Browsing "Historical Amnesia/Cleansing"

Saving “Uncle George” MacDonald

Saving “Uncle George” MacDonald

“The Osceola (Missouri) Democrat raised money to send “Uncle” George McDonald of St. Clair County, a colored Confederate veteran, to the Confederate Reunion at Columbia last month. In 1861 “Uncle” George went off with the men of St. Clair County and fought in several engagements.

At Wilson’s Creek a Minie ball plowed through his hip and buckshot struck him in the face. George lay groaning upon the ground when he was found by Owen Snuffer, a lieutenant of his company. Snuffer stooped down, examined the black man’s wounds and stanched the flow blood from them. “For God’s sake,” cried the suffering negro, “give me a drink of water.”

Snuffer’s canteen was empty but midway between the firing lines was a well. To reach it the lieutenant was to become the target of sharpshooters, and it meant almost certain death. But with bullets falling all around him like hailstones he pushed forward until the well was reached. And then he discovered that the bucket had been taken away and the windlass removed. The water was far down and the depth unknown.

The well was old-fashioned – stone-walled. Owen pulled off his long cavalry boots and taking one in his teeth he let himself down slowly, hand over hand until the water was reached and the boot filled. He then climbed up, straddling the well and clutching with hands and feet the rocky walls. Reaching the surface again he picked up the other boot and safely made his way back to his lines and brought water to “Uncle George.”

Returning from the war, “Uncle George” settled near Monegaw Springs and has reared an intelligent, honest and industrious family. One of his children educated himself, graduated the Smith University in Sedalia, and is now the pastor of a church in Kansas. Another child is a waiter at the Commercial Hotel in Osceola, an establishment known for high integrity.”

(Confederate Veteran, Volume XI, November 1903, pg. 494)

Access Denied to Those Seeking Historical Truth

Access Denied to Those Seeking Historical Truth

“Undoubtedly the main reason for confusion about some of the incidents of the War Between the States – such as the assault on July 3rd at Gettysburg – was the arbitrary manner in which the Northern war department denied Southern writers access to the official documents – even those of their own preparation which were stolen or captured.

This blackout continued for thirteen years after the end of hostilities, a period during which most of the abiding impressions about the war were being formed. It is an amazing fact that when General Robert E. Lee endeavored to inspect his own reports of battles and his own field returns, he was denied that right. He never did have the opportunity to make use of them. Other Southern officers and writers were rebuffed in their efforts to examine papers which they desired to see solely for historical purposes. Officialdom is usually more illiberal than the people it represents.

Never was there a more obvious effort to channel the course of history – to make certain that history was written from only one side – than of the arbitrary Northern war department officials in the late 1860s and the 1870s.

When Governor Zebulon Vance of North Carolina sought to review his own letter books, which had been seized, in order that he might refute accusation made against him that had been based on garbled use of these same letters, the privilege was denied.

It should be recalled that after the war the South was virtually destitute of papers and reports bearing on the conflict. All documents either had been destroyed or seized by the invading armies, bundled and sent to Washington. There many of them remain.

The Rev. J. William Jones, long the secretary of the Southern Historical Society engaged in a spirited campaign with the North’s war department to gain for Southern writers the privilege of reading the reports of Southern generals that were freely available to northern writers. The standard reply was that Congress would have to authorize the printing of any war archives.

Jones charged that the records had been “for years closely guarded to all save a favored few,” and added: “Indeed, the outrage of keeping those documents locked up to Southerners, and open to every writer on the other side who might desire to defame our leaders or falsify our history, has become so patent to all right-thinking people that there have been denials that access has been denied to any seeker of historical truth.”

(Some Aspects of North Carolina’s Participation in the Gettysburg Campaign. Glenn Tucker. NC Historical Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, April 1958, pp. 191-193)

 

Deconstructing Historical Memory

Like the Russian Bolsheviks before them, the African National Congress regime in New South Africa renamed established cities and roadways for heroes of its communist revolution. In post-revolution Russia, the Society of Marxist Historians “demanded a review of all existing historical literature,” with students at the Institute of Red Professors formed into brigades preparing assessments of large portions of existing literature for publication in the press. The same process of assessment moves forward in New South Africa, as it does in the United States.

