Howard Zinn, "that fiery author… with an extraordinary destiny… in the service of the oppressed" bla, bla, bla

For the famous author of Histoire populaire des Etats-Unis, writing was a sensible object only insofar that it was put in the service of the oppressed.

Martin Duberman's laudatory biography about Howard Zinn has been translated to French, where Howard Zinn, une vie à gauche (Editeur Lux) receives an equally laudatory book review from the newspaper of record, i.e., Le Monde and Marc-Olivier Bherer — "that fiery-natured author… with an extraordinary destiny… in the service of the oppressed… who was a veritable actor of our times' History" etc, etc, etc…

L'austérité d'un tel personnage pourrait décourager le biographe, d'autant qu'il a pris soin de détruire les éléments les plus personnels de ses archives. Martin Duberman, historien et ami, a néanmoins tenté dans Howard Zinn, une vie à gauche, de raconter l'homme qu'il a connu. Dans la première biographie – en français – de ce bouillant auteur se dessine un portrait de militant au parcours extraordinaire.

 … Howard Zinn, comme le rappelle Martin Duberman, a en effet choisi d'être un véritable acteur de l'histoire. D'abord à Atlanta, où il enseigna, de 1956 à 1963, au Spelman College, une université noire. Il y prit conscience de la violence de la ségrégation et aida ses étudiants à s'organiser. Un engagement qu'il poursuit encore ailleurs dans le sud des Etats-Unis. Mais c'est véritablement la guerre au Vietnam qui sera le combat de sa vie.

 … Ces épisodes forment un palpitant récit que Martin Duberman tâche de compléter en faisant aussi revivre l'intellectuel. Il en dresse un portrait sans concession, rappelant les raccourcis employés par Howard Zinn dans son histoire des Etats-Unis, ainsi que les nombreux oublis commis. L'oeuvre, parue en 1980, n'est pas aussi révolutionnaire qu'on a pu le croire. A la même époque, de nombreux autres historiens ont également choisi de s'intéresser aux oubliés du récit officiel.

Most professional historians provide “a basically negative understanding of American history”

If you’re old enough to remember the Soviet Union, 

writes Naomi Schaefer Riley in her Wall Street Journal interview of Wilfred McClay,

you’ve probably wondered why so many young people today seem attracted to socialism. One influence is Howard Zinn, who published “A People’s History of the United States” in 1980, the year before the first millennials were born.

The book “continues to be assigned in countless college and high-school courses, but its commercial sales have remained strong as well” [which is nothing less than an outrage].

… Historian Wilfred McClay aspires to be the antidote to Zinn, whom he accuses of “greatly oversimplifying the past and turning American history into a comic-book melodrama in which ‘the people’ are constantly being abused by ‘the rulers.’ ” Mr. McClay’s counterpoint, which comes out next week, is titled “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.”

He says he doesn’t mean his new book as “some saccharine whitewash of American history.” But he’s seen too many students drawn to Zinn because the standard textbooks are visionless and tedious. “Just as nature abhors a vacuum,” Mr. McClay says, “so a culture will find some kind of grand narrative of itself to feed upon, even a poisonous one.”

A lousy story is better than no story at all: “We historians have for years been supplying an account of the American past that is so unedifying and lacking in larger perspective that Zinn’s sweeping melodrama looks good by comparison. Zinn’s success is indicative of our failure. We have to do better.”

 … in the new book he observes that it’s “hard to read about” early-19th-century America “without thinking of the series of events culminating in the coming of the Civil War as if they were predictable stages in a preordained outcome. Like the audience for a Greek tragedy, we come to this great American drama already knowing the general plot,” and susceptible to the illusion that it was written in advance. He urges readers to resist “that habit of mind” and remember that people at the time had no foresight to match our hindsight.

What gets him most riled up is what he sees as an abdication. “When you teach an introductory course in American history,” he says, “you really have a responsibility . . . to reflect in some way the national story, in a way that is conducive to the development of the outlook and skills of a citizen—of an engaged, patriotic, serious citizen.” Most professional historians don’t “take that mandate very seriously at all,” and instead provide “a basically negative understanding of American history.”

He says proudly that they reciprocate his aversion. When he meets colleagues at conventions and tells them the name of his book, “they just kind of look at me and say, ‘Oh my God, what have you been smoking?’ . . . When I say it has the word ‘Great,’ in ‘the Great American Story,’ then they’re even more dubious.”

Mr. McClay’s objective in “Land of Hope” is to help readers develop a sense of perspective and “a mastery of the detail” of American history. The Zinn approach allows them to be lazy: “Why learn what the Wilmot Proviso was, or what exactly went into the Compromise of 1850, when you could just say we had this original sin of slavery?”

By contrast, “Land of Hope” delves into the complexity of the Founders’ debates over slavery. Many expected it would eventually end on its own, or believed the alternative to accepting it—abandoning the union—was worse. Some were conflicted. The book describes George Mason as “a slaveholder but also a Christian who labeled the trade an ‘infernal traffic,’ ” and adds: “Mason feared the corrupting spread of slavery through the nation, which would bring the ‘judgement of Heaven’ down severely upon any country in which bondage was widespread and blandly accepted.” The Founders had to weigh what was possible, not just what was ideal—and Mr. McClay thinks it’s unfair to denounce them for failing to meet today’s standards.

Similarly, he says that when he talks about the wise and loving letters between John and Abigail Adams, “students will say, ‘Yeah, but you know, women couldn’t own property and couldn’t vote.’ ” True enough, but Mr. McClay responds with a challenge: “Well, compared to what? Were things better for women in sub-Saharan Africa? Were they better in France? And generally they can’t answer the question. What they do is they measure the country’s history against an abstract standard of perfection, against which it’s always going to fall short.”

Mr. McClay decries the impulse to “condescend toward history”—and tear down monuments or withdraw honors from historical figures who offend today’s sensibilities. He says he isn’t trying to “reduce everything to context,” only to acknowledge that leaders from Thomas Jefferson to Martin Luther King were complicated, and that their flaws are “no reason to rob them” of recognition for the “truly heroic things that they accomplished.”

Take Woodrow Wilson, recently the subject of controversy at Princeton University, where he was president from 1902-10. Critics want to remove his name from the School of Public and International Affairs because of his bad record on race. Mr. McClay isn’t a fan of President Wilson’s diplomatic efforts and criticizes his suppression of dissent during World War I. But when the U.S. entered that war, Mr. McClay says, “it was a moment for all hands on deck, and Wilson proved to be an excellent wartime leader.” The professor praises the 28th president as “acutely attuned . . . to the maintenance of public morale.”

Ideological bias in history textbooks is bad enough when the events occurred a century or more ago. “Especially once you get past, say, 1960 or 1964,” Mr. McClay says, “it just gets awful.” When examining the recent past, “it’s very, very, very hard to have any kind of perspective, other than whatever your own partisan persuasion is.”

