. Ultimately, the war was the culmination of a long, intricate, and highly political power struggle between the North and South. The slavery issue was one of the most prominent mediums or manifestations of the fight for political power itself. The war wasn’t about slavery itself as much as it was about what slavery meant in relation to economic and political power for both sides.
By sterilizing this history and simplifying it to such a degree, progressives seek to control the narrative and ignore the fact that the South also–maybe even more importantly–fought to preserve its culture, identity, and understanding of the Constitution as a compact between the States, whom, in their correct view, retained their undiminished sovereignty. The average Confederate soldier didn’t own slaves, and many wrote letters which expressed more concern for their own culture and their understanding of the proper role of government.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the job of the Ministry of Truth is to control the narrative by rewriting, amending, or ignoring history. By removing these monuments under cover of darkness, progressives are sweeping these issues under the rug. Furthermore, they are distorting history and simplifying an immensely complicated subject that warrants discussion and preservation.
The Ministry of Truth is not a fictional organization–it is very real. It operates not only as a governmental organization, but among us. Often, it is the people themselves rewrite the past.
That being said, there can hardly be any truth to our study of the Civil War–the term itself is already controlled by the minitrue:
A Civil War could fairly be defined as a “war between citizens of the same country” or a struggle to control the government of a country. The Civil War was not a civil war at all, because Southerners were neither citizens of the United States, nor were they fighting to control the United States Government. They were fighting to leave the Union in much the same way that the colonists fought to secede from the British Empire.
I neither condone slavery, nor claim the the war had nothing to do with slavery. I simply posit that the truth is more complicated, and warrants more discussion. The popular public school understanding of the conflict is very one-dimensional at its best and purposefully deceptive at its worst.
We need to confront real truth, which is infinitely more complicated than the Ministry of Truth would have you believe. To guide you in this quest, be on the lookout for the upcoming Liberty Weekly Podcast where we take on Big Brother by deconstructing the official narratives.
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Source: Liberty Weekly – Thoughtcrime Thursdays: “Minitrue” and the Sterilization of History