Deconstructing Historical Memory

“It may be a trifling issue to deracinated sophisticates, but landmarks in the country’s founding history are slowly being erased, as demonstrated by the ANC’s decision to give an African name to Potchefstroom, a town founded in 1838 by the Vortrekkers.  Pretoria is now called Tshwane.  Nelspruit, founded by the Nel family (they were not Xhosa), and once the seat of the South African Republic’s government during the first Boer War, has been renamed Mbombela. Polokwane was formerly Pietersburg.  Durban’s Moore Road (after Sir John Moore, the hero of the Battle of Corunna, fought in 1808 during the Napoleonic Wars) is Che Guevarra Road; Kensington Drive, [now] Fidel Castro Drive.

Perhaps the ultimate in tastelessly hip nomenclature is Yasser Arafat Highway, down which the motorist can careen on the way to the Durban airport.

The Afrikaans tongue, in particular, has come under the ANC’s attack, as the government attempts to compel Afrikaans schools to adopt English. Afrikaans-speaking universities have been labeled as “racist” in the New South Africa, and have been forced to merge with “third-rate black institutions so that campuses may be swamped by blacks demanding instruction in English.”

On the supplanting of the Afrikaans language, Dan Roodt relates: “Not so long ago, and Indian employee at my local branch of the Absa Bank demanded to know if I was a legal resident in South Africa upon hearing me speak a foreign language, Afrikaans.”

The ANC’s attempt to tame and claim South African history mimics the effort by American elites to deconstruct American history and memory, documented by Samuel Huntington in “Who Are We?”  Wishing to purge America of her “sinful European inheritance,” bureaucrats, mediacrats, educrats, assorted policy wonks and intellectuals trashed the concept of America as melting pot.

In its place, they insisted on ensconcing multiculturalism, inherent in which is a denunciation of America’s Western foundation and a glorification of non-Western cultures.  This mindset does not permit pedagogues to reject faux Afrocentric faux history outright.  They dare not – not if the goal of education is to be achieved, and that goal is an increase in self-esteem among young Africans, in particular.

Other self-styled victim groups, notably natives and women, have had their suppurating historical wounds similarly tended with curricular concessions. Thus, of the 670 stories and articles in “twenty-two readers for grades three and six published in the 1970s and early 1980s . . . none had anything to do with American history since 1780.” The trend, documented by Huntington, accelerated well into the year 2000, when Congress, alarmed by the nation’s historical Alzheimer’s, made an anemic effort to correct decades of deconstruction. It allocated more funds to the Department of Education, which is a lot like letting the proverbial fox guard the historical henhouse.”

(Into the Cannibal’s Pot, Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, Ilana Mercer, Stairway Press, 2011, pp. 80-81)

Nov 27, 2021 - Education, Historical Accuracy, Historical Amnesia/Cleansing, Lincoln's Revolutionary Legacy, Newspapers    Comments Off on The Myth of Social Science

The Myth of Social Science

The study of history since the 1960s is replete with programs of “social science,” a term referring to areas of social and human interactions. This is where the fixation on race, gender and culture originates, and the Marxist reduction of all history to class and socio-economic warfare.

Most history of the past 60 years relies less on facts and then-contemporary writings, and more on modern social science theories and class distinctions. Newspapers have been the worst offenders and regularly publish hearsay, inaccurate accounts of history which do more to increase class warfare than to educate its readers.

The Myth of Social Science

Sociology and the related fields of study are not sciences. They are pseudo-sciences. They lack the essential ingredient of science, which is the desire for verifiable truth.

There have been a few times when these fields approached being scientific, but these have been far and few between. For the most part, they have been so swamped by the emotional tides of the times and by the personalities of the scientists involved they have made negligible progress. Is this because scientific progress in sociology is difficult and facts are so few? Partially, but it is more due to the difficulty of thinking rationally in these emotion-laden areas.

