By Jeffrey Folks

In the great cathedral at Como, Italy, there are two large statues: one of Pliny the Elder and the other of his nephew, Pliny the Younger.  Despite calls from some in the church to remove them, the images of these two pagan writers have stood in Como Cathedral for 500 years.

When told that neither man had been a Christian and that the nephew had been a persecutor of Christians in the province of Bithynia, the citizens of Como fought to preserve the statues of these two favorite sons.  Both Plinys were an important part of their history.  Pliny the Elder was one of the most prolific Latin writers on history and science, and Pliny the Younger was an important historian, the only person to leave a firsthand account of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D.  The real heresy was the attempt to rewrite history by removing all references to anyone who was “pagan.”  

Pliny the Elder at the Cathedralof Como (Photo credit: Wolfgang Sauber)

It seems that Italians have more common sense than some Americans.  The removal of hundreds of Civil War monuments, including the recent removal of a statue of Jefferson Davis and an attempt to remove the imposing image of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, are part of a similar attempt to suppress an aspect of our history that some now see as offensive.

It does little good to note that many southern leaders before and at the time of the war, including Jefferson; Madison; Clay; and Robert E. Lee himself, who assisted slaves moving to the free colony in Liberia and provided emancipation for his slaves in his will, had serious moral qualms about the institution of slavery and hoped it would eventually be eliminated, regardless of the outcome of the war.  Although they owned slaves, Jefferson and Madison both spoke of slavery as an evil that must be abolished.  Henry Clay, who authored the Great Compromise of 1820, sought to preserve the union by maintaining a balance of slave and free slaves.  In his funeral oration for Clay, Abraham Lincoln said, “Such a man the times have demanded, and such, in the providence of God was given us.”

Even those like Jefferson Davis, a strong defender of states’ rights, should be seen as an important figure in American history.  The removal of his image, along with those of all who owned slaves or fought for the Confederacy, is an attempt to rewrite history in a way that is extremely unhealthy.  It would erase much of our national history and, for that matter, world history. But it is dangerous to avert one’s gaze from whatever is troubling or unpleasant.  It creates the false impression that evil does not exist.  Those who are not willing to live with their past are likely to repeat its errors.

No one today would defend the idea of slavery, but slavery was once universally practiced.  Before and even after the Civil War, slavery existed in one form or another in most parts of the world: throughout Africa and the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Russia (via serfdom), in parts of Europe, and even in the northern colonies and states of America.  The Plinys, whose images still stand in Como cathedral, were the owners of dozens of slaves.  Benjamin Franklin once owned slaves, as did the family of America’s first female poet, Anne Bradstreet, along with Patrick Henry, George Washington, John Marshall, and Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd Lincoln.  Nearly every important figure in early American history can be tied to slavery either directly or through the actions of his ancestors.  As an attorney, Alexander Hamilton negotiated the sale of slaves, while Lewis and Clark were accompanied by Clark’s slave York on their western expedition.  

Are we to destroy all references, documents, and images relating to the early history of our country on the grounds that mentioning their names or viewing their images makes us uncomfortable?  That would be akin to a Christian society suppressing all mention of those who are not Christian, or whose ancestors were not (that would include everyone).  Are we to remove all references to the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, to Egypt and the Middle East, and to India, China, and Japan on the basis that they were pagan?

Slavery was legal in all of the early colonies and states, just as it was throughout most of the world (it was not abolished in Brazil until 1888).  The fact that it was almost universal does not make it right, but it does require us to judge our ancestors in the context of their times.  Robert E. Lee was not a “bad” man: he fought to defend states’ rights and out of loyalty to his home state of Virginia.  Before the Civil War, he earned distinction in the Mexican-American War and served as superintendent of the United States military.

This is not to say slavery was right or that the southern states were right in defending it. What that statue of Lee will do is to remind us that the past was different and that things have changed.  Slavery was cruel, and many in the South and the North realized that even before Emancipation.

Other sorts of cruelty exist today, such as the billion people still living under communist rule.  Many of those calling for the removal of the Lee statue are silent about that form of cruelty.  Should we remove all reference to Marx and Marxists, including left-leaning presidents such as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama, from our national history?  There is a good case for doing so if one believes in suppressing whatever makes one uncomfortable.

Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama make me uncomfortable, but I accept that they were part of our history.  I’ve never suggested they be removed from the public discourse or that those who admire them be silenced.  I believe that by losing China to communism, FDR was complicit in the murders of 70 million people, but for me his image is a reminder of that evil, not something to be erased from history.  Likewise, LBJ was the architect of a deadly welfare state, Carter the instigator of economic collapse, and Obama the organizer of a push toward socialism.  It has taken a strong conservative to reverse the evils that each brought about.

