Displaying posts categorized under

HISTORY

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The “Most Colossal Crime of All Ages” A new U.S. resolution acknowledging the Armenian Genocide has Turkey outraged. Raymond Ibrahim

By on October 31st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/most-colossal-crime-all-ages-raymond-ibrahim/

An ugly truth of history has just been acknowledged.  On October 29, the US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly (405 to 11) in favor of Resolution 296, which acknowledges the Armenian genocide perpetrated by Ottoman Turks during WW1.  (Unsurprisingly, Ilhan Omar was among the very few to abstain; her disingenuous logic will be addressed later.)

In order to become official policy, however, the resolution needs to be approved by both houses of Congress, and then signed by the president.  The Senate is currently not scheduled to vote on the measure.

It is at any rate a step in the right direction.  According to the book Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide,

At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000….  Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.

Indeed, Turkey is currently outraged at this resolution; its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, called it “worthless” and the “biggest insult” to the Turkish people. 

Such willful denial borders the surreal considering how well documented the Armenian genocide is.  As the International Association of Genocide Scholars says, “the Armenian Genocide is not controversial, but rather is denied only by the Turkish government and its apologists.”

Continue reading →
HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

1776, not 1619 America’s Founding was not defined by slavery and white supremacy—quite the contrary. Arthur Milikh

By on October 29th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/new-york-times-1619-project

For decades, much of academia, the liberal activist class, and the public school system have operated on the premise that America is fundamentally racist. The latest manifestation of this outlook is the 1619 Project, rolled out last month by the New York Times. Claiming that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” it “aims to reframe the country’s history” by making 1619—the year slavery was first introduced by the British to Virginia—the year of “our true founding.”

This narrative is akin to the Jacobins’ alteration of the calendar to make their revolution the decisive turning point in human history. Just as they would save France from the monarchy, so, too, will the Times save America from white supremacy. The Times encourages public schools to adopt an accompanying curriculum that spreads the 1619 Project’s message to young Americans. Its goal is to brand our founding documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—as immoral and thus unworthy of our allegiance.

To make America’s Founding contemptible, one must hide, ignore, and distort the Founders’ writings and thoughts. Irresponsibly omitted from this narrative is the fact that not a single major Founder endorsed slavery. On the contrary, the Founders unambiguously saw slavery as evil. George Washington said, “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it,” and Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence calls the slave trade an “execrable commerce” and an affront “against human nature itself.” Gouverneur Morris called slavery a “nefarious institution” and “the curse of heaven,” and John Jay said, “It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. . . . To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.”

Continue reading →
HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY R.I.P.

By on October 28th, 2019

Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky was a Russian-born British human rights activist and writer. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, he was a prominent figure in the Soviet dissident movement. He was a prolific writer. His last book was”Judgement in Moscow” described below:

“The movers and shakers of today have little interest in digging for the truth. Who knows what one may come up with? You may start out with the Communists and end up with yourself.” —Vladimir Bukovsky

Bukovsky’s Judgment in Moscow, called “stunning” by Richard Pipes and “a massive and major contribution” by Robert Conquest, has been published for the first time in English. Margaret Thatcher gave a grant to support the writing of the book, and the initial publication in Russia was paid for by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. The book has an introduction by Edward Lucas and an afterword by David Satter.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, legendary Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky had the opportunity to steal thousands of classified documents from the Soviet archives. Judgment in Moscow is about the secrets exposed by those documents. It reveals the inner workings of the Soviet regime and the complicity of many in the West with that regime.

Judgment in Moscow was an international bestseller published in nine languages, but has only now been published in English for the first time. It was previously at Random House, but Bukovsky refused to rewrite parts of the book which accused prominent Westerners of behind-the-scenes dealings with the Soviets. In this edition, the author quotes correspondence with his editor, who says, “I don’t disagree, but I simply can’t publish a book that accuses Americans like Cyrus Vance and Francis Ford Coppola of unpatriotic — or even treacherous — behavior.”

“Vladimir Bukovsky uses the Kremlin’s own documents to show how the Soviet Union provided a false face to the world and how Soviet leaders used Western leaders as dupes or willing actors. Judgment in Moscow provides the written Nuremberg trial the Soviets never got when the USSR fell.” —Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History (Pulitzer Prize)

“An essential warning of the dangers of collaborating with authoritarian regimes.” — Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion and author of Winter is Coming

“The most important work to appear for decades on the Soviet empire and its aftermath.” — Edward Lucas, former senior editor of the Economist, from the introduction

Continue reading →
HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Kurds, Trump, & Forgotten Zionist History By Moshe Phillips

By on October 23rd, 2019

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/the-kurds-trump-forgotten-zionist-history/2019/10/20/

Various media outlets criticized President Trump last week for one of his defenses of his decision to remove 50 American troops who were assisting Kurdish fighters in Syria. “They didn’t help us in the Second World War,” Trump said regarding the Kurds. “They didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example.”