To investigate an area when the results may offend one’s contemporaries, or even oneself, requires a rare type of man. The tragedy is that these fields of study attract the man who is least capable of this type of thinking. A man imbued with the ideals of his time, desiring to do good, desiring social approval, is the last man for the job. These men try to benefit society in accordance with their humanistic beliefs, but they do not seek the truth.

The present state of sociology derives directly from this mixing of science and humanism. A man cannot be a humanist while he is a scientist. This is not to say that he cannot be both a humanist and a scientist. But to be a humanist while a scientist is to carry morality and ethics into an area where they have no relevance. The result is a pseudo-science because, in such a mixture, the ethical and moral considerations far outweigh the scientific.

It would be better to abandon the pretense that a combination of science and humanism is anything but a means of advancing humanism.

Is this conflict inevitable? Yes, so long as humanism takes its present form. Humanism as a philosophy is not dynamic today. It is frozen into certainty. Only the implementation of the philosophy is still a dynamic process. To humanism, as to religion, science is a potential danger. Science means change and change is a threat to any established system, particularly one that seeks to fix man’s relationship to both physical and spiritual worlds.

Today humanism and religion tolerate the physical sciences but neither is comfortable with any real investigation into the nature of man. The existence of any science is an admission that all is not known. The existence of a true social science would be an admission that there are things about man which are not known or understood – which both today’s religion and humanism deny.

Some will object that scientists seek the truth and that truth and morality are synonymous. Others will say that the truth will make us free. But this truth is not the scientist’s truth. The scientist seeks facts which can be verified by experiment. These facts may be useful, useless, or even harmful. Such facts, like science, are amoral. They exist, they have no moral significance.

One, it is true, might assess the effect of science on society as being both good and evil if one had standards by which to judge. But who shall be the judge and what will be the criteria?

(The New Fanatics, William A. Massey, National Putnam Letters Committee, 1964, pp 26-27)

Un-Christian Hell-Hounds in Georgia

The path of Sherman’s army across Georgia was strewn with “outrages and barbarities of the most repulsive nature” wrote Southern newspapers, with the Macon Telegraph claiming that “Southern women had been overpowered by the “lustful appetites of the hell-hounds.” The “cesspools of Northern infamy and corruption” had been dredged, it said, “in order to collect the infamous spawn of perdition sent out to despoil our country.” Sherman, by the acts of hiss men, had earned “the fame of the ravisher, the incendiary and the thief.” His men did not draw a color line as black “comfort women” followed his army.

Un-Christian Hell-Hounds in Georgia

“[Sherman’s] army continued to support its burden of Negro followers . . . despite Sherman’s admonitions. Altogether, about twenty-five thousand – four Negroes for every ten soldiers – tagged along, but about three fourths of them became disillusioned by their new “freedom” and, after a few days of starting out, began the weary trek back to their home places. When Sherman and his men came within sight of the coast, the horde had dwindled to sixty-eight hundred.

[They] were fascinated by the guns and volunteered to “tote” them for the men. In camp they looked after the pots and pans and helped out with the cooking. At night they entertained their “liberators” with their plaintive plantation melodies. And the good-looking women peddled sex.

Sherman naturally was reluctant to take on these added appetites to be satisfied. And he had a strong personal dislike for colored people. (Damn the n****r! he once exploded.)

A large number of Negroes lost their lives in a few minutes of horror and hysteria at Ebeneezer Creek. Upon approaching the creek, General Jeff Davis of the XIV Corps . . . ordered the [bridge] pontoons taken up, leaving the Negroes on the west bank. In desperation, the Negroes attempted a mass crossing. Even the few who could swim had great trouble making it . . . many were drowned.

[When] the Christian Commission asked Sherman to allow its agents – distributing literature and conducting religious services – to carry on their work among the troops, he shot back, “Certainly not . . . Crackers and oats are more necessary for the army than any moral and religious agency, and every regiment has its chaplain.”

(Those 163 Days: A Southern Account of Sherman’s March from Atlanta to Raleigh, John M. Gibson, Bramhall House, 1961, excerpts pp. 73-75)

 

History versus Social Studies

Richard M. Weaver wrote: “Where education is under the control of collectivist fanatics, not only is the individual’s loyalty to truth despised, but the objective findings of science may be thus perverted to serve the ends of a political ideology.” And, he adds: “There are those in America today who apparently get academic freedom mixed up with students’ rights in general” – “and it goes without saying that academic freedom is not a tool for the “democratizing” of universities by turning them over to students.”