Still, history books will continue to write of Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson, Carter, and Obama, and it is proper to do so.  The Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., is one of two memorials dedicated to FDR’s memory.  I do not support any attempt to deface, damage, or remove this or other memorials.  Nor can I support the removal of Civil War statues such as those dedicated to Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.

The suppression of history is always dangerous. By hiding the truth about the past, we make it all the more likely that we will repeat similar errors.  Only by coming face to face with our mistakes, even a mistake as terrible as slavery, can we hope to avoid similar mistakes in the future. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/statues_are_part_of_history.html

Gunnar Smári Egilsson, an Icelandic journalist and founder the Socialist Party of Iceland, has joined the anti-white Black Live Matter hysteria: He wants the statue of Ingólfr Arnarson, the founder of the country, taken down.

Ingólfr Arnarson is the first permanent settler of Iceland, and founder, with his brother Hjörleifr Hróðmarsson, of Reykjavík in 874.

According to the journalist, the founder “murdered” and oppressed “freedom heroes” Duf­þak og Helga… and, the horror, traded and owned slaves. He wants the statue replaced with that of slaves, such as Karla or Vífli.

The reality, of course, is quite different. Ingólfr Arnarson did not murder anyone, even by modern standards. He lawfully executed terrorists, not “freedom heroes”, who were plotting a rebellion. Ingólfr Arnarson did own slaves indeed, like every Norseman at the time. None of them were black. They were primarily Irish or other Nordics.

This makes Gunnar Smári Egilsson’s reference to BLM all the more bizarre. In a more interesting twist, most slaves in Iceland also had slaves themselves at some point.

But the historic detail is quite irrelevant actually. The fact remains that Ingólfr Arnarson founded Iceland and Gunnar Smári Egilsson would not exist without his efforts, also with the freedom denigrate his own culture, heritage and history.

“At the end of the day, we shall all understand that Gunnar Smári Egilsson (who is a disgrace to the name Gunnar) is no different from Talibans and DAESH/ISIS savages, who are demonstrating exceptional intolerance, hatred, and bigotry, by trying to destroy everything and anything their pathetic little emasculated minds don’t agree with,” said one critic.

American weekly The Federalist astutely observed that any white male historical figure anywhere in the world is now “tainted” with a “racist” and “genocidal” legacy, no matter the historical record.

In the US, BLM activists make no distinction between Confederate and Union, abolitionist and pro-slavery, 15th-century figures or more recent figures. They don’t care when a monument was erected, who built it, or why. They have not come to debate or persuade anyone to relocate statues to museums or private property. They simply believe the debate is over and that they have won through violence, threats and coercion.

The target of BLM activists is not the Confederacy, it is actually the United States and in a larger sense to destroy white male symbols of history.

That is why mobs have been defacing statues of abolitionists like Matthias Baldwin and Union war heroes like Adm. David Farragut and Gen. George Thomas. That is why statues of Christopher Columbus were torn down or beheaded in three cities already.

A “peaceful” protest in Whittier, California ended in the Quaker abolitionist considered key in the 19th century movement for equal rights, was not spared by the mob. John Greenleaf, whose statue was vandalized, including with the spray-painted letters “BLM”, was among the most prominent literary voices leading the fight to end slavery even decades before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

freewestmedia.com/2020/06/20/calls-to-remove-statue-of-icelands-founder/

A shocking report out of Germany says that government agencies intentionally placed homeless children with a widespread and influential pedophile ring for decades.

Starting in the 1970s psychology professor Helmut Kentler conducted his “experiment.” Homeless children in West Berlin were intentionally placed with pedophile men. These men would make especially loving foster parents, Kentler argued.

A study conducted by the University of Hildesheim has found that authorities in Berlin condoned this practice for almost 30 years. The pedophile foster fathers even received a regular care allowance.

Helmut Kentler (1928-2008) was in a leading position at Berlin’s center for educational research. He was convinced that sexual contact between adults and children was harmless.

Berlin’s child welfare offices and the governing Senate turned a blind eye or even approved of the placements.

The outrage became public when victims came forward. Since then, researchers at Hildesheim University have tirelessly tracked down victims and conducted interviews, finding a vast pedophilia network that included educational institutions, child welfare offices, and the Berlin Senate. According to researchers, pedophilia was “accepted, supported, [and] defended.”

Kentler was never prosecuted because of the statute of limitations, which also prevented the victims from getting compensation for their suffering. German lawmakers are reversing that restriction to help the victims.

The researchers found that several of the foster fathers were high-profile academics. They speak of a network that included high-ranking members of the Max Planck Institute, Berlin’s Free University, and the notorious Odenwald School in Hesse, West Germany, which was at the center of a major pedophilia scandal several years ago. It has since been closed down.

