Cultural Narrative Quotes
In addition to the Muslim world during the Crusades losing control of the Holy City for the first time in 400 years, the Christians stabled their horses on the Al Axa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, two of Islam’s holiest places. In addition, the Crusaders, after taking the city, slaughtered most of the inhabitants—Muslims, Jews and even fellow Christians who were Eastern Orthodox—more than 30,000 in just a day or so. It was a reign of terror on a scale that even today, it is shocking to most. So where as to us the Crusades were an interesting of aberrant part of history, to many Muslims of the Middle East the thought or discussion of the Crusades is traumatic even today.
Like the Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera, he produced gigantic murals with historical and social themes. He actually included lynchings and KKK meetings and Mormon persecution in his works which offended many Missouri politicians, but then he was probably in a better position to do so than any artist in Missouri.
Blight was referring to one classic example where the myth developed in the South and spread to the rest of the country, that the Civil war motivation was not to maintain slavery but a noble fight for freedom and states rights. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the seceding states had a legislative declaration of secession and all of them stated maintaining slavery was the cause of the war and secession. None mentioned a general principle of states’ rights. As a matter of fact the State’s rights issue went the other way. It was the Northern states that refused to obey the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court to return fugitive slaves. The Northern states claimed State’s rights and the South responded that states had no right to nullify a Federal Law that had been upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court. The historical myths that nations create, puts a more acceptable veneer on disreputable behavior of the past. The United States does this but other nations do as well, and some of the myths cause conflict and violence hundreds of years later as with the Balkans where each ethnic subgroup has its own myths all of which are wrong but believed.