History versus Social Studies

“History has always been a sobering discipline because it presents the story not only of man’s achievements but also of his failures. History contains many vivid lessons of what can happen to man if he lets go his grip upon reality and becomes self-indulgent; it is a record of the race, which can be laid aside alongside the dreams of visionaries, with many profitable lessons.

Yet the modern tendency is to drop the old-fashioned history course and to substitute something called “social science” or “social studies,” which one student has aptly dubbed “social stew.” What this often turns out to be is a large amount of speculation based on a small amount of history, and the speculation is more or less subtly slanted to show that we should move in the direction of socialism or some other collectivism.

Often this kind of study is frivolous; the student is invited to give his thought to the “dating patterns” of teenagers instead of to those facts which explain the rise and fall of nations. There is more to be learned about the nature of man as an individual and as a member of society from a firm grounding in ancient and modern history than from all the “social studies” ever put together by dreamy “progressive” educators.”

(In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1963, Ted J. Smith, III, editor, Liberty Fund 2000, excerpt pp. 191; 201-202)

Feb 26, 2021 - Historians on History, Historical Amnesia/Cleansing, Memorials to the Past, Propaganda, Southern Educators    Comments Off on The Study and Appreciation of Lost Causes

The Study and Appreciation of Lost Causes

Many lost causes of history are worthy of study to reveal what may have been omitted by court historians of the time or later, or somehow missed relegation to the Memory Hole. Author Richard Weaver cites Schopenhauer’s statement that “no one can be a philosopher who is not capable of looking upon the world as if it were a pageant” as having made a strong impression on him. His view was that this type of detachment, produced by suppressing the instinct to be arbitrary, “seems to me a requirement for understanding the human condition.”

The Study and Appreciation of Lost Causes

“I am now further convinced that there is something to be said in general for studying the history of a lost cause. Perhaps our education would be more humane in result if everyone were required to gain an intimate acquaintance with some coherent ideal that failed in the effort to maintain itself.

It needs not be a cause which was settled by war; there are causes in the social, political and ecclesiastical worlds which would serve very well.  But it is good for everyone to ally himself at one time with the defeated and to look at the “progress” of history through the eyes of those who were left behind.

I cannot think of a better way to counteract the stultifying “Whig” theory of history, with its bland assumption that every cause which has won has deserved to win, a kind of pragmatic debasement of the older providential theory.

The study and appreciation of a lost cause have some effect of turning history into philosophy. In sufficient number of cases to make us humble, we discover good points in the cause which time has erased, just as one often learns more from the slain hero of a tragedy than from some brassy Fortinbras who comes in at the end to announce the victory and proclaim the future disposition of affairs.

It would be perverse to say this is so about every historical defeat, but there is enough analogy to make it a sober consideration. Not only Oxford, therefore, but every university ought to be to some extent “the home of lost causes and impossible loyalties.” It ought to preserve the memory of these with a certain discriminating measure of honor, trying to keep alive what was good in them and opposing the pragmatic verdict of the world.”

(In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1963, Ted J. Smith, III, editor, Liberty Fund 2000, excerpt pp. 38-40)

 

Two Views of Freedom

The following excerpt is from Senator Hubert Humphrey’s account of his interview with Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev in 1959. Though claiming to be staunchly anti-communist, Humphrey in 1944 endorsed and promoted the fusion of the Farmer-Labor party with Democrats, as well accepting the support of “Stalinists and other assorted radicals who dominated the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] in Minneapolis at this time.” Humphrey was also admired by Roosevelt’s pro-Soviet vice president, Henry Wallace.

Two Views of Freedom

“I told [Krushchev] that a lot of young and vigorous Democrats . . . were coming up and that things would be very different after the 1960 elections. “Mr. Premier,” I said, “you and your system have been living on borrowed time. You have just had it easy with the Republicans. Just wait until the Democrats come in. You want economic competition? We’ll run you right out of Gorki Park.”