Breitbart News reported on the research from Hildesheim University.

The 57-page report, which was published this week, found that a “network of actors in the Senate administration and institutions of educational reforms during the home reform of the 1970s tolerated the establishment of shared apartments and foster homes for paedophile men”.

A man with a criminal record for child abuse, referred in the report as Fritz H., was able to rape and abuse at least nine children that were given to him as foster children under the government-backed scheme. Despite the extreme warning signs, Berlin youth welfare officers consistently chose him as a foster father to children, who were often six or seven years old.

The abuse committed by Fritz H. was carried out from the 1970s until 2003, according to the local newspaper Berliner Zeitung.

The report specifically pointed to the Pedagogical Centre in Berlin as the main coordinating institution of the scheme, though added that the policy was likely to have extended throughout the whole country.

Breitbart did some digging on Kentler and found horrific viewpoints on child rape.

The director of adult education at Pedagogical Centre was Helmut Kentler (1928-2008), a social scientist, who argued that sex between adults and children was a crucial part to healthy sexual development, saying that “in some cases almost something like a gentler form of social work”.

A popular figure in Germany’s sexual revolution in the 1960s, Kentler often authored ‘expert’ reports for the Berlin Senate and his books on ‘sexual liberation’ were bestsellers at the time. Indeed, Deutsche Welle notes how the change in attitudes towards child sexuality in Germany at this time was part of the 1968 revolution that swept Europe and worked to throw aside all tradition and conventional wisdom, including the idea that children should not have sex with adults.

Kentler wrote a book called Eltern Learned Sexualerziehung, which, translated, means “Parents Learn Sexual-Education.” It shows a parent bathing naked with children and is still for sale on Amazon. The report also said there are over 1,000 files the university has not been allowed to access and researchers believe its in an effort to keep the names of high-profile pedophiles a secret.

The report did point to three former Social Democrat Berlin senators — the Senator for School and Education Carl-Heinz Evers, the Senator for Youth and Sports Kurt Neubauer, and the Senator for Labour and Social Affairs Kurt Exner — for having a particular “hand” in the scheme.

At least one member of the Green Party is pushing for transparency and exposure of the criminal child rapists involved in the pedophile ring.

Marianne Burkert-Eulitz of the Green Party — which itself pushed for the legalisation of “consensual” sex between children and adults in the 1970s — accused the Senate of slow-walking an investigation into the network out of fear of political backlash if other prominent politicians are revealed to have been involved.

She said that “there were and are networks, they still exist”, adding that it may not be easy for political parties to admit culpability in the scandal “but it has to be done”.

This scandal comes on the heels of the Italian “Angels and Demons” scandal that rocked several Italian towns and included mayors, doctors, and social workers in the criminal operation that took children from loving families through the power of the state and gave them, in some cases, to pedophiles. The Independent had that story, which included falsifying reports on parental abuse while social workers and doctors took part in electric shock torture of children.

Italian police have arrested 18 people, including a mayor, social workers and psychologists for allegedly “brainwashing” children into believing their parents had abused them, in a scheme to take them away from their families and sell them to foster parents.

Authorities in the central Italian city of Reggio Emilia revealed how a network of carers allegedly used hours of psychotherapy sessions and electroshocks to convince children their parents had sexually abused them and “alter their memory ahead of the trials”, Italy’s Ansa news agency reports.

They then allegedly sold the children on to friends and acquaintances in a scheme worth hundreds of thousands of euros.

The investigations, codenamed “Angels and Demons”, started in the summer of 2018 after police received a series of reports of wrongdoing that initially proved false.

The 18 arrested include Andrea Carletti, mayor of Bibbiano, a town of about 10,000 near Reggio Emilia, as well as politicians, doctors, social workers and psychologists.

There is a pattern where child welfare services keep showing up in these stories of sex-trafficked children. The U.S. State Department recently reported that sex-trafficking is directly linked to our foster care system. Even with this information, the state continues to give child welfare offices more power, not less, over children and families. One particularly horrific case, where a little girl known as Baby Devani was burned over 80% of her body and sexually abused, blew open a scandal revealing that CPS in Arizona gave multiple foster children to a child porn ring leader. Not one government agency involved in this outrage was ever held accountable.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/megan-fox/2020/06/19/scandal-german-govt-officials-intentionally-placed-foster-children-with-pedophile-ring-for-thirty-years-n553228

A psychodrama in two short acts.

Mayor Libby Schaaf said Wedesday that a hate crime investigation was under way after a social media post identified a noose at the city’s popular Lake Merritt. Police said they searched the area on Tuesday and found five ropes attached to trees.