To rebut Trump’s argument, CNN quoted Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute: “World War II was a war among states and the Kurds weren’t a state,” he said. It also quoted Henri Barkey, a Middle East expert from the Council on Foreign Relations, who said, “Just like many other people who did not have a state, [the Kurds] could not have helped the United States.”

In fact, though, both in World War I and World War II, stateless Zionist Jews lobbied and organized in the U.S., UK, Canada, Palestine, and elsewhere to form independent fighting units to fight against Germany and the Ottomans in WWI and against the Axis powers in WWII.

In WWI, first the Zion Mule Corps (650 Jewish soldiers, served at Gallipoli) and then later the Jewish Legion (5,000 Jewish solders) fought under British army command; in WWII, the Jewish Brigade (30,000 Jewish soldiers) was part of the British army.

The men agitating for and leading the Jewish soldiers in WWI and WWII were some of the most colorful and amazing individuals of the Zionist movement. That Barkey and Rubin could be expert sources for CNN and not be highly familiar with their stories is rather surprising.

The WWI Jewish fighters were led by British officer John Henry Patterson. Patterson was the most famous African lion hunter in British history. His story is told in the 1996 Val Kilmer/Michael Douglas film “The Ghost and the Darkness.” Patterson was played by Kilmer, and the movie is based on a book by Patterson. Two other books written by Patterson detail his work with Jewish soldiers and were titled With the Zionists in Gallipoli and With the Judaeans in the Palestine Campaign.

Continue reading →
BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

Women Under the Spell Augusto Zimmermann

By on October 21st, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/10/women-under-the-spell/

The connections of early feminism with secular ideologies such as liberalism and socialism are well known. I have myself written about these in several of my articles, including a chapter in my book on Western legal theory. However, the spiritual dimensions that underpinned the early feminist movement in the nineteenth century were entirely unknown to me until I discovered this important book on the subject.

Dr Per Faxneld obtained a PhD in History of Religions at Stockholm University in 2014. He is a professor at Stockholm University, was a visiting professor at Cambridge University in 2014, and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Mid-Sweden University. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the history of Satanism and Western esotericism.

Satanic Feminism is based on Faxneld’s doctoral dissertation, which was awarded the Donner Institute Prize for Eminent Research on Religion. It discusses how prominent feminists—primarily between 1880 and 1930—used Satan as a symbol of their rejection of the so-called “patriarchal traits of Christianity”. It shows that these women were inspired by the period’s most influential new religion, Theosophy, and how the anti-Christian discourses of radical secularism affected feminism.

Satanic Feminism sheds a new light on the early feminist movement. It discusses neglected or unknown aspects of the intellectual connections of early feminism with Satanism in a way that nobody before Faxneld has dared to do. In doing so, he richly illustrates how leading figures of the early feminist movement, such as the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the actress Sarah Bernhardt and the poet Renée Vivien, viewed God as the precursor of patriarchy and Satan as an ally in the fight against it.

Continue reading →
HISTORY Comments turned off

The Adventures of Commodore Levy, U.S.N. William Bryk *****

By on October 18th, 2019

https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/the-adventures-of-commodore-levy-u-s-n

A sailor of great professional skill and courage, he was proud, arrogant, and self-righteous.

Born April 22, 1792 (Nissan 30, 5552), Uriah Phillips Levy was 10 years old when he ran away to sea. He returned two years later, as he’d promised his mother, to prepare for his bar mitzvah. Then he apprenticed to a Philadelphia ship owner. In our day of wooden men and iron ships, “learning the ropes” is a cliché. To Levy, it was life and death. A square-rigger has more than 200 ropes (called lines), each has a name and a function, and Levy had to know them all. To confuse a clew line with a halyard, or a lee brace with a weather backstay, could mean a dismasted ship and the endangerment of all aboard her.

