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HISTORY

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The myth of the ‘stolen country’ – What should the Europeans have done with the New World? Jeff Funn-Paul

By on September 25th, 2020

https://spectator.us/myth-stolen-country-america-new-world/

Last month, in the middle of the COVID panic, a group of freshmen at the University of Connecticut were welcomed to their campus via a series of online ‘events’. At one event, students were directed to download an app for their phones. The app allowed students to input their home address, and it would piously inform them from which group of Native Americans their home had been ‘stolen’.

​We all know the interpretation of history on which this app is based. The United States was founded by a monumental act of genocide, accompanied by larceny on the grandest scale. Animated by racism and a sense of civilizational superiority, Columbus and his ilk sailed to the New World. They exterminated whomever they could, enslaved the rest, and intentionally spread smallpox in hopes of solving the ‘native question’. Soon afterwards, they began importing slave labor from Africa. They then built the world’s richest country out of a combination of stolen land, wanton environmental destruction and African slave labor. To crown it all, they have the audacity to call themselves a great country and pretend to moral superiority.

​This ‘stolen country’ paradigm has spread like wildfire throughout the British diaspora in recent years. The BBC recently ran a piece on the 400th anniversary of the Plymouth landings, whose author took obvious delight in portraying the Pilgrim Fathers as native-mutilating slave drivers. In Canada, in the greater Toronto school district, students are read a statement of apology, acknowledging European guilt for the appropriation of First Nations lands, before the national anthem is played over the PA system every morning.

​As a professional historian, I am keenly aware of the need to challenge smug, feel-good interpretations of history. I understand that nationalism and civilizational pride carry obvious dangers which were made manifest by the world wars of the 20th century. And I understand that these things can serve as subtle tools not only of racism but of exploitation of many stripes, and as justification for a status quo which gets in the way of meritocracy and fairness.

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Battle of Kulikovo: Russian Liberation from the Muslim Horde By Raymond Ibrahim

By on September 8th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/battle_of_kulikovo_russian_liberation_from_the_muslim_horde_.html

Today in history, on September 8, 1380, Russia began its long march to liberation from the Tatar yoke, by way of a battle that is as important to Russian history as the battles of Tours and Vienna are to the West.

Although pagan when they conquered Russia around 1240, by 1300, the Mongols were thoroughly Islamized.  Arabic was adopted; “the entire Muslim religious establishment of qadis, muftis, and the like arose in Sarai, the Golden Horde’s capital on the lower Volga”; and “sharia, Muslim religious law,” reigned supreme.  “With this the Russo-Tatar conquest society entered the mainstream of Medieval Christian-Muslim frontier life” — that is, it entered into a familiar paradigm of enmity and war, punctuated only by vast sums of gold and slaves flowing from Russia to the Horde.

In 1327, Uzbek Khan’s cousin Shevkal — “the destroyer of Christianity,” according to a Russian chronicle — asked a boon of his khan: “allow me to go to Rus to destroy their Christian faith, to kill their princes and to bring you their wives and children.”  Uzbek consented.  At the head of a vast horde, Shevkal invaded Russia “with great haughtiness and violence.  He inaugurated great persecution of the Christians, [using] force, pillage, torture, and abuse.”  Nor were Russians ignorant of the reason behind their (renewed) sufferings: everywhere in their chronicles, “they appear as defenders of the faith battling to save Christianity from marauding infidels driven by religious animosity.”  Moreover, “Mongol atrocities” are always recorded “as incidents in a continuous religious war.”

When the Golden Horde’s infrastructure began to fracture from internal discord in 1359, the principality of Moscow (or Muscovy) began to defy its overlords.  So Khan Mamai, seeking to squash the rebels and “impose Islam on the Russians,” made for Moscow with, according to sources, some 100,000 Turco-Tatars in 1380.  Boasting that they would put their swords “to the test for the Russian land and the Christian faith” against “the armor of the Moslems,” the Russians accepted the challenge.

Under the general leadership of Grand Prince Dmitri Ivanovich of Moscow, some 50,000 Russians went out and met the khan at Kulikovo Field, near the Don River and other tributaries.  The opposing armies were so vast as to be spread out over eight miles.  The Christians strategically positioned themselves between rivers and dense forests, thereby limiting the Tatar horsemen’s maneuvering and flanking abilities.

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V-J Day, 75 Years Later By Arthur L. Herman

By on September 4th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/remembering-v-j-day-75-years-later/

‘T oday the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won.”