He adds that some recent history books are “somewhat disfigured” by the way in which the understanding of recent history is “projected back on to the past.”

 … Mr. McClay is even harsher on history textbooks: “They’re completely unreadable because they’re assembled by committee, by graduate students who write little bits and pieces of them. I’m not convinced that most of the textbooks that have the names of very eminent historians on the cover were actually read by them, let alone written by them.”

There are also the committees that approve them—state and local school boards, which answer to a variety of “stakeholders.” Members of every racial, cultural and religious group want a say in how they and events important to them are described. Mr. McClay opted to dispense with that process, and “Land of Hope” is being published by a conservative house, Encounter Books. He probably won’t sell many copies to public schools, but he hopes there are enough private and religious and charter schools, not to mention home-schoolers, that it will find a market.

… Unlike many modern textbooks, “Land of Hope” has no sidebars or charts; a few maps and portraits provide the only distractions from the text. Mr. McClay writes with a literary quality, as when he likens Lincoln to Moses, “cruelly denied entry into the promised land of a restored Union, denied the satisfaction of seeing that new birth of freedom he had labored so long to achieve.”

 … In the classroom, he endeavors to cultivate a longer view. When he explains the Constitution, he reminds students—or lets them know for the first time—that “conflict is part of the human condition and can never be eliminated. Neither can the desire for power and the tendency to abuse it.”

 … When he taught at Tulane in the late 1980s and early ’90s, he recalls, “almost every applicant for graduate study wanted to work on the civil-rights movement—even though we didn’t have a single person on the faculty at that time who was an expert on the subject.” It’s easy to see the attraction, but he worries about the expectation that history will “provide an agenda for a moral crusade.”

“Very few moments of conflict have the moral clarity of that particular historical moment,” Mr. McClay cautions, “and we fall into error when we try to repeat it again and again.” Instead, he encourages students to appreciate the nobility all around them. “Gosh,” he says, “as Americans, you are part of what is arguably the most exciting enterprise in human history.”

On the Seth Leibsohn show:

The great Wilfred McClay on the beauty of American History and his new book, "Land of Hope" with me today, audio here:https://t.co/Bful5IYuHG

— Seth Leibsohn (@SethLeibsohn) May 18, 2019

In the world of Zinn, things never evolve, economies don't recover, victims never overcome adversity, and white men are always to blame

Because [A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present] is the only book on American history that many students will read, Howard Zinn has become one of the most dangerous men in America

writes Bettina Esser;

the book's overarching thesis could best be summarized in this way: "America is not a republic but an empire controlled by white men, but only certain white men, and its heroes are anti-establishment protestors and those in the trenches of class warfare."

This book is a bestseller [only] because it is required reading in most colleges and an increasing number of high schools. … In the world of Zinn, things never evolve, economies don't recover, victims never overcome adversity, and white men are always to blame. Once a person is labeled as "evil," there is no personal redemption. "Robber barons" are not recognized for their own personal achievements or the risks and losses they endured, but only for their manipulation of people and money. In Zinn's economic view, where everybody is out for the most he can get, there is no room for voluntarism, charity, or philanthropy.

…In the world of Zinn, these were the only things that Columbus, Jackson, or Roosevelt ever did, and no other actions in their lives could compensate for their sins. In his chronology, the reader goes from one unpleasant climactic event to the next, and nothing good happens in the interim.

1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT—Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

Over the past few months, the New York Times has opined three times on historical questions, both ancient and recent.

How valid, how pretty (sic), have the results been?

First, the 1619 Project, which is designed to call America's entire history a scam, for which Americans deserve to be shamed and punished. (I forgot where I read it, but this is hardly unrelated to the fact it appears that the Democrats' 2020 candidates want less to govern Americans than to punish Americans.) Update: thanks for the Instapundit link, Glenn…

(The present post is mainly about the 1619 take, and la pièce de résistance is a remarkable document by the left-leaning National Geographic's attempt to share in and to contribute to the leftist message — below, in the third part of this post. After a presentation of the Times's, i.e., the leftists', twisted view of history (part 1 of this post) and a discussion thereof (part 2) — not least Europe's contribution to the demonization of the United States (for almost two centuries, if not more!) — the final, 3rd, part, will feature an in-depth examination of a fully left-leaning article that actually manages to utterly debunk the leftists' (and the Europeans') entire (self-serving) premise.)

“1619,” our new podcast from the #1619Project, explores how the legacy of slavery still shapes America today. Listen here: https://t.co/s4YTu7haeT

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 27, 2019

Second, America's paper of record described the "narrative" within the "arch of history" of communist China's founder as a rise from poverty to (apparently well-deserved) fame and glory. Mao Zedong "began as an obscure peasant", the Times wrote (quoting its own 1976 obituary), and he "died one of history's greatest revolutionary figures."  (By the way: don't forget that Trump ‘May Be Responsible for Many More Millions of Deaths’ than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao — hardly an implausible conclusion to make, when you reflect upon the fact that the NYT' headline for a 1953 Kremlin obituary was: Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State.)

So, China's revolutionary, who went out of his way to murder 45 million people, deserves nothing but praise and hagiography. While America's revolutionaries must be condemned irrevocably for having slaves (as was part of daily life at the time, indeed had been so the world over up until their era, when Founding Fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson went out of their way to begin the abolition thereof) — slaves who, by all accounts, were treated in a relatively humane fashion. (By the way, does the average American — does the average foreigner (!) — know that African-Americans in North America lived about twice as long as their fellow slaves in South America, as well as far longer than in Africa… itself? Probably not. That would make the demonization of the United States — along with what is alleged to be white privilege — much harder to accomplish…)

Here’s the graf with the quote pic.twitter.com/SDQGwsnEqF

— Anders Hagstrom (@Hagstrom_Anders) September 9, 2019

Third, on the 18th anniversary of 9/11, the "newspaper of record" sent out a commemorative tweet ignoring the Islamist terrorists ("airplanes took aim" — compare with guns kill people and must be banned; an irreverent Iowahawk adds, "And 18 years later, we still somehow allow airplanes to be legal. Let that sink in"), managing to downplay the number of the victims (is 2977 closer to "more than 2000" or simply to nearly 3,000?).

The Times also referred to their cold-blooded murders as simple deaths; not to mention they made the chief part of the story the fact that "families will gather at Ground Zero" and that "there will be an outpouring of grief." (On June 6, do we put the main focus on the young American, British, and Canadian soldiers storming ashore in Normandy in 1944 or on the (relatively banal) "annual ritual[s] of mourning" by their families in subsequent years and decades where "once more", common civilians remember their loved ones?)

Likewise, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in October 2019, the Washington Post referred to the ISIS terrorist-in-chief (at least temporarily) as an austere religious scholar while Bloomberg News tried to outdo the Democracy Dies in Darkness newspaper with a fawning headline hailing an up-from-the-bootstraps story. [Update: In December 2019, The Times labels American embassy-storming militants in Baghdad as mourners. "Keep rooting for our enemies", comments Glen Reynolds, "and people might start calling you enemies of the people, guys."]

