In 2001, attacks in New York and Washington are blamed on Al Qaeda as a pretext for invading Afghanistan. In the months leading up to the event, American negotiators had warned Afghanistan’s Taliban that they were interested in securing right of way for proposed pipeline projects, and the US would achieve this with either a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs. The Bush administration’s first major national security directive, NSPD-9, a full-scale battle plan for the invasion of Afghanistan, including command and control, air and ground forces, and logistics, was drafted and sitting on the President’s desk to be signed off on September 4, 2001, seven days before the 9/11 attacks. The invasion proceeded as planned in October.
I Don’t Get Debate Over Confederate Flag, ‘We Need to Put the American Flag Down’I can tell you that the cops murdering blacks ain't wearing the stars and bars, that's for damn sure.
While the sought purge of cultural items in South Carolina and throughout America is different in many ways from the destruction of cultural items pursued by ISIS, Manning’s observations suggest some important similarities. In America such cultural cleansing similarly threatens to obliterate Americans’ “memories” and the evidence of history. The whitewashing also attempts to alter the American narrative to remove the alternatives, with their both good and bad aspects, that may be suggested by the purged cultural items.
The German government’s attack on “degenerate art” in the 1930s and ‘40s is an illustrative example of the systematic destruction of cultural items.
