A warning from George Orwell on the ‘monument wars’

“So will George Washington now lose his status?” the president asked Tuesday. “Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson?”

It’s a good question — no doubt the question for many Americans. It’s not that the alt-left has already got its noose around statues of Washington, but the leftist-outrage industry does move fast.

Even in New York.

Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted Wednesday, “New York City will conduct a 90-day review of all symbols of hate on city property.”

Protesters have already swarmed the statue of Teddy Roosevelt at the Museum of Natural History. They reckon it’s a symbol of white supremacy.

Assemblyman Dov Hikind wants to remove two concrete markers honoring French World War I heroes who ended up collaborating with the Nazis in World War II. De Blasio agreed. One of those, in the name of Philippe Pétain, “will be one of the first we remove,” said the mayor.

t takes a lot of Communist commitment to believe Trump is worse than Kim Jong Un. There’s no reason to imagine that the left is going to settle for a few statues of Lee.

The left wants to attack the very legitimacy of America, of which Washington is the real symbol. And going after statues and other cultural icons is part of the Marxist playbook.

It was written about by George Orwell in his dystopian novel “1984,” a quote from which is making the rounds this week.

In it, one of Orwell’s characters warns of how “every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.”

“And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute,” adds Orwell’s character. “History has stopped.”

Is that what we want?

Orwell’s wisdom suggests Trump was smart to raise the question of where all this is going. And to say: “You are changing history, you’re changing culture.”

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