As an aside, may it be pointed out that the New York Times approach to 9/11 sounds remarkably like that of their fellow leftist, Ilhan Omar, when she describes the crimes of the Islamists as "some people did something," all the while going ballistic at the alleged sins of Americans.

Granted, Omar managed to backtrack somewhat subsequently, saying on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that

9/11 was an attack on all Americans. It was an attack on all of us, and I certainly could not understand the weight of the pain that the families of the victims of 9/11 must feel.

But the Minnesota representative immediately hedges this with a "But": she tempers this with what she finds objectionable — truly shocking — which is that

It’s important for us to make sure that we are not forgetting the aftermath of 9/11, [when] many Americans found themselves now having their civil rights stripped from them, and so what I was speaking to was that as a Muslim, not only was I suffering as an American who was attacked on that day, but the next day I woke up as my fellow Americans were now treating me as suspect.

First of all, when people bring up the suffering and the hundreds of post-9/11 anti-Muslim crimes, they refrain from explaining that many, if not most, of these "hate crimes" are little else than such things as anonymous phone calls with insults.

Forgive me if I am so callous not to get extremely upset about this type of "crime" and would prefer suffering such types of crimes by far, 1,000 times over, to getting blown to smithereens by aircraft used as missiles and having skyscrapers collapse on my head. Or, as a French father wrote four years after 130 people were killed by Islamists in the 2015 attacks in Paris, "They killed my daughter at Le Bataclan, and their women dare to pout about not being allowed to wear a veil!"

Having said that, there is simply no truth to any part of Ilhan Omar's statement: in the aftermath of 9/11, everybody lost civil rights (just look at airport security). Indeed, Americans, whatever their race, creed, or religion, lost civil rights precisely because America was, and is, doing its utmost to show impartiality to the Muslim American community, by targeting everyone as potential suspects…
(End of the brief Omar aside…)

Trump is flooding the zone in Baghdad with firepower while progressives all but pray for more dead diplomats and service members a la Benghazi.

Hell of a way for Resistance Media and its sycophants to end 2019. https://t.co/hV1fJ3YivD

— Bryan Dean Wright (@BryanDeanWright) January 1, 2020

[Update: Likewise, when Qasem Soleimani was taken out two to three months later (on January 3, 2020), A.J. Caschetta wrote that

The terror general’s postmortem fan club members are all denizens of the Left — media figures, celebrities, politicians, and academics.

 … exaggerations of Soleimani’s greatness and the depth of his intellect are common. Time magazine compared him to Cardinal Richelieu and Machiavelli. Prompted by Fareed Zakaria’s claim that Soleimani was “regarded in Iran as a completely heroic figure, personally very brave,” Anderson Cooper compared him to Charles de Gaulle. Rosanna Arquette compared Trump to Hitler for killing the great Soleimani. … The Hollywood script of Trump as bumbling reactionary is more honed among the professoriate, but the elements are the same. It follows well-established patterns developed during the Reagan and both Bush presidencies. No surprise, then, that both Iraq and Iran experts agree that Iran’s leaders are wilier than Trump.]

Such journalistic (sic) perspectives as we have seen in the above three examples have lead Greg Price to observe that:

I would genuinely like to ask the editors of the New York Times if they regret the outcome of the Cold War

Whatever the case: According to leftists, Americans are sinners and need to be shamed, with every molehill made into a mountain. By contrast, America's adversaries, from Mao's communists to Bin Laden's Islamists, are heroic or at least blameless and need to be excused, with every mountain made into a molehill.

To conclude: don't you recognize the NYT's approach to history, whether it's by mainstream media types or simple left-leaning citizens, as well as to current events? Previous generations called it "BLAME AMERICA FIRST!"

(Even as a teenager, I protested: "Why 'first'? There is no 'first'!" It should be called "Blame America alone"!  And so t'is.)

The message to America and to Americans is:

You have nothing to be proud of.

Indeed, the only thing you ought to feel is shame!

Shame!

SHAME!

From Mike Gonzalez in the Federalist:

the series is but yet another attempt to make Americans [and foreigners alike (!)] question [the] country’s very core

Adds Lyman Stone:

the 1619 Project … isn’t mostly about helping Americans understand the role played by plantation agriculture in American history. It’s mostly about convincing Americans [and foreigners alike (!)] that “America” and “slavery” are essentially synonyms.

It’s mostly about trying to tell readers they should feel sort of, kind of, at least a little bit bad about being American, because, didn’t you hear? As several articles say explicitly, America, in its basic DNA, is not a liberal democracy, constitutional republic, or federation. It’s a slave society.

Nothing is more repellent than the next generation of American (as well as foreign, chiefly European) schoolchildren and college students believing that the country lacks “a history to be proud of”, that America is uniquely, demonically evil,  and even that America invented slavery. (As Glenn Reynolds puts it, tongue in cheek, It’s almost as if our education system is in the hands of our nation’s enemies.)

Over at RealClearInvestigations, John Murawski chimes in:

 … the spread of ethnic studies from college campuses to K-12 education is raising alarm among those who find the field one-sided, ideological and frightening. They note, for example, that college students generally take such courses voluntarily, whereas as high-schoolers and middle-schoolers may not have a choice.

"It comes dangerously close to turning American exceptionalism on its head: Yes, we're exceptional – exceptionally evil,” said Will Swaim, president of the California Policy Center, a free market think tank. "It is remindful of re-education camps in Vietnam or China. It is indoctrination rather than education.”

Update: (A surprised) Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project
 
Instapundit's Sarah Hoyt raises her voice:

Sure, there was slavery in America in the seventeenth century.  Bad news guys. There was slavery everywhere in the seventeenth century, pretty much.

 … Within [the Declaration of Independence], these words — these revolutionary, crazy words — contained the seeds of real justice, contained the fall of slavery, contained… we don’t know yet, but contained the possibility of a future we can build, a future that’s more equitable than all the past.

 … The left wants to revile and destroy our founding fathers in order to make themselves appear revolutionary and new, and innovative.

 … Yes, the founders were men who lived and died in a world full of slavery. But what they built had within it the end of slavery. All kinds of slavery.  It was a mental revolution. The kind that can’t be reset.

Over at the Cat Rotator's Quarterly, TXRed puts things in perspective;

That the Spanish and Prortugese had already been bringing African slaves over, and that almost every other people on the American continents practiced slavery, and that the rest of the planet practiced slavery, doesn’t seem to matter. That slavery is still practiced today, in part because some religious texts positively command it, doesn’t matter to those who are concerned with chattel slavery of Africans as practiced in the British colonies.

Yes, slavery has been around as long as humans have been around in sufficient numbers to get into disputes. And it continues, either openly as slavery, or as debt-peonage, or concubinage, or debt-slavery, or “life servants,” or “gift servants.” Only Europeans tried to end the practice, because they believed that all men were created equal, and that enslaving people was no longer a right and moral practice. But that doesn’t count, or so the New York Times and other sources suggest.

