Roundup: Talking About History
This is where we excerpt articles about history that appear in the media. Among the subjects included on this page are: anniversaries of historical events, legacies of presidents, cutting-edge research, and historical disputes.
SOURCE: WSJ (12-22-06)
Until yesterday Christmas shoppers at Target department stores could purchase a 24-CD carrying case decorated with the image of Che Guevara. When I heard about it, I wondered why the retailer would want to promote the memory of a mass murderer. What's next, I asked, when I spoke with a representative of the company on Wednesday, Pol Pot pajamas?
Late Wednesday evening Target sent me this statement: "It is never our intent to offend any of our guests through the merchandise we carry. We have made the decision to remove this item from our shelves and we sincerely apologize for any discomfort this situation may have caused our guests."
The fact that it took only a day for Target to make that admirable decision suggests that at least someone at the company knows who Guevara was and what Cuba is today thanks in part to him. The misstep, though, probably occurred because others at the company allowed Target to become a target itself of the Che myth.
...
Late Wednesday evening Target sent me this statement: "It is never our intent to offend any of our guests through the merchandise we carry. We have made the decision to remove this item from our shelves and we sincerely apologize for any discomfort this situation may have caused our guests."
The fact that it took only a day for Target to make that admirable decision suggests that at least someone at the company knows who Guevara was and what Cuba is today thanks in part to him. The misstep, though, probably occurred because others at the company allowed Target to become a target itself of the Che myth.
...
Friday, December 22, 2006 - 18:02
Comments
SOURCE: FrontpageMag.com & RealPolitics.com (12-22-06)
[Roger Kimball is co-Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books.]
It's no secret that American universities, while trumpeting "diversity," are among the least diverse places in the Western world. When it comes to the sort of diversity that matters at educational institutions--intellectual diversity--they are more like one one-party states, bastions of what the literary critic Frederick Crews called "Left Eclecticism." At many institutions, you'll find 57 varieties of Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, deconstructionist, new-historicist animus, united by reader-proof prose and a thoroughgoing hostility to traditional American values. But you have to look long and hard to find more than token representation of conservative ideas.
The imbalance is so great that at some institutions, dissident--i.e., conservative--faculty members have created centers where students and faculty can encounter...
It's no secret that American universities, while trumpeting "diversity," are among the least diverse places in the Western world. When it comes to the sort of diversity that matters at educational institutions--intellectual diversity--they are more like one one-party states, bastions of what the literary critic Frederick Crews called "Left Eclecticism." At many institutions, you'll find 57 varieties of Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, deconstructionist, new-historicist animus, united by reader-proof prose and a thoroughgoing hostility to traditional American values. But you have to look long and hard to find more than token representation of conservative ideas.
The imbalance is so great that at some institutions, dissident--i.e., conservative--faculty members have created centers where students and faculty can encounter...
Friday, December 22, 2006 - 16:50
SOURCE: Slate (12-19-06)
In 1983, as the residents of Calcata, a small town 30 miles north of Rome, prepared for their annual procession honoring a holy relic, a shocking announcement from the parish priest put a damper on festivities. "This year, the holy relic will not be exposed to the devotion of the faithful. It has vanished. Sacrilegious thieves have taken it from my home." Not since the Middle Ages, when lopped-off body parts of divine do-gooders were bought, sold, and traded, has relic theft been big news. But the mysterious disappearance of Calcata's beloved curio is different.
This wasn't just the residuum of any holy human—nor was it just any body part. It was the foreskin of Jesus Christ, the snipped-off tip of the savior's penis, the only piece of his body he supposedly left on earth.
Just what the holy foreskin was doing in the priest's house—in a shoebox at the back of his wardrobe, no less—and why and how it disappeared has been debated ever since the relic...
This wasn't just the residuum of any holy human—nor was it just any body part. It was the foreskin of Jesus Christ, the snipped-off tip of the savior's penis, the only piece of his body he supposedly left on earth.
Just what the holy foreskin was doing in the priest's house—in a shoebox at the back of his wardrobe, no less—and why and how it disappeared has been debated ever since the relic...
Thursday, December 21, 2006 - 23:03
SOURCE: FrontpageMag.com (12-21-06)
[Humberto Fontova is the author of Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant, a Conservative Book Club "Main Selection."]
