RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-weaponization-of-history-11566755226

History is the most humbling and humanizing of subjects. It opens reality to us in all its gorgeous variety, from the earthbound lives of ordinary peasants and servants to the rarefied universe of the mighty and wealthy, and the astonishing range of human experience in between. It seeks to provide a balanced and honest record of humanity’s achievements and enormities alike, generous enough to acknowledge the mixture of motives that every one of us flawed humans bring to life’s tasks.

That, at any rate, is how it ought to be. But instead of expanding our minds and hearts, history is increasingly used to narrow them. Instead of helping us to deepen ourselves and take a mature and complex view of the past, history is increasingly employed as a simple bludgeon, which picks its targets mechanically—often based on little more than a popular cliché—and strikes.

The best example may be the evergreen argumentum ad Hitlerum, in which every evil from bigotry and militarism to vegetarianism and appreciation of Wagner’s operas is referred to the transcendentally evil standard of Nazism. The detention centers on America’s southern border should be called “concentration camps,” according to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When questioned, the young, irrepressible Democrat advised Americans: “This is an opportunity for us to talk about how we learn from our history.” But that history isn’t ours. By invoking such an emotionally laden term, she was playing on a potent theme, but in a way that underscored the limited range of her historical reference, as well as the public’s.

A more disturbing example is the pell-mell rush to pass judgment against heroes of the past and tear down or rename the monuments to them—including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson. Are we really so faint of heart that we can no longer bear to allow the honoring of great men of the past who fail in some respects to meet our current specifications?

It’s true that all three men held either slaves or racist beliefs. Does that exhaust everything we need to know about them? Ought it to outweigh the value of everything else they did? For those who say yes, the transformation of history into a weapon depends upon a brutal simplification of the historical record. Such is the approach of the New York Times’s audacious “1619 Project,” which argues “that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”

A genuinely historical approach would acknowledge, even insist on recognizing, that Washington owned slaves. It would go on to consider that fact from the larger perspective of a long, important and consequential life. It would weigh Washington’s beliefs and actions carefully in the context of their time, and would take into account his decision to free his slaves at the time of his death.

That kind of respectful detail and complexity seems to be leaving with yesterday’s fashions. Instead, we get patent idiocy. The San Francisco School Board voted in June to spend up to $600,000 to paint over a high school’s mural depicting the life of Washington. Two weeks ago it voted to cover up the artwork instead—a compromise. The 1,600-square-foot mural was painted in 1935 by a communist who sought to include Washington’s ownership of slaves as part of a complex portrait of him. But the school board decided that complexity was too disturbing to teenagers, and that the mural was racist and degrading in its depiction of black and Native American people. Better to have plain white walls—or morality tales depicting “the heroism of people of color in America,” as is the new plan—than to tell a complicated story about an American hero.

The weaponizing of history corresponds invariably with a remarkable hostility to history. Its practitioners are content to slice a single fact out of a web of details, then repeat that fact with the stubbornness of protesters who have memorized a chant.

This aggressive historical simplification is at the core of the cult of intersectionality, which now rules American college campuses. The language of unchallengeable collective grievance relies on history for its authority. Notice how concepts such as “historically underrepresented” and “historically marginalized” are used to certify groups that deserve to be favored automatically in the present. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/olive-oatman-the-pioneer-girl-abducted-by-native-americans-who-returned-a-marked-woman?utm_source=pocket-newtab

About a century and a half ago, some Native American tribes of the Southwest used facial tattoos as spiritual rites of passage. Through a series of strange tragedies (and some possible triumphs), a white Mormon teenager who was traveling with her family through the area in the mid-19th century ended up sporting one too, a symbol of a complicated dual life she could never quite shake.

In 1851, the Oatman family, having broken from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was traveling through southeastern California and western Arizona, looking for a place to settle. As newly inducted Brewsterites—followers of Mormon rebel James C. Brewster—they’d been advised that California was, in fact, the true “intended gathering place” for Mormons, rather than Utah.

The group of approximately 90 followers had left Independence, Missouri, in the summer of 1850, but when they arrived in the New Mexico Territory, the party split, with Brewster’s faction taking the route to Santa Fe and then south to Socorro, and Royce (sometimes spelled Roys) Oatman leading a group to Socorro and then over to Tucson. 

When the remaining dregs of the Oatman-led party approached Maricopa Wells, in modern-day Maricopa County, Arizona, they were warned not only that the southwestern trail ahead was barren and dangerous, but that the native tribes in the region were famously violent toward whites. To continue, it was made clear, was to risk one’s life.

The other families elected to stay in Maricopa Wells until they had recuperated enough to make the journey, but Royce Oatman chose to press on. And that’s how Royce, his wife Mary, and their seven children, aged 1 to 17, found themselves trekking through the most arid part of the Sonoran Desert on their own.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274643/stalin-hitler-pact-turns-80-lloyd-billingsley

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was born on March 15, 1933, and Senator Dianne Feinstein on June 20 of the same year. An event that occurred six years later is far more significant than both those active public figures but much less understood, if known at all.

On August 23, 1939, Joseph Stalin of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics signed a pact with Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist regime in Germany. “Fascism is a matter of taste,” quipped Soviet foreign policy boss Vyacheslav Molotov, confirming that the two totalitarian regimes were essentially the same. Though often described as a “non-aggression pact,” the reverse was true.

The month after the Pact, Stalin and Hitler both invaded Poland, starting World War II. As Ben Peck noted in 2009 at Marxist.com, the Pact provided the Nazis with raw materials which “funded the Nazi war machine in Europe.”  By 1940, Stalin supplied Hitler’s Germany with 900,000 tons of mineral oil, 100 tons of scrap iron, 500,000 tons of iron ore” and other important minerals.  Soviet diplomats “groveled before the Führer in order to ingratiate themselves. In his cynical fashion, Stalin expelled each ambassador from the territories of the USSR as their countries were occupied by the Nazi armies.”

During the Pact, the Nazi and Soviet intelligence services teamed up against the Western democracies, and as the leftist Guardian recalls, the Stalin-Hitler collaboration did not end there. “Stalin also handed back a substantial number of German communists who had taken refuge in the Soviet Union after the Nazi seizure of power.” These Jewish communists, “were taken directly from the Soviet Gulag to a German concentration camp.”  As Christopher Wolf notes, “not many people know that many Jews fled Stalin’s control as well.”

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/a-bad-deal-80-years-ago/

Some 80 years ago, on Aug. 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the “Treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

The world was shocked — and terrified — by the agreement. Western democracies of the 1930s had counted on the huge resources of Communist Russia, and its hostility to the Nazis, to serve as a brake on Adolf Hitler’s Western ambitions. Great Britain and the other Western European democracies had assumed that the Nazis would never invade them as long as a hostile Soviet Union threatened the German rear.

The incompatibility between communism and Nazism was considered by all to be existential — and permanent. That mutual hatred explained why dictators Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin both despised and feared each other.

Yet all at once, such illusions vanished with the signing of the pact. Just seven days later, on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun.

After quickly absorbing most of Eastern Europe by either coercion or alliance, Hitler was convinced that he now had a safe rear. So he turned west in spring 1940 to overrun Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and the Netherlands.

Hitler accomplished all that relatively easily, failing only to conquer Great Britain with an exhaustive bombing campaigning.

During all these Nazi conquests, a compliant Stalin shipped huge supplies of food and fuel for the German war effort against the West. Stalin cynically had hoped that Germany and the Western democracies would wear themselves out in a wasting war — similar to the four horrific years in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I.