Georgia loses a bizarre landmark

Georgia has its share of controversial monuments. They embrace Stone Mountain, which has America’s largest Accomplice memorial carved into its facet. And till final week the state was dwelling to the Georgia Guidestones, sometimes called “America’s Stonehenge” (to not be confused with an attraction with that title in Salem, New Hampshire). Positioned about 100 miles (160km) north-east of Atlanta, the 19-foot (six-metre) landmark had messages sandblasted onto its granite surfaces in a dozen languages, together with English and Babylonian cuneiform. It additionally served as a sundial and an astronomical calendar.

Within the pre-dawn hours of July sixth a shadowy determine, caught in a grainy picture on digital camera, apparently planted an explosive gadget on the website of the Guidestones and broken them. Authorities ordered the remnants destroyed, involved that the unstable construction might collapse on investigators. They’ve but to establish any suspects, however an area prosecutor described the assault as an “act of home terrorism”. The perpetrators face a minimal of 20 years in jail.

Though the most recent thriller is discovering out who bombed them, the Georgia Guidestones have been an enigma since their inception. In 1979 a person utilizing the pseudonym Robert C. Christian commissioned the monument on behalf of a “small group of Individuals who imagine in God”. Many conspiracy theorists got here to imagine that the Guidestones have been the work of an evil cabal bent on controlling the world: inscriptions on the stones included what appeared like commandments, resembling “Keep humanity below 500,000,000 in perpetual steadiness with nature”.

Others merely noticed the monument as a testomony to the skills of the craftsmen of close by Elberton, the self-proclaimed “granite capital of the world”. Nonetheless others noticed the Guidestones as nothing greater than a wacky roadside curiosity.

Those that subscribe to sinister notions concerning the stones have been as soon as largely confined to the fringes. Now they are often discovered amongst politicians (lots of whom have additionally embraced different conspiracy theories, together with the concept that the 2020 presidential election was stolen). Earlier this yr one candidate for governor made it a part of her platform to destroy the “satanic” stones; Kandiss Taylor in the end misplaced the Georgia Republican main in Could with solely 3.4% of the vote, however the latest occasions have pushed her into the highlight once more.

In an interview with Alex Jones, a infamous conspiracy theorist, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a controversial Republican congresswoman from Georgia, stated that the stones known as for “inhabitants management”, a coverage she linked to the “onerous left”. Whether or not or not the bomber of the Guidestones purchased into such fantasies, the affect of the monument’s destruction can be all too actual. Elberton has misplaced its “Stonehenge”—and an eccentric vacationer attraction that every yr lured 1000’s of intrigued guests from all over the world.