Two former Latin American heads of state have been much in the news lately – one because he passed away and the other because his death seems imminent. The terms "human rights abuses," along with "murders and tortures," appear consistently in the articles on one while being almost completely absent from the ones on the other, where the terms "gains in health-care and literacy" predominate.
Fidel Castro jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Hilter and Stalin – and for three times as long. Modern history's longest-suffering political prisoners languished in the prisons and forced-labor camps established by his regime. According to the Harvard-published Black Book of Communism, he executed 14,000 subjects by firing squad. These ranged in age from 16 to 68 and included several women, at...
Two former Latin American heads of state have been much in the news lately – one because he passed away and the other because his death seems imminent. The terms "human rights abuses," along with "murders and tortures," appear consistently in the articles on one while being almost completely absent from the ones on the other, where the terms "gains in health-care and literacy" predominate.
Fidel Castro jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Hilter and Stalin – and for three times as long. Modern history's longest-suffering political prisoners languished in the prisons and forced-labor camps established by his regime. According to the Harvard-published Black Book of Communism, he executed 14,000 subjects by firing squad. These ranged in age from 16 to 68 and included several women, at...
Thursday, December 21, 2006 - 17:16
SOURCE: LAT (12-20-06)
MAHMOUD Ahmadinejad has an impeccable sense of timing. Just a week after
the Iraq Study Group recommended a heart-to-heart with him, the president
of Iran convened a conference in Tehran to examine whether the Holocaust
really occurred. The answer from such"scholars" as David Duke, the
notorious former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, was a resounding no.
On one level, Ahmadinejad's embrace of Holocaust denial might seem surprising. A man who has repeatedly called for Israel to be"wiped off the map" surely has no problem with the murder of Jews. You might expect him to adopt the position espoused by the Egyptian newspaper Al Akhbar, which a few years ago ran an editorial praising Adolf Hitler ("of blessed memory") and complaining only that"his revenge on [the Jews] was not enough."
Or you might expect Ahmadinejad to take the far more common line in the Muslim world, which is to admit that, sure, some Jews died, but it was a lot fewer than 6 million and, anyway, what's the big deal?...
Wednesday, December 20, 2006 - 18:17
SOURCE: Guardian (12-20-06)
[Anthony Seldon is the author of Blair; his new book, Blair Unbound, is due to be published in July 2007.]
Within the next seven months, Tony Blair will have gone, and the landscape of British politics will change utterly. The daggers are being sharpened and the pens filled to tear into his record. Already a picture is emerging of a prime minister who had a strong first term, a disastrous second, and a flawed third while battling to secure his legacy.
This view will underscore the television retrospectives now in preparation. But Blair's defenders remain as unrepentant as ever. They showcase a record of achievement and argue that history will be kinder to him than contemporary judgments. Blair's four predecessors - Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher and John Major - were all burnt out by the end. Blair by contrast is fighting fit, and believes he is more on top of his game than ever. In his mind, at least, the quest for the holy grail - leaving on...
Within the next seven months, Tony Blair will have gone, and the landscape of British politics will change utterly. The daggers are being sharpened and the pens filled to tear into his record. Already a picture is emerging of a prime minister who had a strong first term, a disastrous second, and a flawed third while battling to secure his legacy.
This view will underscore the television retrospectives now in preparation. But Blair's defenders remain as unrepentant as ever. They showcase a record of achievement and argue that history will be kinder to him than contemporary judgments. Blair's four predecessors - Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher and John Major - were all burnt out by the end. Blair by contrast is fighting fit, and believes he is more on top of his game than ever. In his mind, at least, the quest for the holy grail - leaving on...
Wednesday, December 20, 2006 - 17:34
SOURCE: H-Diplo via Eric Alterman's Blog, Altercation (12-18-06)
1) From: David Noon, University of Alaska:
The Washington Post editorial about Pinochet -- approvingly cited by David Horowitz -- must rank among the more intellectually dishonest pieces to appear in that newspaper's pages in recent years. The bulk of the piece aims to argue one irrelevant point (that Castro is/was worse), one questionable assertion (that Jeane Kirkpatrick was "right" about right-wing dictators) and one enormous falsehood (that Pinochet deserves credit for Chile's economic success).
The latter claim is especially popular but easily refuted. The Chilean "free market reforms" -- administered by a regime that overthrew a democratically-elected government -- garroted that nation's economy for a decade. With the abolition of minimum wages, the evisceration of the state's pension and social welfare systems, the assaults on unions (itself a violation of human rights), and other "free market" gestures, unemployment and...