Me being me, I have to wave my penalty flag. First off, slavery is not unique to the Americas, Europeans, or Africans. Everyone enslaved everyone else, ever since waaaay back when.
Africans enslaved other Africans, and sold them to everyone else. Until almost 1800, it was native Africans who controlled the sale of slaves to Europeans in west Africa. …

The Mongols, and later Tatars captured millions of Europeans and sold them into slavery over the course of time from around 1000 until the 1700s. The last slave raids against England and Iceland were in the late 1600s! Part of the job of the Royal Navy was to keep Barbary Pirates from landing and kidnapping English men and women to sell in North Africa. … Indian groups owned slaves just like Euro-Americans did.

… Having practiced chattel slavery makes the US neither unique nor especially evil. It means we were like other humans since the eighth day of creation. 

Over at Minding the Campus, Peter Wood points out that the 1619 Project comes in the wake of

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ anti-white screed Between the World and Me (2015) … now the second most-assigned book in the country in college summer reading programs. Coates treats slavery as an institution that was never truly abolished. It continues as the pervasive racism of American society.

 … The Times launched its 1619 Project on August 18 to a great deal of fanfare. 1619 is the year that the first black African slaves landed at Jamestown. It is a noteworthy date, but not quite what the beginning of slavery in the New World or in what would become the United States. The Spanish [and the Portuguese — see below] had brought African slaves long before. And we have at least one account by an early Spanish soldier, Cabeza de Vaca, who was captured and enslaved by Native Americans in the South in the 1520s. Slavery was an indigenous American institution long before Europeans got here.

Be that as it may, the Times wants to re-imagine the European version of America as founded on slavery and stained in every possible way by the continuing effects of slavery. This is a political project more than a historical one. Its unacknowledged goal is to taint all opposition to progressive political goals as rooted in the perpetuation of oppression, and perhaps to delegitimize America itself.

 … But the 1619 Project also reduces the lives of African Americans to perpetual victimhood, and it ignores the glorious ideal of freedom in American history. It reverses the traditional conception of America as an exceptional land of liberty to conceive of it as an exceptional land of slavery and oppression.

 … The 1619 Project creates a new kind of Black Legend, which casts America as uniquely, demonically evil.

The Times is calculating that Americans are already primed to believe this new Black Legend. They have been softened up by the pseudo-history of Howard Zinn, whose elaborately distorted vision in A People’s History of the United States has been swallowed whole by millions. (A nod of appreciation is due to Mary Grabar whose new book Debunking Howard Zinn is a long-overdue corrective to the Marxist storyteller.) Others are hoping the 1619 Project will flatten what is left of resistance to anti-American mythmaking in K-12 and college history courses. The new Black Legend is already comfortably ensconced in many of our high schools and colleges. The first book college students read very likely treats it as fact.

 … The campaign to delegitimize America, to recast it as a uniquely evil force for slavery and oppression, has triumphed in a myriad of classrooms in American [and European] higher education.

 … The college administrators … deans, provosts, and presidents … are already true believers in The 1619 Project … The institutional stamp of higher education tells incoming college students throughout the country: We believe in the Black Legend of American villainy. And you should too. After all, the editors at The New York Times who commissioned The 1619 Project learned their defamatory history in college.

Do not think that Europe's role in this is secondary or passive. Au contraire:  Europe's influence in these teachings is paramount and must not be minimized.

From the Europeans' school benches in the 19th century to the establishment in the United States of the Frankfurt School — certainly the European élites' most successful gambit has been to take over at least parts of American education over the course of the 20th century — with the more or less willing aid of the Democrat Party.

I am the son of diplomats who, every three years, would be posted in the embassy of a different national capital — among the places I lived in through my childhood were Denmark, the United States, France, and Belgium:
In Scandinavia I learned about slavery in America along with the treatment of the Indians.

In France I learned about slavery in America along with the treatment of the Indians.

In Belgium I learned about slavery in America along with the treatment of the Indians.

In Scandinavia we did not learn much about the Sámi people — a people, and a word, even most Scandinavians would barely recognize (they are better known as Lapps or Laplanders, but with no Swedish blood-letting attached to their names, only romantic folklore).

In France we did not learn much about Napoleon's conquest of Haiti and the horrors perpetrated on the blacks of that island, along with the reenslavement (!) of the former slaves liberated during the French Revolution.

In Belgium we did not learn much about the kingdom's Congo — where, 20 to 40 years after Appomattox, indeed all the way into the early 20th century, blacks were not only the equivalents of slaves, but the terror and brutality meted upon them dwarfed any punishment seen on a Southern plantation, the most terrifying being the most horrific instances of maiming (having hands and/or feet chopped off) if they did not meet their masters' expectations.

Nor, needless to say, does any American schoolchild learn much, if anything, about the Sami, Haiti, or King Leopold's Congo Free State.

When King Leopold's Ghost (A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa) was translated into French and Dutch, writes Adam Hochschild,

The Belgian prime minister clearly wanted the row to end. "The colonial past is completely past," he told the [Guardian]. "There is really no strong emotional link any more. . . . It's history."

That's it. The only country where the "past" — if and when leaning towards the negative — is never "completely past" is the United States. The only sins, real or alleged, that there is a strong emotional link to is America's.

As Walt Whitman wrote in the midst of civil war, around 1863 or 1864,

The Democratic Republic has paid her to-day the terrible and resplendent compliment of the united wish of all the nations of the world that her Union should be broken, her future cut off, and that she should be compell’d to descend to the level of kingdoms and empires ordinarily great! There is certainly not one government in Europe but is now watching the war in this country, with the ardent prayer that the united States may be effectually split, crippled, and dismember’d by it. There is not one but would help toward that dismemberment, if it dared. I say such is the ardent wish to-day of England and of France, as governments, and of all the nations of Europe, as governments. I think indeed it is to-day the real, heart-felt wish of all the nations of the world …

 … We need this hot lesson of general hatred, and henceforth must never forget it. Never again will we trust the moral sense nor abstract friendliness of a single government of the world.

The reason is very simple: the hatred for America started in the 1780s, when George Washington, instead of executing the Hessian prisoners, instead of keeping the mercenaries imprisoned, or instead of simply sending them home, offered them to remain in the United States and become citizens, even giving them, as far as I remember, free land.

Coupled with comparatively minute amounts of taxes, this led to two fears in Europe's more or less oppressive kingdoms. First, that their countries would become deserted, as whole strata of their populations started emigrating to the land of the free and the brave (for instance, one tenth of the Danish people, one fourth of the Swedish, and one third of the Norwegian); and, two, that their populations would not emigrate (and who could tell which scenario was worse?!) but might start demanding the same rights and freedoms, not to mention the same comparatively low taxes, in their homelands as in America. 