Those were Douglas MacArthur’s words following the signing of Japan’s unconditional surrender on board the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, September 2, 75 years ago. That signing ceremony ended the last phase of World War II, the bloodiest war in history. As MacArthur indicated, it also opened a new era in the relationship between the United States and Asia, in which the once-defeated Japan has come to play a pivotal part.

After being America’s mortal enemy, Japan has become the U.S.’s closest and oldest ally in Asia. This is a tribute not only to generations of leadership in both countries, but also to the hopes that MacArthur set in motion on that day.

On the one hand, the ceremony of V-J Day was a magnificent display of American power. On board the USS Missouri were representatives of an international coalition to defeat imperial Japan that included the Soviet Union as well as Great Britain and its Dominions, and China.

Tokyo Bay itself was filled with American warships as far as the eye could see. When the surrender ceremony was completed, MacArthur staged an overflight of more than 1,500 Navy warplanes and 400 B-29s, the super bomber that had dropped the most destructive weapon ever devised, the atomic bomb, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to hasten Japan’s unconditional surrender.

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When Turkey’s ‘Hero’ Beheaded 800 Christians for Refusing Islam Lessons from the Martyrs of Otranto. Raymond Ibrahim

By on August 18th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/when-turkeys-hero-beheaded-800-christians-refusing-raymond-ibrahim/

The ritual decapitation of 800 Christians who refused Islam 539 years ago—and whose commemoration was last Friday, August 14—sheds much light on contemporary questions concerning the ongoing conflict between Islam and the West.

Background: When he sacked Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II was only 21-years-old—meaning he still had many good decades of jihading before him. He continued expanding into the Balkans, and, in his bid to feed his horses on the altar of Saint Peter’s basilica—Muslim prophecies held that “we will conquer Constantinople before we conquer Rome”—he invaded Italy and captured Otranto in 1480.  More than half of its 22,000 inhabitants were massacred, 5,000 hauled off in chains.

To demonstrate his “magnanimity,” Sultan Muhammad offered freedom to 800 chained Christian captives, on condition that they all embrace Islam.  Instead, they unanimously chose to act on the words of one of their numbers: “My brothers, we have fought to save our city; now it is time to battle for our souls!”

Outraged that his invitation was spurned, on August 14, Muhammad ordered the ritual decapitation of these 800 unfortunates on a hilltop (subsequently named “Martyr’s Hill”).  Their archbishop was slowly sawed in half to jeers and triumphant cries of “Allah Akbar!”  (The skeletal remains of some of these defiant Christians were preserved and can still be seen in the Cathedral of Otranto.)

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Our Use of Nuclear Weapons 75 Years Ago Was a Moral and Strategic Imperative. Invading Japan was not a serious option. Neither was a negotiated peace. By Henry I. Miller, M.S., M.D.

By on August 7th, 2020

https://humanevents.com/2020/08/05/our-use-of-nuclear-weapons-75-years-ago-was-a-moral-and-strategic-imperative/
EXCERPT
Americans are no strangers to times that ‘try men’s souls,’ to borrow a phrase from Thomas Paine. By mid-1945, we had been at war for three-and-a-half years, enduring the draft, mounting numbers of casualties, and rationing, with no end in sight. Many Americans were weary, not unlike our feelings now, after half a year of privations and anguish related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The historical context and military realities of 1945 are often forgotten when judging whether it was “necessary” for the United States to use nuclear weapons.

That sense of anxiety got me thinking about how WWII was suddenly—and to many, unexpectedly—resolved. August 6th will mark one of the United States’ most important anniversaries, memorable not only for what happened on that date in 1945 but for what did not happen.

What did happen was that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 Superfortress bomber, dropped Little Boy, a uranium-based atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That historic act hastened the end of World War II, which concluded within a week, after the August 9th detonation of Fat Man, a plutonium-based bomb, over Nagasaki. These were the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare.

I have two peripheral connections to those events. The first is that when Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, my father, a sergeant in the U.S. Army infantry who had fought in the Italian campaigns of WWII, was on a troopship, expecting to be deployed to the Pacific theater of operations. Neither he nor his fellow soldiers relished the prospect of participating in the impending invasion of the Japanese main islands. When the Japanese surrendered (on August 14th), the ship headed, instead, for Virginia, where the division was disbanded. (I was born two years later.)