[Then] Krushchev made the most interesting statement of the whole interview. “They are old-fashioned, they are reactionary,” he said of the communes. “We tried that right after the revolution. It just doesn’t work. That system is not nearly so good as the state farms and the collective farms. You know Senator, what those communes are based on? They are based on that principle, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” You know that won’t work. You can’t get production without incentive.”

[We] got into a debate about over the nature of capitalism and “socialism” (meaning Soviet Communism). I told him that he was sadly misinformed about as to how American capitalism really works and he told me Americans “just plain don’t understand us.” His remarks included a remarkable statement of the Communist idea of freedom:

“In the USSR there is freedom.” Krushchev said, “In the capitalist world there is freedom of enterprise, freedom just to take care of yourself. In the USSR freedom means every member taking care of all the others. The citizen of the USSR regards the country’s welfare as his own welfare.  This needs to be understood. As a religious man believes in God, so does a citizen of a socialist country depend on the welfare of the country as a whole. You believe in God and you believe that your welfare is in the hands of God. We believe the individual’s welfare is the welfare of the state and is in the hands of the state.”

(My Marathon Talk with Russia’s Boss, Hubert Humphrey, LIFE, January 12, 1959, pg. 86)

Social Democrats and Revolution

In 1883 Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, son of a prosperous country gentleman, founded the first Russian Marxist movement and dominated it for over twenty years.  Coming from the country where many revolutionary leaders originated rather than cities, he was turned to radical politics as a student. He formed a “Liberation of Labor” group whose principal object was to systematically apply Marxism to the Russian scene.  

Plekhanov believed that Russia would have to become industrialized in order to produce a proletariat, a working class, before Czarism could be overthrown. Only the workers could produce a revolution. The Narodniks had a different view, opposed the capitalistic and industrial path of eventual revolution, holding that “serfdom to socialism” was more direct.

Karl Marx was a contributor to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune before the war, promoted Lincoln’s cause in Europe and penned supportive letters to both Lincoln and his successor, Andrew Johnson. Marx saw the industrialized North as fertile ground for a socialist proletariat, and black people as workers to be organized against capitalism.

Social Democrats and Revolution

“One starts to see here the beginnings of a future rivalry; the Marxists with their emphasis on the industrial worker and the Narodniks with their emphasis on the peasants. It was Plekhanov, presiding over his revolutionary court in Geneva, who most rapidly began to gain ground.  In his writings he urged that terrorism was a secondary weapon; the main object was to set up a socialist organization among the working class in Russia, to train agitators, to stimulate strikes and demonstrations, and to spread Marxist ideas through the illegal printing press.

Soon small groups of his followers began to form in the principal cities in Russia. They called themselves Social Democrats.

Neither Marx nor Engels, moreover, had thought very highly of the Russians. Marx was particularly trenchant about them. “I do not trust any Russian,” he once wrote Engels. Russia, in any case, Marx thought, still had a long way to go before it achieved socialism; he had much better hopes of the United States where “the masses are quicker.”

(The Russian Revolution, Alan Morehead, Bantam Books, 1959, excerpts pp. 35-36)

Unleashing Uncontrollable Power

The Marquis of Wellesley is reported to have said that the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo was unfortunate for England; having put down a power she might have controlled, she raised up a power that she would be unable to control.

Unleashing Uncontrollable Power

 “I firmly believe that if the coming vote in Congress on the repeal of the Neutrality Act carries, it will be our last chance to vote on the question of keeping out of war and that our representative form of government will be doomed. It will probably require another revolution to reestablish it . . .

Now we are linked to the bear than walks like a man; a ruthless, murderous Stalin than can send his best friend before a firing squad with utter complacency. So that’s our ally.

Do you think you want to team up with that kind of monster? Do you want your country to spend its substance in a fight to make the world safe for communism? That’s what we would be doing by coming to the aid of Russia . . .”

Rep. Anton Johnson (R. Illinois). From radio address, inserted in Congressional Record, Oct. 15, 1941, p. a4937.

(The Illustrious Dunderheads, Rex Stout, editor, Alfred A. Knopf, 1942)