In that perspective, it is no coincidence that it was after the revolutions of 1848, that the European élites eventually started treating their populations better and invented the public school, while passing the message, overtly or covertly, and foremost to their nations' respective children, that those Yankees were hypocrites, racists, violent, and without an iota of compassion within them.

The people, convinced that they (and that their élites) are compassionate, tolerant, and overflowing with wisdom, take these (self-serving) notions to heart and have been doing so for more than a century.

(Similarly, the whole purpose of the social studies systems that grew in Europe throughout the 19th century seems to be to prove that the average person cannot be trusted and therefore that popular government does not work.)

As mentioned earlier, among the most disastrous events of the past 100 years is the Frankfurt School's success in importing European myths to America's schools.

Listen to Mike Gonzalez in the Federalist again:

Edmund Burke wrote in 1790, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” and [Howard] Zinn, [Herbert] Marcuse, [Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bryan Stevenson,] and the writers of the “1619 Project” understood that the obverse is also true: You make children believe their nation has been hideous from the start, and you have the makings of a peaceful revolution.

No wonder that, as Jamie Kirchik put it, Barack Obama

entered the White House with a deep conviction that many of the world’s problems were chiefly the consequence of American hubris [which the apologizer-in-chief with the brilliant forward-looking policy of smart diplomacy basically referred to as] disastrous acts of American imperialist aggression

As the Stéphane blog puts it,

we can turn the subject in all directions, in the final analysis, the only problem in the world turns out to be the United States. … In short, nothing is ever right. On the one hand Americans are scolded for acting the part of the world's policeman, on the other, for not acting with the responsibility and the diligence of the world's policeman.

Let Pascal Bruckner have the final word: as it turns out,

there exists in Europe a group of shallow critics [echoed by their American counterparts, better known as leftists and as Democrats] for whom the worst crime by a tyrant like Milosevic [or Saddam, Ho, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Santa Anna, George III] … can never match the fundamental crime of America's intrinsic sin: the very fact of its existence. (Il existe en Europe un groupe de critiques primaires, pour qui le pire crime d’un tyran comme Milosevic … ne pourra jamais égaler le crime fondamental de l’Amérique — le simple fait d’exister.)

In a sense, it is less an anti-American position per se than a position against independence and self-rule (which the Americans have tried to be champions of for the past two and a half centuries).

Related: 1619: Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

And what all of the above does is bring us to is this post's pièce de résistance. It so happens that the National Geographic got the NYT's message, as its History offspring sets out to join in the demonization of Americans, the nation's birth (its birth defect), and America's very existence.

Like the Journolist — or, more recently, like the Bidens' shady dealings in Ukraine for which all the media outlets hastened to use the exact same dismissive adjective ("inaccurate") to describe a story they had had no more than a few days to investigate — it seems that a number of MSM reporters, editors, and publications have all agreed more or less in secret to set out a broadside of the same, or of a similar, message at the same time.

Over the decades, once-neutral periodicals like the National Geographic, and once-conservative periodicals like the Reader's Digest, have been taken over by leftists and become left-leaning publications. 

Lyman Stone, Peter Wood, and TXRed are among those who have written lengthy articles whose factual details entirely undercut and debunk the 1619 project. (As it turns out, The United States Was a Footnote in Slavery’s History.)

But most of those writers are conservative. What is remarkable about the National Geographic article by "a historian of the African diaspora" is that it is introduced by an opening paragraph presuming America's guilt. Likewise, Dr. Kelley Fanto Deetz's piece ends with finger-wagging about the depth of American guilt. However, if you read the article, "400 years ago, enslaved Africans first arrived in Virginia", the National Geographic's quarterly offshoot is entirely open about the mutiple-nation, multiple-continent, existence of slavery, hiding nothing and in fact giving far more details than our conservative friends do.

What is fascinating about leftists' written history is how they try to get all, or most, details correct, but in the end, they still manage to pull off the "Blame America First Alone" editorializing.

The article starts familiarly enough — with castigation of the United States (or of the future United States):

In late August 1619, “20 and odd” captive Africans first touched the soil at Point Comfort (now Fort Monroe National Monument), part of England’s new colony in Virginia. These men and women had been stolen from their homes in Africa, forced to board a ship, and sailed for months into the unknown. The first Africans in an English colony, their arrival is considered by many historians to be the beginning of a 400-year story filled with tragedy, endurance, survival, and a legacy of resilience, inequality, and oppression.

But what follows, especially the first half of the article, is surprisingly neutral and objective — again, that is, until the conclusion.

Here, the Congolese are not the victims as in the late 19th and early 20th century, they are central in the group of oppressors.

Prepare to be surprised as we take the National Geographic's "400 years ago, enslaved Africans first arrived in Virginia" from the following subhead:

Slavery in Africa

On the west coast of central Africa in the 1600s, the Portuguese were in the midst of a war with Ndongo, a powerful west African kingdom located between the Lukala and Kwanza rivers, in present-day Angola. The people of Ndongo lived in developed cities and towns surrounding their capital city, Kabasa. The capital was where royalty lived, along with approximately 50,000 citizens. In 1618, Portuguese forces aligned with Ndongo’s adversaries, neighboring Imbangala mercenaries, to invade the kingdom. They captured thousands of prisoners to sell into slavery.

These political relationships were spawned 135 years earlier. In 1483, the Portuguese first forged a relationship with the Kingdom of Kongo. Portuguese explorers aimed to spread Catholicism in Africa, colonize both people and land, and grow rich. Upon developing a trade deal with the Portuguese, the Kongo King Nkuwu converted to Catholicism. After his death, his son and heir, King Nzinga Mbemba, took the name King Afonso I and declared the kingdom a Catholic state, firmly bonding the two nations.

In 1512, Afonso I negotiated an agreement with the Portuguese giving them rights to land and direct access to Kongo’s prisoners of war, who would be sold into the transatlantic slave trade. This arrangement provided a model that other European nations and western and central African kingdoms would follow for centuries afterward. (See also: Tracing slaves to their African homelands.)

The first people sold were mostly prisoners of war. African kingdoms were often in conflict, at times absorbing smaller nations or kinship groups into themselves. The vast ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity in these kingdoms allowed for easily identifiable differences among groups, making it easier for kingdoms to sell their enemies in exchange for weapons and goods to expand and protect their territories. Grand empires, such as the Kongo, Dahomey, Yoruba, Benin, and Asante, were vying for wealth and power in their regions, and Europeans were in need of laborers to build their colonies. It was the ideal circumstance to bring about the largest forced migration in human history.

In just two years, 1618 and 1619, the Portuguese-Imbangala alliance resulted in the capture and enslavement of thousands of Ndongo people, filling at least 36 ships with human cargo. These captives would be sent to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Central and South America to work as laborers. It was through this arrangement that slavery would spread to British North America in 1619, when chaos intervened and the destiny of those “20 and odd” Africans was redirected to a place called the Colony of Virginia on the Atlantic coast.