The Washington Post editorial about Pinochet -- approvingly cited by David Horowitz -- must rank among the more intellectually dishonest pieces to appear in that newspaper's pages in recent years. The bulk of the piece aims to argue one irrelevant point (that Castro is/was worse), one questionable assertion (that Jeane Kirkpatrick was "right" about right-wing dictators) and one enormous falsehood (that Pinochet deserves credit for Chile's economic success).
The latter claim is especially popular but easily refuted. The Chilean "free market reforms" -- administered by a regime that overthrew a democratically-elected government -- garroted that nation's economy for a decade. With the abolition of minimum wages, the evisceration of the state's pension and social welfare systems, the assaults on unions (itself a violation of human rights), and other "free market" gestures, unemployment and...
Tuesday, December 19, 2006 - 20:30
SOURCE: WSJ (12-16-06)
"Not acceptable," says Ban Ki Moon, new Secretary-General of the United Nations. "Repulsive," say the editors of Britain's Guardian newspaper. "An insult . . . to the memory of millions of Jews," says Hillary Rodham Clinton. Global polite society is in an uproar over the Holocaust conference organized this week in Tehran under the auspices of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Moral denunciation is what reasonable people do--what they must do--when a regime that avows the future extermination of six million Jews in Israel denies the past extermination of six million Jews in Europe. But let's be frank: Global polite society has been blazing its own merry trail toward this occasion for decades.
The Australian Financial Review is not the Journal of Historical Review, the Holocaust-denying "scholarly" vehicle of some of the Tehran conferees. But in 2002 the AFR thought it fit to print the following by Joseph Wakim, at one...
Moral denunciation is what reasonable people do--what they must do--when a regime that avows the future extermination of six million Jews in Israel denies the past extermination of six million Jews in Europe. But let's be frank: Global polite society has been blazing its own merry trail toward this occasion for decades.
The Australian Financial Review is not the Journal of Historical Review, the Holocaust-denying "scholarly" vehicle of some of the Tehran conferees. But in 2002 the AFR thought it fit to print the following by Joseph Wakim, at one...
Monday, December 18, 2006 - 23:29
SOURCE: Slate (12-12-06)
On Monday, the Iranian foreign ministry held an international conference. There's nothing unusual in that. Foreign ministries hold conferences, mostly dull ones, all the time. But this one was different. For one thing, the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust dealt with history, not current politics. Instead of the usual suspects—deputy ministers and the like—the invitees seem to have included David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader; Georges Thiel, a Frenchman who has called the Holocaust "an enormous lie"; and Fredrick Töben, a German-born Australian whose specialty is the denial of Nazi gas chambers. The guest list was selective: No one with any academic eminence, or indeed any scholarly credentials, was invited. One Palestinian scholar, Khaled Ksab Mahamid, was asked to come but was then barred because he holds an Israeli passport—and also perhaps because he, unlike other guests, believes that the Holocaust really did happen....
...
...
Sunday, December 17, 2006 - 15:22
SOURCE: Azure (12-1-06)
Macedonian nationalists want Greece back, or at least its northern provinces. Their latest weapon is an obscure genetic study, which claims that while Macedonians belong to the older Mediterranean substratum of peoples, Greeks do not. Consequently, the study concludes, the Macedonians predate even the earliest Greek civilization.1 Among Macedonian political activists who believe that Greece “has held Macedonian territory illegally for… ninety-three years” and who dream of the re-unification of historical ethnic Macedonia, there is considerable excitement at the prospect of their view that Macedonians “are the oldest people living in the Balkans” being genetically corroborated.2 Welcome to the gene wars.
Genetically based claims to sovereignty are the newest tactics employed in old struggles over national sovereignty and borders.3 They are used to support assertions of historical primacy, the principle that the first of the nations still existing to have established...
Genetically based claims to sovereignty are the newest tactics employed in old struggles over national sovereignty and borders.3 They are used to support assertions of historical primacy, the principle that the first of the nations still existing to have established...
Sunday, December 17, 2006 - 14:56
SOURCE: NYT (12-16-06)
[Richard V. Allen, national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.]
IN the days since Jeane Kirkpatrick’s death, much has been written about her tenure at the United Nations, her foreign policy outlook and her indelible personality. But not a lot has been said about Jeane Kirkpatrick, ardent Democrat — and what that meant to the success of Ronald Reagan in international affairs.
