They never stop, and won't until all history is erased

now you see ‘em …

now you don’t

The Taliban comes to Hartford

A normally placid panel that oversees the State Capitol complex erupted in opposition Thursday to a plan to remove the marble statue of an early English settler who led the massacre of hundreds of Native Americans in the 1637 Battle of Mystic.

The State Capitol Preservation & Restoration Commission bristled at plans by legislative leaders to take down the stone likeness of John Mason from the north exterior of the Capitol, charging that by keeping the statue in its third-floor niche overlooking Bushnell Park, the figure can become a learning tool, whether or not it offends people.

Commission members warned that if Mason is removed from the high-profile perch above the Capitol’s north steps, other statues of early settlers, including slave owners, could be next. “It’s not going to stop at one thing,” warned Mary Finnegan, a commission member who worked in the General Assembly for nearly 38 years.

But right after the hour-and-20-minute-long commission meeting, state Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, the powerful co-chairwoman of the legislative Appropriations Committee, said her plans to remove the statue indeed remain in the state budget that starts July 1.

Mason’s colonial troops joined with allies from the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes to the battle against the Eastern Pequot tribe in May of 1637, killing about 500 Native Americans. The massacre, which is also the subject of another commemoration on the Capitol, is an affront to Native Americans, said Osten, whose district includes the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribal nations.

Osten said that those women, children and older Native Americans who were not killed in the massacre were tortured and became slaves. She said that the statue could be sent to the Old State House for permanent exhibition rather than taking a honored location at the Capitol.

But …

Walter Woodward, an associate professor of history at UConn who serves on the commission and is an expert in early Connecticut history, joined in the defense of the keeping the statute in public view on the exterior of the 1878 Capitol.

“One of the things that I know is that John Mason certainly, in that Pequot fort on that morning, did something that was horrendous to save his and his men’s lives,” said Woodward, who is also the Connecticut state historian, during the virtual commission meeting. “The massacre at Mystic, as it is called now, was a desperate act by someone in desperate trouble, by someone trying to survive. And at that moment he and his men were fighting to save the colony of Connecticut as well. The reason the state of Connecticut honored him through those centuries, is because at a moment of great peril for this fledgling colony that was facing starvation and surrounded by enemies, he was the great risk-taker.”

Statues, books, ideas: all can raise ideas, stir discussion, and keep history alive. Which is why the new totalitarians are so desperate to erase them. They want, as they say, to create “a new consciousness”, a new class that will replace the lumpenproletariat that’s unable to recognize the superiority of communism with a new, more malleable generation. To do that, they can’t have people like Professor Woodward around, and they can’t have anything in the new world order that might stimulate discussion or, god forbid, independent thought and departure from the party line..