To repeat: In just two years, the Portuguese-Imbangala alliance results in the capture and enslavement of so many Africans that the 1000s upon 1000s of prisoners will fill no less than 36 ships with human cargo. In the second of those two years, a single ship bearing still more African slaves to Iberian America is "accidentally" captured by pirates and sent instead to an English colony, resulting in the unpremeditated landing in Virginia of some 20 Africans. 

But: neither the Portuguese nor the Spanish nor the English need to be unduly censured for this; neither do the Imbangala nor does any part of Africa. 

No, the only country that deserves castigation is the one that won't be founded for another 150 to 160 years!

They entered the Middle Passage, a phrase used to describe both the trip itself and the shipping of people from the coasts of Africa to the European colonies in the Americas. Conditions aboard the ships were dreadful; a lack of food and water, physical abuse, and severe overcrowding led to the death of approximately 30 percent of the captives on any given ship.

 … It was because of [the] complex political climate that the Africans aboard the San Juan Bautista found themselves in an unexpected turn of events. In late July or early August 1619, just weeks before the Ndongo captives would have been sold through the port of Veracruz, the ship was attacked by pirates searching for Spanish gold.

 … The English colonies were expanding and the captives supplied them with an instant and distinguishable work force. The Spanish and Portuguese capture and enslavement of Africans as laborers in the Atlantic world was common practice by the time Jamestown was established, and the British followed suit. By the end of the 17th century, the colonies’ reliance on indentured servants had shifted toward that of enslaved African people.

Got that? Barely mentioned so far have been the United States — for obvious reasons — as well as their direct colonial forebears (ibid), and neither have their cousins, the colonists' countrymen in Britain (re–ibid). And yet, notice that, as we approach the conclusion of the article, Dr. Kelley Fanto Deetz ("a historian of the African diaspora") loses all interest in, say, the thousands of Ndongo slaves who filled at least 36 ships with human cargo, as she focuses only on the US of A.

By all means, the 20-odd slaves arriving in Virginia by a fluke are not uninteresting, far from it, nor is the fate of the thousands of slaves that would follow them over the next two centuries inside what would exclusively become the territory of the USA, but we know where we are headed as the historian of the African diaspora starts to editorialize by echoing Barack Obama's speech that racism is "part of our [i.e., of Americans'] DNA." This is not anything I have a problem with, offhand, but why does racism never seem to be part of the DNA of, say, Portugal, Spain, France, or Belgium? Or part of the DNA of, say, the Kongo, Benin, Asante, or Imbangala nations?

As an Economist article on slavery in South America's largest country (Brazil) signals, sporting a chart from the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, the 400,000 slaves brought to mainland North America are a minute part of three and a half centuries of transatlantic slave trade from Africa (only the — tiny — archipelago of the Danish West Indies imported fewer slaves) — thus proving that, in fact, The United States Was a Footnote in Slavery’s History. 

And yet, the National Geographic article will basically apply the final subhead, "Dark Legacy," to the United States alone.

National Geographic History:

 … Early Virginia census records [mark] the beginnings of a racial caste, formalized into Virginia law by the early 1650s, the enslaved status of African women was written into Virginia law as their children automatically inherited their status and were enslaved at birth, regardless of the father’s identity. This set up slavery as a permanent, hereditary condition. A series of laws, called slave codes, followed, each one cementing racism firmly in the DNA of the United States. 

 … The first Africans in Virginia were followed by more than 400,000 people captured and brought directly from West and central African to the North American slave ports, from New England to New Orleans.

Dark legacy

  … most African Americans can only trace their ancestors back to the late 19th century, following emancipation, when African Americans were free to record their own full legal names. Scientific advances in genetics have also given people new tools to find their ancestors via DNA, but creating a full family tree remains unlikely. Few family histories will ever be complete, yet another legacy of the inhumane treatment of enslaved Africans and their descendants. 

Looking back to 1619, one realizes it is time to recognize how racist ideology fed the colonization of the Americas and the systematic enslavement and oppression of both Native Americans and captive Africans. Looking forward, one must also see how necessary it is for humanity to try to tell the full story of the millions of Africans who were stolen away.

Dr. Kelley Fanto Deetz ends on what is seemingly a general note on the Americas, but by this point, the latter half of the article — most of which I have not quoted as you can read it at the link — has only, or mainly, focused on the colonies that would become U.S. states, and it is as clear that the average reader will focus on the U.S. as it is that the "historian of the African diaspora" fully embraces the New York Times's 1619 Project.


Again: The obvious question is if the United States is to be castigated for these sins, why on Earth is it the only, or the main, nation to be so described (and demonized)?  How about the Spanish, Portuguese, and British kingdoms?  How about the Kongo, Dahomey, Yoruba, Benin, and Asante empires?  How about the Arabs? And the Muslims? The Arabs and the Muslims? How do they fit in?

Ask George Avery, who goes even further outside the box:

Relatively speaking, the United States was a minor player in the African Slave Trade — only about 5% of the Africans imported to the New World came to the United States. Of the 10.7 million Africans who survived the ocean voyage, a mere 388,000 were shipped directly to North America. The largest recipients of imported African slaves were Brazil, Cuba. Jamaica, and the other Caribbean colonies. The lifespan of those brought into what is now the United States vastly exceeded those of the other 95%, and the United States was the only purchaser of African slaves where the population grew naturally in slavery – the death rate among the rest was higher than the birth rate. …

The World Slave Trade

The Trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean African slave trade, which began by Arabs as early as the 8th Century AD, dwarfed the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and continued up to the 20th Century. Between the start of the Atlantic Slave Trade and 1900, it is estimated that the eastern-bound Arab slave traders sold over 17 million Africans into slavery in the Middle East and India, compared to about 12 million to the new world – and the Eastern-bound slave trade had been ongoing for at least 600 years at the START of that period.

In any case, this is how the leftist journalist and/or historian operates: he or she camouflages his writing as straightforward facts-only-ma'am reporting, after a quick sting at the beginning, and then brings editorializing in, more or less subversively, at the end.

Leave it to the wide(r)-angle lens of someone like The Federalist's Lyman Stone to point out the true story of slavery in the United States is America's Story Is of Increased Refusal to Tolerate Slavery.

 … in 1775, there was no free soil anywhere in the Western hemisphere. Slavery was a universal law. While I cannot say for certain, it is possible there was no free soil in the entire world—that is, no society that categorically forbade all slavery. … In other words, Americans were early adopters of abolition.

More than that, adds Kevin Gutzman in Reclaiming 1619:

Virtually as soon as independence came, the abolition of slavery began.

 

The Workshops Of Identity

There is a new blog in town (in the tinsel town of Hollywood, that is)… And in a recent Big Hollywood post, Bill Whittle had the following to say:

Militarily, the United States is not only unmatched on the world stage, but its relative strength is unmatched in history. And without question, this juggernaut is the most benign dominant military force the world has ever seen – and by a very large margin.

