Then They Came for the Board Games

Will chess be safe if we go back to the original Indian or Persian chessmen? After all, Kings, Queens, Bishops, and Knights are all very 'Western'.

From Daffey Thoughts

By David Griffey

So this is The Atlantic. Not some fan boy site or forum where a bunch of fan boys and brand boys duke it out, making mountains out of molehills and going into hysterics over the latest change in elf fashion. This is The Atlantic.

And what is the gist? The gist is the problem with board games that portray European Colonialism. That's something I've seen on hobby forums now for the last couple of years. Some have responded to calls that any game portraying the West's colonial past must be censored and eradicated. Other have gone farther, saying all games that portray anything West/America should be eliminated because, well, of course. After all, if you're in Germany in the 30s, you say the same about Jewish anything. Youngsters today are being taught to think 'Jew in Germany' whenever they see anything European/American.

Now, that's just hobby forums where the weird can sometimes overshadow the interesting. And in our day of politics-as-god, where everything down to Stamp Collecting.com must inject fealty to The Party into the mix, you can expect this sort of thing to spiral into lunacy.

But now we have The Atlantic. Take it for what it's worth, it's still regarded as a respected - and quotable - source for analyzing the issues of our time. Which I've noted is sort of what the press has figured out. A dozen years ago, many thought the Internet and Social Media were the doom of journalism. Somehow, some way, journalists learned to survive by weaponizing the same, and now have learned they can advance radical agendas in ways that liberal journalists decades ago only dreamed of.

The gist of this particular story, however, is one of several prongs of the attack. I touched on another prong of attack regarding the Cleveland Indians. This whole 'if it was named anything by a European or Euro-American, you can be it's racist' mantra. The point is to engrain in our minds a Pavlovian response to any term or concept from the Western Tradition. It starts with Gypsy Moths or baseball names or pancake mix clearly being offensive and needing to be eliminated, and ends with other words and phrases - like democracy, liberty, life, rights, religious freedom, and on and on.

The Atlantic piece is another of the Triple Joe* inspiration for the Modern Left. In this case, the eradication of the historical record. We either rewrite the history, or we eradicate the history. There is no learning from it. Presentism and all its accompanying contempt, judgment, condemnation, censorship and iconoclasm yes. But learn? The last thing the Left wants is for people to learn. They need drugs, sex and smartphones. Learning will be done by the beautiful people at the best Hollywood and Manhattan parties.

The shocking thing isn't that this is happening. It's that it's happening so in all its flagrant glory, and yet plowing forward almost unopposed. If we ever pondered how the terrible evils of history were allowed to happen, we need only watch the news or look out our windows and watch how we're letting it all happen again today. As my sons have said many times, we're the generation that finally proves an education isn't enough.

*That is, Joe McCarthy, Joe Goebbels, and Joe Stalin.