Within nine years, as Levy wrote, “I passed through every grade of service—cabin boy, ordinary seaman, able-bodied seaman, boatswain, third mate, second mate, first mate, to that of captain…” In 1809, while on shore leave in Tortola, a British press gang seized him. He was carrying his papers. However, a Royal Marine sergeant sneered, “You don’t look like an American to me. You look like a Jew.” Levy replied, “I am an American and a Jew.” “If the Americans have Jew peddlers manning their ships, it’s no wonder they sail so badly,” the Royal Marine replied. Levy hit him full in the face. Hitting a Royal Marine in the face is almost invariably a mistake. When Levy came to in the brig of HMS Vermeer, the officer of the watch was shoving a New Testament at him and demanding he swear himself into the Royal Navy. Levy refused, saying, “I am an American and I cannot swear allegiance to your king. And I am a Jew, and do not swear on your testament, or with my head uncovered.” Somehow, he gained an audience with Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, who agreed that his papers were valid and ordered him released.

In 1811, at 19, he became master and part owner of the brig George Washington. He nailed a mezuzah outside his cabin door, a small box containing Biblical verses that signified his cabin was a Jewish home. When the United States declared war on Great Britain in 1812, Levy entered the U.S. Navy as a sailing master. Levy was captured when his ship was taken by a British warship. He was imprisoned at Dartmoor for 16 months, during a winter so cold the Thames froze solid to the bottom. He learned French and fencing; he failed only in organizing a congregation among the prisoners for want of a minyan, the traditional quorum of 10.

Continue reading →
HISTORY Comments turned off

Christopher Columbus: A Progressive Tool for Discrediting America The Left’s vicious assault on American history ensues. Bruce Thornton

By on October 16th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/legacy-christopher-columbus-bruce-thornton/

The recent attacks on historical monuments by the “woke” progressive Philistines, and the New York Times’s “1619 Project” aimed at rewriting America’s history as a racist plot, are just the latest in the left’s long assault on American history. Long before this current iconoclasm, Christopher Columbus has been the arch-villain in the left’s Orwellian revision of American history as peculiarly and irredeemably evil from its birth.

Attacking and demonizing American history predates the current frenzy of revisionism and virtue-signaling, for it is one of the progressive left’s favorite tools for undermining the patriotic solidarity that binds us together and undergirds our political order.

This long assault on America’s founding and exceptionalism has been a weapon of the left for weakening the US’s most successful and powerful enemy. The left can never forgive the US for achieving “prosperity, power, the tendency towards uniformity of economic conditions,” as Raymond Aron pointed out in 1957, “by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention” and the “revolutionary code.” The left has to discredit America’s foundations in order to show that its success has come at too great a price––the institutionalization of racist oppression and inequality that has created “white privilege” and “white supremacism.” What better place to start than with Christopher Columbus, who began the evil colonization of and genocide against the innocent American peoples? And Columbus’s most malign heir has been the United States.

Continue reading →
HISTORY Comments turned off

Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) guide for the perplexed, 2019 Amb. (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on October 11th, 2019

Based on ancient Jewish sages, October 10, 2019, https://bit.ly/2OBJ3Nw 

1. US-Israel special ties are highlighted by Columbus Day (October 14, 2019), which is always celebrated around Sukkot (October 13-20, 2019). According to “Columbus Then and Now” (Miles Davidson, 1997, p. 268), Columbus landed in America on Friday afternoon, October 12, 1492, the 21st day of the Jewish month of Tishrei, in the Jewish year 5235, on the 7th day of Sukkot, Hosha’na’ Rabbah – a day of special universal deliverance and miracles.  Hosha’ (הושע) is “deliverance” in Hebrew; Na’ (נא) is the Hebrew word for “please” and Rabbah (רבה) is “The Sublime.”  The numerical value of Na’ in Hebrew is 51 (נ – 50, א – 1), and the celebration of Hoshaa’na’ Rabbah is on the 51stday following Moses’ ascent to Mt. Sinai.

2. the 3rd Jewish pilgrimage holiday (following Passover and Shavou’ot – Pentecost) has been celebrated for the last 3,300 years, commemorating the Exodus, the 40 years of wandering in the Sinai Desert, the construction of the Holy Tabernacle and the victories along the way into the Land of Israel. It reaffirms faith in God, reality-based optimism, gratitude for the Ingathering and the harvest. Sukkot reminds people of human limitations and (its humble structure) emphasizes the importance of humility. Humility is a central message of Sukkot, as demonstrated by the seven day relocation from one’s permanent residence to the temporary, humble, wooden Sukkah (booth).