Consider modern history, which many consider the time since the end of World War II. At the end of 1945, the only military force of any real substance remaining in the world was that of the Soviet Union, and while they had large numbers of troops and tanks, they had no navy and no strategic air force to speak of. The United States possessed, intact, the most awe-inspiring, battle-hardened navy the world had ever seen. It possessed sky-darkening clouds of B-29 strategic bombers. And it possessed, alone, the atomic bomb and the will to use it.

The United States of America could have planted its flag anywhere it wanted and no one would have been able to do a thing about it.

And what did we do with this arsenal? We scrapped the ships, drove steel bars through the wings of the priceless bombers, and began the largest de-militarization in the history of the world.

And in all of the years since then, despite what Michael Moore may want you to believe from the comfort of his editing room, the United States has deployed in response to aggression – not to cause it. Berlin, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland – all of it Soviet — that is to say Communist – Leftist – aggression. Ask a 17 year old indoctrinated with Hollywood’s portrayal of America as a world-striding bully who started the War in Korea, or Vietnam, or Nicaragua or any of these places, and I will bet you a Xbox 360 Elite that they will not reply that it was in fact worldwide socialism, but rather America. Tell them that communists started Korea and Vietnam and pretty much everything else and they will likely ask “what is a communist?” Actually, come to think of it, they probably do not even care enough to ask.

And for those who feel that such a once-noble America is dead and gone, let’s talk about the last time we heard about “Imperialism” and “a war for oil.” In 1991, after destroying the army that Saddam Hussein sent into Kuwait to steal, rape and murder, the United States sat alone and unchallenged on top of the richest oil field on the planet. What did it do? It put out the fires and went home.

Unlike today’s screenwriters who credit themselves as intellectual and creative giants, some of us remain humble enough to not only read history, but to actually understand it on some fundamental level. And those of us who actually know people in the military, who research weapons and tactics, supply and strategy, can tell you that a war for oil consists of placing an armored cordon around the remote oil fields, providing overwhelming air cover for armed convoys direct to port facilities, and then shipment via US tankers escorted by naval assets until out of the region.

None of this is happening, of course. What has happened is that we have spent 4000 and more lives building schools and hospitals and protecting a people against fellow Muslims who show day in and day out that they will kill as many children as they need to in order to terrorize their own people into submission.

That story, apparently, holds no interest for today’s Hollywood. …

The American university system is the envy of the world. Nowhere is there better science being done, and no where is there anything like the numbers of people receiving advanced scientific and engineering degrees.

But that is not all they are receiving. They are also receiving lethal doses of anti-Americanism and anti-Capitalism, main-lined directly and administered by morally blind charlatans like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky – men who repeatedly acknowledge the “relativity of truth” and who distort and select facts so frequently and shamelessly that I will paraphrase Mark Twain by saying that the omission of the works of Chomsky and Zinn would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.

And … Culturally it is America that the world watches, that the world listens to, that the world emulates and copies to the degree that suicide bombers wear Lakers t-shirts and the most virulent anti-American Euro kids look and dress and act and talk like kids from Compton or Detroit.

There was a time when America broadcast its virtues to the world. Films like It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, even Star Wars and Spider-man, were films about common, decent people – Americans, obviously, for we all know that even Luke Skywalker was an Iowa farm boy – who find themselves in dangerous and evil places and whose fundamental decency corrected this wrong in the world and restored a sense of hope and optimism, a sense that we are masters of our own destiny. It is an idea so powerful that even French intellectuals, who seemed then and seem today to be incapable of a single positive or upbeat thought, could watch in wonder and contempt as legions of their countrymen flocked to see them.

Those days have gone. No longer does Hollywood broadcast America’s mythic virtues to the world. No, the flow is reversed now. Now the great creative driving force of Hollywood is to present to America the anti-American hatred of the intellectuals watching in impotent fury out in the rest of the world.

Of the six or seven war movies made during the last few years, all – save one – were spectacular failures. Many were the reasons given for this, but perhaps, someday, while sitting in a hammock in the Cayman Islands, even a studio executive might be just intellectually aware enough to catch a flash of what is obvious to a pharmacist in Des Moines: that maybe, just perhaps, these films failed not because of war weariness or denial or rank stupidity on the part of the American people, but rather – are you sitting down? – that most of the country, unlike Hollywood, has sons and daughters and fathers and brothers in the military and know for first-hand fact that they are not rapists or murderers, hicks, dullards, losers, or broken and victimized children but rather the bravest, the most capable, the most decent and honorable and just plain competent people we have.

And perhaps, just perhaps, it might enter that navel-gazing, self-centered, dim little brain to reflect that the one war movie that did out-of-the-park business was the one that showed the Marines as the good guys, winning on the battlefield, defending their people and their culture against long odds and full of the heroism and sacrifice that used to be so commonplace in this city… even if the Marines in question wore loincloths and funny helmets and advanced with spears and round shields.

…Civilizations rise and fall. Barbarism is eternal. If you think the threat is not an existential one you have some reading to catch up on.

How long will the next darkness last? A few centuries? All of the readily available tools to build a new civilization – the ores, the coal and oil – all these are gone. Monks in stone cloisters cannot build photovoltaic cells. If this civilization falls, as have all others – from a lack of belief in itself – then civilization and medicine and science may very well never return.

Those are the stakes.

And how – pardon the profanity – how ironic is it that those libertines, those most determined to be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, and at no cost to themselves… how ironic, how pathetic, how tragic, how infuriating and indeed, how insane is it that they – they alone – now control the mythology and the message of the workshop of our identity?

Colleges' Basic History Courses: America's Decisions Are Invariably Evil and Gratuitous and Every Adversary Is An Entirely Innocent One

This is the man most colleges entrust the general history of the United States — and, indirectly, the history of the rest of the world — to.



With the help of Mike Konopacki, Howard Zinn is now about to embark on a project to teach kids about "A People's History of American Empire" in comic book/graphic novel form…

Update: Nina May mentions a film Zinn would not know of (and would not be interested in were Emancipation Revelation Revolution to come to his attention)…

The Era of Hope'n'Change has been one prolonged act of suicide

Am I the only one who remembers 2008, when we were promised that the election of a Democrat named Barack Obama, aka an apologizer-in-chief with the brilliant forward-looking policy of smart diplomacy, would bring back respect both for the United States and for (whoever was/is) the occupant of the White House?

Thank God the answer is no, and they include Richard Fernandez and Max Boot, along with Instapundit's Stephen Green.

Max Boot, first:

The White House is sensitive to charges that the president is conducting an “apology tour” of the world. And it’s true that on Tuesday the president didn’t actually apologize in Laos for American actions in the 1960s, but he danced right up to the line.

 … Everything Obama said was factual, and there is nothing wrong with his desire to aid Laos—the U.S. needs as many friends on China’s borders as it can find. But his rhetoric was nevertheless one-sided and disappointing.

What was lacking, above all, was any context. Someone who listened to Obama’s speech and knew nothing of Laos’s history would have been left mystified about why the U.S. dropped bombs “like rain” on that country.