My second connection was that during the 1960s, three of my M.I.T. physics professors had participated several decades earlier in the Manhattan Project, the military research program which developed the atomic bombs during the war. In class, one of these professors recalled that, after the first test explosion (code-named Trinity), he was assigned to drive Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the project, to view the result. They arrived to find a crater 1,000 feet in diameter, and six feet deep, with the desert sand inside turned into glass by the intense heat. Gen. Groves’s response? “Is that all?”

Approximately 66,000 are thought to have died in Hiroshima from the acute effects of the Little Boy bomb, and about 39,000 in Nagasaki from the Fat Man device. In addition, there was a significant subsequent death toll due to the effects of radiation and wounds.

Shortly thereafter, the questions began: “was it really necessary?” The Monday-morning quarterbacks started to question the morality and military necessity of using nuclear weapons on Japanese cities. Even nuclear physicist Leo Szilard, who, in 1939, had written the letter for Albert Einstein‘s signature that resulted in the formation of the Manhattan Project, characterized the use of the bombs as “one of the greatest blunders of history.” Since then, there have been similar periodic eruptions of revisionism, uninformed speculation, and political correctness.

The historical context and military realities of 1945 are often forgotten when judging whether it was “necessary” for the United States to use nuclear weapons. The Japanese had been the aggressors, launching the war with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and systematically and flagrantly violating various international agreements and norms by employing biological and chemical warfare, the torture and murder prisoners of war, and the brutalization of civilians, including forcing them into prostitution and slave labor.

Leaving aside whether our enemy “deserved” to be attacked with the most fearsome weapons ever employed, sceptics are also quick to overlook the “humanitarian” and strategic aspects of the decision to use them.

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By Joshua Lawson:75 Years Later, It’s Clear Truman Was Right To Drop The Atomic Bomb

By on August 6th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/06/75-years-later-its-clear-truman-was-rig

Ultimately, the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan hastened the end to WWII, halted further Soviet aggression, and saved millions of lives.

On August 6, 1945, 30-year-old U.S. Air Force pilot Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. took to the sky in the Enola Gay, his Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber. His destination, the Japanese city of Hiroshima, was not an especially notable target. His payload, however, a single bomb nicknamed “Little Boy,” would change the course of history.

True watershed moments in history are rare — the agricultural revolution is one such example, as was the Battle of Salamis, the advent of Jesus Christ, and the fall of Western Rome. Yet in the last 1,500 years, no two distinct epochs of time are as clear as the time before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the time since.

‘Prompt and Utter Destruction’

Eleven days before Tibbets’s fateful flight, on July 26, 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s “Potsdam Declaration” gave the Empire of Japan one final chance to surrender unconditionally after more than three years of war in the Pacific. If they persisted in fighting, the Potsdam text promised “the full application” of U.S. military power, culminating in “the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.” The closing of the ultimatum rings all the more forebodingly in hindsight: if the Japanese refused the terms, the alternative was “prompt and utter destruction.”

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The Man Who Conquered Polio-Jonas Salk and American Hero By Clifton Rodgers

By on August 3rd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/02/the-man-who-conquered-polio/

EXCERPTS

Jonas Salk never patented his vaccine or earned any money from his discovery, preferring it to be distributed as widely as possible. When asked who owned the patent to the polio vaccine, Salk answered, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

In the news, there were endless historical accounts of the horrors of prior epidemics. I was not old enough to remember the Black Plague or the Spanish Flu. Asian Flu, Swine Flu, SARS and Ebola were terrible, but they hadn’t shut down the world. Suddenly, the “bring out your dead” scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” wasn’t funny anymore.

I was old enough, however, to recall the terrors of polio. I remembered how proud the people of Pittsburgh were that they had been part of the making of the vaccine. 

In his 2010 novel—Nemesis—Philip Roth describes the fear of polio that swept through his childhood neighborhood in Newark during the summer of 1944. “Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us,” Roth wrote.

The disease terrified the nation. The lives of millions of Americans were disrupted. Many of the victims were left paralyzed—or dead. 

When—or if—an effective vaccine could be developed was an open question. Sound familiar?

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Slaves of a Different Color Some inconvenient truths about North African slavery. By Bruce Bawer

By on August 2nd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/01/slaves-of-a-different-color/

Welcome to 2020. The New York Times wins a Pulitzer Prize for its “1619 Project,” which depicts slavery as a distinctly American phenomenon and as the very foundation of American civilization. For several weeks, a half-dozen all but unreadable books seeking redefine the concept of racism hover at or near the top of the bestseller lists. Meanwhile, the cities of America become battlegrounds in a race war waged by young people, many of whom think that America invented the institution of slavery.