Let me take you back to early 1980. Jeane Kirkpatrick and I were on our way to an appointment at the Madison Hotel in Washington. Before we entered the building, Ms. Kirkpatrick paused, grasped my arm and said, warily but sternly, “Listen, Dick, I am an A.F.L.-C.I.O. Democrat and I am quite concerned that my meeting Ronald Reagan on any basis will be misunderstood.”
Mr. Reagan, then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was in town, and as his chief foreign policy adviser I had been trying to...
IN the days since Jeane Kirkpatrick’s death, much has been written about her tenure at the United Nations, her foreign policy outlook and her indelible personality. But not a lot has been said about Jeane Kirkpatrick, ardent Democrat — and what that meant to the success of Ronald Reagan in international affairs.
Let me take you back to early 1980. Jeane Kirkpatrick and I were on our way to an appointment at the Madison Hotel in Washington. Before we entered the building, Ms. Kirkpatrick paused, grasped my arm and said, warily but sternly, “Listen, Dick, I am an A.F.L.-C.I.O. Democrat and I am quite concerned that my meeting Ronald Reagan on any basis will be misunderstood.”
Mr. Reagan, then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was in town, and as his chief foreign policy adviser I had been trying to...
Saturday, December 16, 2006 - 18:36
SOURCE: Newsweek (12-18-06)
[Heschel holds the Eli Black Chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and is the author of "Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus" (University of Chicago Press).]
Mary and Joseph must have been great parents. Jesus' followers were so impressed by his religious personality that they believed he was anointed by God (Christos means "anointed" in Greek). Because Jesus became such a religious hero, the Nativity narratives in the Gospels, written long after his death, adopted mythic themes associated with the birth of special figures. Yet modern Jews believe that the birth of Jesus was not the birth of Christianity, a religion that did not emerge until after his death. The first Christians were Jews, and thought of themselves as Jews; it is therefore impossible to understand Christianity without tracing its Judaic roots.
This is not just interfaith boilerplate; it is responsible history. Rather than a "parting of the ways" between...
Mary and Joseph must have been great parents. Jesus' followers were so impressed by his religious personality that they believed he was anointed by God (Christos means "anointed" in Greek). Because Jesus became such a religious hero, the Nativity narratives in the Gospels, written long after his death, adopted mythic themes associated with the birth of special figures. Yet modern Jews believe that the birth of Jesus was not the birth of Christianity, a religion that did not emerge until after his death. The first Christians were Jews, and thought of themselves as Jews; it is therefore impossible to understand Christianity without tracing its Judaic roots.
This is not just interfaith boilerplate; it is responsible history. Rather than a "parting of the ways" between...
Friday, December 15, 2006 - 18:38
SOURCE: Website of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (And Education Gadfly) (12-15-06)
Interest in classical humanism, the “traditional” liberal arts, has fallen sharply over the past two decades, and nowhere more so than in American K-12 education.
Grounded in the worlds and ideas of the Greeks and Romans, and transmitted to us through the European Middle ages and the Renaissance, classical humanism aims to teach students about the ideas, arts, persons, and events that constitute the “Western tradition.” It’s a model for the liberal arts that engages students with the intellectual and cultural traditions that gave rise to the culture and society they take for granted today. Yet it is a model that, today, has everything going against it.
The intellectual tradition of classical humanism carries a whiff of elitism, not to mention Eurocentricism. It was developed, transmitted, and evolved through society’s upper strata, and undeniably centered in Europe and North America. Some of its most prominent modern advocates have died, such as Robert...
Grounded in the worlds and ideas of the Greeks and Romans, and transmitted to us through the European Middle ages and the Renaissance, classical humanism aims to teach students about the ideas, arts, persons, and events that constitute the “Western tradition.” It’s a model for the liberal arts that engages students with the intellectual and cultural traditions that gave rise to the culture and society they take for granted today. Yet it is a model that, today, has everything going against it.
The intellectual tradition of classical humanism carries a whiff of elitism, not to mention Eurocentricism. It was developed, transmitted, and evolved through society’s upper strata, and undeniably centered in Europe and North America. Some of its most prominent modern advocates have died, such as Robert...
Friday, December 15, 2006 - 16:59
SOURCE: Jackson List run by Mr. Barrett (12-15-06)
[Mr. Barrett is the editor of the memoirs of of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.]