3. Sukkot ( in Hebrew) is named after the first stop during the Exodus from Egypt, the town of Sukkota (סוכותה), as documented in Exodus 13:20-22 and Numbers 33:3-5.  Itcommemorates the transition from nomadic life in the desert to permanence in the Promised Land; from oblivion to deliverance; and from the spiritual state-of-mind during the High Holidays to the mundane of the rest of the year. 

Continue reading →
HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Back Story to Hollywood’s Anti-Trump Blacklist Recalling the director who pushed back at the Hollywood Left — and was glad he did. Lloyd Billingsley

By on September 18th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/back-story-hollywoods

Debra Messing and Eric McCormack, billed as “co-stars” of something called Will & Grace, have called for the “blacklisting” of those attending fundraisers for President Trump. As the Washington Examiner put it, this was “so that Hollywood Democrats could refuse to work with them in the future.” As RT.com had it, this drew “natural comparisons to the late Sen. Joe McCarthy’s efforts in the 1950s to rid Hollywood of ‘Communist sympathizers.’” These efforts might pack more clout if they had the history right.

The primary investigator of Communism in Hollywood was a House committee that started with a probe of fascism during the 1930s, and as William F. Buckley said, should have been called the Committee to Investigate Fascism and Communism. It wound up being called the House Committee on Un-American Activities and after World War II, congressional sleuths were after Communist International (Comintern) agent Gerhart Eisler, whose brother Hanns Eisler was a composer in Hollywood.

When HCUA reps showed up there, that caught the attention of many in the dream factories. As Budd Schulberg noted, the Communist Party was the only game in town during the 1930s and 1940s. The CPUSA controlled unions that read incoming scripts and trashed the work of conservative writers. The Party also smeared and blacklisted actors they didn’t like and attacked them directly during the violent studio strikes and jurisdictional disputes following World War II. The chief anti-Communists were liberal Democrat union leaders such as Ronald Reagan of the Screen Actors Guild and Roy Brewer of IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. 

Reagan was one of the “friendly” witnesses before an HCUA hearing in Washington in November of 1947. The “unfriendly” witnesses, originally 19, were pared down to the “Hollywood Ten,” including Stalinist screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson, CPUSA straw boss in the talent guilds. Defiant studio heads proclaimed they would not fire Communists but changed their minds after the hearings.

That was the origin of the “Hollywood Blacklist” legend, and it all took place before Joe McCarthy was any kind of player. Senators do not serve on House committees and McCarthy never had anything to do with Hollywood. His wild, accusatory style did great harm to anti-Communists, particularly the liberal Democrats among them. Anybody who raised any concern about Communism could be smeared with “McCarthyism,” a preferred incantation of the Left for decades. (Although it is crucial to stress that McCarthy’s cause, not his style, was legitimate and has been vindicated.)

Continue reading →
HISTORY, MEDIA Comments turned off

No, Jonathan Haidt is Not Like a Slavery Apologist written by Adam Rowe

By on September 6th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/09/04/no-jonathan-haidt-is-not-like-a-sla

Eve Fairbanks, in an essay for the Washington Post, argues that many of the writers on the so-called “reasonable right,” a group that includes such seemingly benign figures as Bari Weiss and Jonathan Haidt, are making many of the same arguments and using much the same language as proslavery advocates in the American South:

The reasonable right’s rhetoric is exactly the same as the antebellum rhetoric I’d read so much of. The same exact words. The same exact arguments. Rhetoric, to be precise, in support of the slave-owning South.

Fairbanks follows this breathless announcement by acknowledging that she is not accusing anyone of defending slavery, and that includes, weirdly enough, actual antebellum proslavery writers. “Proslavery rhetoricians talked little of slavery itself,” she writes. “Instead, they anointed themselves the defenders of ‘reason,’ free speech and ‘civility.’” This is a bit like smearing someone as a Nazi, then qualifying it with the claim that overt anti-Semitism was really quite atypical of Nazism. In her characterization of proslavery thought, Fairbanks has taken a line that not even the most stalwart member of the Daughters of the Confederacy would care to defend. It is, well, an exact inversion of the truth.

In one sense, the argument is too silly to merit a serious response. The fact that defenders of slavery have in the past appealed to reason and civility no more discredits anyone who appeals to those values than the Nazis’ love of calisthenics discredits anyone who exercises. But the essay does raise, in an absurd, wrong-headed way, an interesting question about the fate of civility and free speech in a society that no longer operates on shared moral premises.

Free speech principles were often at stake in the antebellum controversy over slavery.

Continue reading →