Victor Sengbe, who is black, told KGO-TV that the ropes were part of a rigging that he and his friends used as part of a larger swing system. He also shared video of the swing in use.

“Out of the dozen and hundreds and thousands of people that walked by, no one has thought that it looked anywhere close to a noose. Folks have used it for exercise. It was really a fun addition to the park that we tried to create,” Sengbe said.

“It’s unfortunate that a genuine gesture of just wanting to have a good time got misinterpreted into something so heinous,” he told the station.

Schaaf said officials must “start with the assumption that these are hate crimes.” However, the mayor and Nicholas Williams, the city’s director of parks recreation, also said it didn’t matter whether the ropes were meant to send a racist message.

“Intentions don’t matter when it comes to terrorizing the public,” Schaaf said. “It is incumbent on all of us to know the actual history of racial violence, of terrorism, that a noose represents and that we as a city must remove these terrorizing symbols from the public view.”

“The symbolism of the rope hanging in the tree is malicious regardless of intent. It’s evil, and it symbolizes hatred,” Williams said.

Due process and guilty until proven innocent is one of those horrible racist things invented by dead white men.

But Williams and Schaaf sum up the diseased leftist psyche that is at the heart of this insane national meltdown. 

It doesn’t matter whether the ropes were exercise equipment put up by a black man or nooses. There is a symbolic need for them to be nooses. Actual facts are irrelevant. The psychodrama of indictment, guilt and atonement, our endless Salem Witch Trials, are what this is about. The assumption must be that they are nooses and no amount of facts can ever disprove this need for the noose.

The Left wants the psychodrama and doesn’t care about black people or reality. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/06/imaginary-nooses-and-need-racial-psychodrama-daniel-greenfield/

The Syrian Huseein S. (31 years old) has to serve 3 years and 9 months in prison, his compatriot Fadi A. (16 years old) was sentenced to one year on probation.

The two had previously smoked marijuana together with two Stralsund girls in 2019, after which the 12- and 16-year-old were raped by them.

At the trial, the defendants complained that they had had “a difficult time” in Syria. S. also said that the girls had been provoked because they had been sitting with him late at night.

The 16-year-old was given a lenient sentence because he turned himself in after the crime and was on drugs. However, in addition to his sentence, he will have to do 250 hours of community service and start an education.

bild.de

The German federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern will no longer send police officers to Berlin for relief missions. The reason for this is the recently passed anti-discrimination law in the capital.

The state’s Interior Minister Lorenz Caffier (CDU) told the dpa news agency on Wednesday that he now sees as a reversal of the burden of proof, for example in the case of racism allegations against officials. “We cannot accept that,” emphasized the CDU politician. Police officers should not run the risk of suffering legal disadvantages during operations in Berlin.

The state anti-discrimination law passed by Red-Red-Green coalition in Berlin is designed to protect citizens and associations from discrimination, for example when dealing with authorities, checking tickets or dealing with the police. If a court finds discrimination, the person concerned receives compensation from the State of Berlin. The law is the first of its kind in Germany. It provides for a so-called burden of proof relief, according to which it is sufficient if a person concerned can claim any incident was “mostly likely” credible.

Critics, on the other hand, speak of a reversal of the burden of proof. Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer (CSU) also announced to the dpa that for the time being federal police officers will no longer be sent for deployments to Berlin. “I cannot subject my officials to this discrimination, where they must then prove that they have not discriminated.”

Several interior ministers of the federal states had already considered suspending support missions in Berlin due to the new regulations. On Wednesday, Brandenburg’s Interior Minister Michael Stübgen (CDU) criticized the move in an interview on rbb-Inforadio saying that every citizen should have the opportunity to defend themselves against illegal treatment of police officers. A reversal of the burden of proof is, however, the wrong way. He said he would not allow the legal position of police officers from Brandenburg to be undermined.

Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg had announced that they would reconsider further deployments by their officials to Berlin. Should they experience disadvantages due to the anti-discrimination law, they will no longer send support. Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia, on the other hand, had announced that they would continue to send police officers to the capital.

Berlin’s Senator for the Interior, Andreas Geisel (SPD), repeatedly criticized the law. Claims for damages will in all cases be directed against the State of Berlin, not against individual officials, he said on Inforadio. He accused his colleague Stübgen of not having read the law, which is why he has now sent him the text. He classified the debate about the new Berlin regulation as “political folklore”.

The State Anti-Discrimination Act is also the subject of discussion at the Interior Ministers’ Conference in Erfurt, which started on Wednesday.

freewestmedia.com/2020/06/19/german-state-refuses-to-send-police-officers-to-berlin-citing-anti-racist-law/