This is but one of many historical facts about which they’re wrong. The truth is that fewer than 4 percent of the slaves who were transported across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa ended up in the territory of what is now the United States. More slaves were shipped to the small island of Barbados than to the vast areas that started out as British North America and then became the United States. 

The same applies to Trinidad and the Windward Islands (Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Dominica, and Martinique). Ditto the Guianas (now Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana). Ditto the Spanish-speaking mainland of Latin American. Over 8 percent of transatlantic African slaves—twice the number sold between Maine and Georgia—were sold in St. Domingue, a French colony in what is now Haiti. Over 8 percent of slaves also ended up in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. The largest numbers of all are for Jamaica (over 11 percent) and Brazil (over 30 percent). 

In recent years, as schools and universities increasingly focus on racial issues, young Americans’ heads are filled with heaps of information—much of it from books like A People’s History of the United States—about the American legacy of racism and, in particular, the history of slavery and Jim Crow. But virtually none of them know that the slaves who were shipped to the present-day United States were a small fraction of the victims of the African slave trade.

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Sir Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation’: a guide and celebration :

By on July 27th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/civilisation/2020/07/sir-kenneth-clarks-civilisation/

Fifty-one years ago, when the first Apollo astronauts reached the moon, Sir Kenneth Clark (1903-1983), the eminent British art historian, was invited to the National Gallery in Washington DC to accept a medal for Distinguished Service to Education in Art. He had little idea of the frenzied crowd that would be on hand to welcome him. Clark, a modest and private person, found himself walking the entire length of the gallery amidst thunderous cheering. By the time he reached the speaker’s platform, tears were pouring down his cheeks.

The gallery was filled to capacity by an enthusiastic crowd anxious to see the man who had written and hosted the most unexpectedly popular series on culture in the history of television: Civilisation: A Personal View.

The subject of the series was the history of Western art; but this didn’t explain the wild enthusiasm. In fact, Clark had unwittingly tapped into grim, often unspoken fears of the time – that the social fabric of civilized life in the West was being torn asunder; that it was being undermined by endless war, random violence, moral decadence, and the ennui that corrodes any society overwhelmed by unprecedented material prosperity and a consumer mentality.

But now, from a tweedy and genial figure — more at home reading in an English country house than squinting into the brilliant limelight of sudden celebrity — came a sudden shaft of hope … Clark had brought Civilisation. 

Now, half a century on, we are embarking on a fascinating journey into the history and nature of Western Civilisation. This 15-week series will provide a guide to Civilisation: A Personal View. It can be used to accompany the DVD version or the episodes available on YouTube, or it can be read by itself as a synopsis of Clark’s great work.

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Communist China: A History Lesson for Mark Cuban To virtue-signaling corporatists, black lives matter but Chinese lives do not. By Thaddeus G. McCotter

By on July 25th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/24/communist-china-a-history-lesson-for-mark-cuban/

Recently, in what constitutes the modern equivalent of an old-fashioned Texas showdown, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban met in the middle of the Twitter community’s Main Street and exchanged fire.

The genesis of the dispute was conservative talk radio host Mark Davis’ statement that he would be “out” if Mavericks players took a knee during the national anthem in a show of support for the Black Lives Matters movement. Not surprisingly, Cuban defended his players by responding to Davis with “Bye.” 

Not surprisingly, too, Senator Cruz took exception to Cuban’s cavalier attitude toward Texans who believe kneeling for the national anthem is disrespectful. This led to Cuban questioning Cruz’s manhood. Cruz responded in kind.

Though initially about the anthem controversy, the most noteworthy aspect of this Twitter shootout at the “I’m OK, You’re Not Corral,” occurred when Cruz challenged Cuban to criticize Communist China, in general, and Beijing’s mistreatment of Hong Kong and the Uyghurs in particular. 

After Cuban affirmed his support for Black Lives Matter, claimed America is systemically racist, and accused Cruz of not doing enough to stop the COVID-19 pandemic (which Cuban failed to note originated in Communist China), he espoused the amoral canard corporate titans have long used to justify their complicit silence about oppression in the face of massive profits: “But I have never gotten involved in the domestic policies of ANY foreign country. We have too much to do here.”

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