That Silly Putty Called History

When General Eisenhower was shown the concentration camps just liberated by American soldiers he ordered camera crews to document it all. .

Actual Tough Guy

Eisenhower wanted the movies made by his men to provide evidence of what actually happened, "In order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'"

Local Good Ol' Boys and One Hero

Military people know better than most how history gets handed down. They know history is one long argument. They know history is malleable, but they also know that some facts are stubborn, that some things, like a dead body, cannot be denied. 

So, Mr. Trump tells us Ukraine started the war with Russia.

Kent State

Hitler asserted the Poles attacked Germany to start WWII. Also, he said, the Czechs  oppressed German speaking people in Czechoslovakia, and so he had no choice but to rescue them by marching into the Sudetenland. 

Southern Hospitality

And now, most Americans can barely recall who fought who in World War II. The soldiers who actually fought it are mostly dead now. There are more years between Pearl Harbor and today (84 years) than there were between Custer's Last Stand and the bombing of Hiroshima (69 years.)

Lunch Counter Reception

The most cringe worthy part of every Jimmy Kimmel Show is his man on the street interviews, where he asks random United States citizens questions like who the United States fought during the Civil War, or who was the first President of the United States.

Keeping Them In Their Place

Statues to Confederate heroes of the Civil War are saluted as being homage to "Southern heritage," rather than statues to traitors who fought to keep chattel slavery in place.

To control the present, you must first control the past. Or, as George Orwell more elegantly phrased it, "Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future."

Golden Childhood

For Trumplings, there was once a golden past, when white men controlled their wives, their communities, earned a good wage at the factory down the road, where they went off with lunch pails full, and came home at night to a home they ruled and had enough money for vacation homes, automobiles and times were good. 

Elon Musk's Efficiency Plan

Of course, there may have been times when some of that was true, but those were also times when women were not allowed to have credit cards or bank accounts, unless their husbands cosigned for them. And there were daily lynching in the Confederate states, where a black teenager whistling at a white woman was strung up a the nearest tree, where bathrooms, motels, restaurants, swimming pools were labeled "White only," or "colored." When nobody admitted to having sex outside of marriage, and when women were not supposed to really enjoy or seek out sex, which was for procreation. "Those were the days," Archie Bunker sung, when men were men and women were property, and the dark races knew their place.

Pretty Much Says It All

Those were the days when Senator Joseph McCarthy said he had a list of Communists in the American State Department and the Army and he would get around to naming names, and he said Hollywood was under the control of Jews and Communists and fellow travelers and careers were ruined simply by placing a name on a list. Those were the days when neighborhoods were "red lined" so no people of color, no Jews, and even sometimes, no Catholics need apply. 

Fighting Communism

And then came the sixties and the government of Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson lied on and on, insisting the war in Vietnam would be won quickly and, for the Americans, painlessly, all the while knowing the war was unwinnable in the short term and unpalatable and unsupportable in the long term. Those were the years when American boys from suburbia and from inner city America got dropped off in the rice paddies, armed with automatic rifles and they mowed down villagers, whose only offense was wanting to harvest rice and to be left alone. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d8FTPv955I

And now we learn from Mr. Trump,  America has been raped and plundered by the rest of the world. And as we all now know, while Mr. Trump may be willing to live with rape, he is very offended by plunder.

Now that's a wrong, written in history, which has to be rectified.

Postcard from a Lynching