 … It is certainly possible to question the utility and even the morality of U.S. bombing in Laos—but it is highly misleading for any analyst, much less the president of the United States, to criticize the U.S. in a vacuum without noting the actions of the North Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao who killed countless numbers of Laotian civilians, violated Laotian sovereignty, and ultimately overthrew the internationally recognized government of Laos in order to impose a Communist dictatorship. That dictatorship continues to rule to this day, by the way. It has made some economic reforms primarily to encourage tourism, but it remains a dictatorship that is rated “not free” by Freedom House.

To his credit, Obama did speak out about human rights during his trip although in a particularly mealy-mouthed way. He never directly criticized Laos’s human-rights record, which is poor. He never highlighted the plight of dissidents or called for democracy. Instead he spoke in oblique terms about the importance of human rights while making clear that they are not very crucial in the U.S.-Laos relationship … In other words, while saying he would speak out on behalf of human rights, Obama did not really do that.

I get what Obama is up to here. He thinks the U.S. can exercise more influence today by acknowledging past “misconduct” without directly criticizing the behavior of countries it deals with. The problem is that, in practice, this amounts to kow-towing to dictators from Cuba to Iran and buying into their fiction that the U.S. is guilty of conduct just as bad, if not worse, than what they have done. That simply isn’t true, and by shading the truth the president is failing to speak on behalf of the principles upon which the United States was founded–and which have long been our most powerful tool and selling point in international affairs.

He is also inadvertently buttressing the dictatorships he is dealing with; now they can turn to their people and say in essence, “Our problems are America’s fault–the president of the United States even said so.” What we have seen during the two terms of the Obama presidency is that by failing to speak out more robustly on behalf of freedom, the president is not winning any friends; he is simply convincing the world’s dictators that he is a patsy who can be pushed around with impunity.

As Stephen Green notes wryly,

I’m not so sure it’s inadvertent; President Pen & Phone isn’t isn’t a huge fan of representative democracy. And as Glenn [Reynolds] noted earlier, Obama “never much liked the country he was elected to run.”

In any case, for an example of a world leader considering Obama a patsy, or at least someone hardly worth of a huge amount of respect, we turn to Commentary Magazine.

If you listen to Rodrigo Duterte's now infamous rant against president Obama (start at minute 6)

writes Richard Fernandez (gracias por Glenn Reynolds),

you might be forgiven for thinking it was Howard Zinn or Bill Ayers speaking, allowing for the accent. He spoke of the "lapdogs of America" who forget that "America has one too many [offenses] to answer for". He argued that the Philippines "inherited the [Muslim] problem from the United States" and since "everyone has a terrible record of extrajudicial killing ... why make an issue of it."  He describes the massacre of the Indians, the oppression of migrants etc. as reasons for ordering the deaths of thousands proving, if there was any remaining doubt, that he learned the lesson of moral equivalence well.

From this, Duterte concluded that he wouldn't listen to lectures from the SOB leader of such a country. It's almost as if he's been listening to Obama and Obama was hoist on his own petard. The Western left has the habit of preaching from a moral height while simultaneously describing its history as one unending crime. You've heard the teaching moments. "I live in a house built by slaves." "You didn't build that!" This whole country is stolen!

Say it often enough and someone will believe you. Somebody did. The trouble is you can't rise from the toilet to suddenly preach from a great moral height. It's possible to do one but not both simultaneously. Of course the liberal left can context shift and switch between sackcloth and ashes and the throne of moral superiority with the alacrity of Dr. Who. But Durterte isn't that nimble.

The clash between the two is tragi-comedy. … Duterte intuits that Obama is someone to despise and so despises him, because he neither respects nor fears the man from Chicago. Rodrigo Duterte would never call Xi a S.O.B. because he wouldn't dare. The world, as Winston Churchill knew, has people who are either at your throat or at your feet -- and that probably includes most leaders in the Third World.

 … Obama's framing of Duterte's drug war as a human rights problem, which it doubtless is, missed a key dimension. The drug war is the symptom of a national security problem: the narco invasion of the Philippines. The killings are a result and not the cause in themselves of the problem. And now that the diplomatic breach has opened the door to Chinese subversion on an unprecedented scale with incalculable consequences to regional security, it is likely to get worse.

The Era of Hope and Change has been one prolonged act of suicide. If anyone had said that Obama would manage to alienate Israel and the Philippines, lose Turkey, pay Iran a hundred billion dollars, preside over the loss of a won war in Afghanistan, lose billions of dollars in military equipment to ISIS, watch a consulate burn, restart the Cold War with Russia, cause Japan to re-arm and go the knife's edge with China, would you have believed it? If someone had told you in 2008 millions of refugees would be heading for Europe and that the UK would leave the EU after Obama went there to campaign for them to remain, would you not have laughed?

He promised "smart diplomacy" and the restoration of American prestige in the world. How did it come to this?

Glenn Reynolds has the beginning of an answer to this one:

Well, for starters, he was an unqualified community organizer who never much liked the country he was elected to run.

On the Left and Religion

I find a disturbing similarity in the outlook of the political and institutional “lights” of our age, and a memorandum on how religion should be maligned written by Gorky to Stalin.

We need to know the "fathers of the church," the apologists of Christianity, especially indispensable to the study of the history of Catholicism, the most powerful and intellectual church organization whose political significance is quite clear. We need to know the history of church schisms, heresies, the Inquisition, the "religious" wars, etc. Every quotation by a believer is easily countered with dozens of theological quotations which contradict it.

We cannot do without an edition of the "Bible" with critical commentaries from the Tubingen school and books on criticism of biblical texts, which could bring a very useful "confusion into the minds" of believers.

It also brings to mind Howard Zinn’s efforts to rewrite history and work it into the curriculum of the American public school systems.

For this reason, there should be courses set up at the Communist Academy which would not only treat the history of religion, and mainly the history of the Christian church, i.e., the study of church history as politics.

Even the willfully constructed ‘soft touch’ when it comes to managing the news and the minds of youth:

By strongly emphasizing facts of a negative nature, we open ourselves up to our enemies, providing them an enormous amount of material, which they in turn very aptly use against us, compromising our party and our leadership in the eyes of Europe's proletariat, compromising the very principle of the dictatorship of the working class, because the proletariat of Europe and America feeds on the bourgeois newspapers for the most part—and for this reason it cannot grasp our country's cultural-
revolutionary progress, our successes and achievements in industrialization, the enthusiasm of our working masses, and of their influence on the impoverished peasantry.

The imperative to destroy faith by those who want control over a people is clear:

Our youth is very poorly informed on questions of this nature. The "tendency" toward a religious disposition is very noticeable--a natural result of developing individualism. At this time, as always, the young are in a hurry to find "the definitive answer."

Which is why those who like the idea of controlling a society feel such a strong need to manipulate education and the spinning of news. They know that a society left to make its’ own choices simply wouldn’t guarantee them the power over others that they seek.