As we close a week that included the Iranian government’s historically and morally absurd conference purporting to examine whether there was a Holocaust, it is well to remember that undeniable knowledge of the Holocaust is rooted deeply in the work 61 years ago of Justice Robert H. Jackson and his United States and Allied colleagues at Nuremberg, Germany.
On October 6, 1945, Justice Jackson and his counterpart chief prosecutors from France, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom signed at Berlin the indictment on which Nazi defendants soon were brought to trial at Nuremberg before the International Military Tribunal. The indictment charged twenty-four persons and six organizations with the principal crime of engaging in a common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The indictment also charged most defendants...
Friday, December 15, 2006 - 16:56
SOURCE: Nation (12-18-06)
[Bashir Abu-Manneh teaches English at Barnard College.]
Since occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel has been the only sovereign state in British Mandate Palestine. Palestinians have been living either as second-class citizens in the Jewish state; or as colonized residents of the West Bank and Gaza with no human or political rights; or as refugees dispersed and stranded in neighboring Arab countries, in often extremely difficult conditions. The chances of Palestinians overcoming exile and exercising their right of return seem as far away as ever. Hardly more promising are the immediate prospects for ending the Israeli occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in accordance with the international and Arab consensus, in place since at least 1976 and rejected by the United States and Israel.
Neither armed struggle from bordering Arab countries and the occupied territories nor popular mobilization and political...
Since occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel has been the only sovereign state in British Mandate Palestine. Palestinians have been living either as second-class citizens in the Jewish state; or as colonized residents of the West Bank and Gaza with no human or political rights; or as refugees dispersed and stranded in neighboring Arab countries, in often extremely difficult conditions. The chances of Palestinians overcoming exile and exercising their right of return seem as far away as ever. Hardly more promising are the immediate prospects for ending the Israeli occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in accordance with the international and Arab consensus, in place since at least 1976 and rejected by the United States and Israel.
Neither armed struggle from bordering Arab countries and the occupied territories nor popular mobilization and political...
Friday, December 15, 2006 - 16:49
SOURCE: Weekly Standard (12-11-06)
Why should we care what the Founding Fathers believed, or did not believe, about religion? They went to such great trouble to insulate faith from politics, and took such care to keep their own convictions private, that it would scarcely matter if it could now be proved that, say, George Washington was a secret Baptist. The ancestor of the American Revolution was the English Revolution of the 1640s, whose leaders and spokesmen were certainly Protestant fundamentalists, but that did not bind the Framers and cannot be said to bind us, either. Indeed, the established Protestant church in Britain was one of the models which we can be quite sure the signatories of 1776 were determined to avoid emulating.
Moreover, the 18th-century scholars and gentlemen who gave us the U.S. Constitution were in a relative state of innocence respecting knowledge of the cosmos, the earth, and the psyche, of the sort that has revolutionized the modern argument over faith. Charles Darwin was born in...
Moreover, the 18th-century scholars and gentlemen who gave us the U.S. Constitution were in a relative state of innocence respecting knowledge of the cosmos, the earth, and the psyche, of the sort that has revolutionized the modern argument over faith. Charles Darwin was born in...
Friday, December 15, 2006 - 16:21
SOURCE: http://www.truthdig.com (12-11-06)
[Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and professor of history at UC Irvine.]
Is George W. Bush the worst president in U.S. history? Or is it Richard Nixon? That question is being debated by historians ranging from Eric Foner and David Greenberg in the Washington Post to Sean Wilentz in Rolling Stone. Usually Bush is named worst because, although Nixon abused the power of the presidency, he also did some good things, like opening relations with China and approving the Environmental Protection Agency. Bush in contrast not only started the Iraq war; he also approved the use of torture; he claimed the right not to follow laws he disagrees with; and he abolished fundamental rights for the accused, including trial by jury.
There is, however, one extremely simple measure of who was worse, summed up in the question that antiwar demonstrators asked LBJ back in the 1960s: How many kids did you kill today? We can compare the number of casualties in wars that...
Friday, December 15, 2006 - 15:17
SOURCE: Oliver Camm (Blog) (12-11-06)
[Mr. Camm writes a column for the Times of London.]
