Almost twenty years ago, Murray Rothbard noted how manufactured “heroes” add the required mythology necessary to help perpetuate the statist quo:

We live, increasingly, in a Jacobin Age. Memory, embodied in birthdays, anniversaries, and other commemorations, is vitally important to an individual, a family, or a nation. These ceremonies are critical for the self-identity and the renewed dedication to that identity, of a person or of a people. It was insight into this truth that led the Jacobins, during the French Revolution, to sweep away all the old religious festivals, birthdays, and even calendar of the French people, and to substitute new and artificial names, days, and months for commemoration.

This Jacobinical process has been going on in the United States, albeit more gradually, in recent years. Festivals important for American self-identity and dedication have been purged or denigrated: e.g. Washington’s Birthday has been denatured into an amorphous “President’s Day” designed merely to ensure one more holiday weekend. And in stark contrast to the great World Columbian Exposition in Chicago for the quadricentennial of the discovery of America, at its quincentenary in the fall of 1992, the discovery was universally reviled as a vicious genocidal act by a “dead white European male.” Every week, it seems, the media come up with little-known substitute people or events whose anniversaries, or whose deaths, we are required to honor.

The latest ersatz hero is Cesar Estrada Chavez …

Read Rothbard’s full article here.