There are two great myths about the late General Augusto Pinochet. One is that the coup that brought him to power in Chile in 1973 was engineered by the United States. I wrote about the myth here. While there are many reasons for opposing the realist foreign policies of Henry Kissinger, and many more for abominating the tyranny of Pinochet, no one has ever been able to demonstrate that the US brought Pinochet to power, for the simple reason that it isn't true. (Other myths followed inexorably from this. Mark Falcoff notes in his Modern Chile: 1970-1989, 1991, p. 307, that a Chilean exile, Isabel Vargas, wife of the Vice-President of the Norwegian parliament, asserted in 1987 that "the [Chilean] generals would turn their backs on [Pinochet] if the United States would stop giving him weapons and loans". This was in the eleventh year of an arms embargo imposed by the US Congress.)
That myth, however, is...
There are two great myths about the late General Augusto Pinochet. One is that the coup that brought him to power in Chile in 1973 was engineered by the United States. I wrote about the myth here. While there are many reasons for opposing the realist foreign policies of Henry Kissinger, and many more for abominating the tyranny of Pinochet, no one has ever been able to demonstrate that the US brought Pinochet to power, for the simple reason that it isn't true. (Other myths followed inexorably from this. Mark Falcoff notes in his Modern Chile: 1970-1989, 1991, p. 307, that a Chilean exile, Isabel Vargas, wife of the Vice-President of the Norwegian parliament, asserted in 1987 that "the [Chilean] generals would turn their backs on [Pinochet] if the United States would stop giving him weapons and loans". This was in the eleventh year of an arms embargo imposed by the US Congress.)
That myth, however, is...
Friday, December 15, 2006 - 14:14
SOURCE: Salon (12-14-06)
The death last week of Jeane Kirkpatrick -- ambassador to the United Nations during Ronald Reagan's first term and the highest-ranking neoconservative in his administration -- coincided with President Bush's rejection of the Baker-Hamilton Commission report on Iraq and his subsequent consultations with neoconservatives to entrench his belief in "victory." But rather than providing a sobering but inspirational backdrop for Bush's heroic stand against the foreign-policy establishment, Kirkpatrick's passing illuminates the conflicting legacies of the ideological movement of which she was once an icon and the confusion that surrounds a president who demands certitudes.
In its obituary, the New York Times buried a surprising scoop about her last act of diplomacy, when she was sent by President Bush on a secret mission to Geneva in March 2003 to justify the invasion of Iraq to Arab foreign ministers. "The marching orders we received were to argue that preemptive...
In its obituary, the New York Times buried a surprising scoop about her last act of diplomacy, when she was sent by President Bush on a secret mission to Geneva in March 2003 to justify the invasion of Iraq to Arab foreign ministers. "The marching orders we received were to argue that preemptive...
Thursday, December 14, 2006 - 16:49
SOURCE: FrontpageMag.com (12-14-06)
[Humberto Fontova is the author of Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant, a Conservative Book Club "Main Selection."]
To read the mainstream media lately you'd think Augusto Pinochet's villainous henchmen, while twirling their pointy black moustaches and snickering maliciously, overthrew a Chilean "President" (Salvador Allende) somewhere on the order of Jimmy Carter. Then they lined up 3000 harmless sociology professors and innocent leftist parliamentarians and shot them, for the sheer heck of it.
The real story, as you might imagine, is a tad more complicated—despite the media/academia Black Legend regarding Chile.
Upon Stalin's death in 1953, Chilean Communists held a "Homage to Stalin" in Santiago's Baquedano theatre where Salvador Allende could hardly contain himself: "Stalin was a banner of creativity, of humanism and an edifying picture of peace and heroism!" he gushed while choking back the tears. "...
To read the mainstream media lately you'd think Augusto Pinochet's villainous henchmen, while twirling their pointy black moustaches and snickering maliciously, overthrew a Chilean "President" (Salvador Allende) somewhere on the order of Jimmy Carter. Then they lined up 3000 harmless sociology professors and innocent leftist parliamentarians and shot them, for the sheer heck of it.
The real story, as you might imagine, is a tad more complicated—despite the media/academia Black Legend regarding Chile.
Upon Stalin's death in 1953, Chilean Communists held a "Homage to Stalin" in Santiago's Baquedano theatre where Salvador Allende could hardly contain himself: "Stalin was a banner of creativity, of humanism and an edifying picture of peace and heroism!" he gushed while choking back the tears. "...
Thursday, December 14, 2006 - 15:45
