Ah, yes. The moniker “SmashTheState” is far too subtle.
I’m left of center myself, but I completely agree with this sentiment. Many people know far more about (a simplified version of) the scandals and bad side of famous figures than about what made them famous or important in the first place.
Slavery of course is high on this list by what I’ve termed the Latter Day Abolitionist movement (who don’t quite seem to realize taht taking a stand against slavery well over a century after the 13th Amendment just isn’t that gutsy or noble a position. I was sickened watching some show on Thomas Jefferson on cable that was supposed to be a general biography but on which they talked far more about the fact he was a slaveowner than the fact he was president. Yes, he owned slaves- hundreds of them in fact- and he probably had one who was his concubine (as well as his wife’s half-sister) and with whom he had children, and that’s definitely interesting and worthy of inclusion in a biography, but IT’S NOT WHY HE’S REMEMBERED AND WHY THERE ARE MONUMENTS TO HIM AND WHY HE’S ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT MEN IN U.S. HISTORY!
They gloss over the fact that he and other slaveowning rich white men told the most greatest political and military power the world had seen since Rome to go screw itself, AND THEY WON! True, it was with French loans and alliance, but even once that was achieved (years after the beginning of the war) it was anybody’s game, and Washington/Jefferson/Franklin/the Adams’ cousins/any name you’ve ever heard associated with the Revolutionary cause really were risking their lives and property to do so.
And then there’s the fact that the attitudes of the slaveowners was far from monolithic. Jefferson devoted realms of paper to his notions on the topic, he wanted it to end, but he didn’t know how on Earth it could be achieved and at the time it probably couldn’t have. (Plus it’s amazing how little press the fact Washington did free his slaves in his will gets.)
Outside of slavery, far more people know JFK had many affairs and one was with Marily Monroe than can tell you jack about his Vietnam policies, or even about the Bay of Pigs or the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Puritans were religiously intolerant people who regarded the Indians as subhuman savages- but the fact that they had balls the size of pumpkins to come to a strange continent in tiny ships in the first place (where most of them died within a year or two and those who didn’t almost all stayed) is glossed over cause we can’t have it said there was anything good about them. And a similar simplification is of the '50s as a bunch of paranoid and xenophobic to the point that all people who feared Communism are lumped in with McCarthy and Cohn, while the fact that there really was a Communist threat and major Communist spy rings operating in the U.S. is forgotten.
I understand wanting to add accuracy and “the whole story” to history but there’s a difference between that and just tearing down the statues and namecalling, and the teaching of “warts only” is just as much a disservice as the teaching of men carved from marble who did no wrong.
Of course as always it’s a showtune that sums it up best for ‘warts only’ and the ‘no warts’ camps:
I imagine my source was a writer to the Straight Dope commenting on a previous Cecil item debunking the “LTEC” myth. The writer sets out the tale exactly as I recall it, but Cecil’s answer shoots down this theory. I remembered the story but did not remember the takedown - my bad.
Now here’s another twist I found–can’t vouch for it but the cite is included:
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/227600.html
…It has been suggested that the speaker’s intention wasn’t as cynical as is generally supposed. French law required bakers to sell loaves at fixed prices and fancy loaves had to be sold at the same price as basic breads. This was aimed at preventing bakers from selling just the more profitable expensive products. The let them eat brioche (a form of cake made of flour, butter and eggs) would have been a sensible suggestion in the face of a flour shortage as it would have allowed the poor to eat what would otherwise have been unaffordable…
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation let slavery remain legal in the states where he was actually recognized as a legitimate leader, and only addressed those slaves in states where he was seen as the leader of a nation with which they were at war.
Here’s a discussion of Loewen, with some criticism. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=38543
There’s probably some criticism of Zinn on the board, too. Go ye and search.
And convenience is sometimes relative to where one stands.
Just a bit of clarification: Gandhi could be a weird guy, and he had some whacked-out theories, but his philosophy has too often been reduced to some sort of ubiquitous pacifism. On the contrary, while Gandhi considered nonviolent resistance to be the best way of protesting, he also said that if you do not have the courage or dedication to risk your life so directly, you should at least engage in violent resistance. For Gandhi, not resisting an injustice at all was the most cowardly and immoral thing one could do.
So I assume you’re very much aware of the hundred million people killed by radical assholes like you in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China?
I’m an anarchosyndicalist, not a Bolshevik. “Radical assholes” like me are the reason you have an 8 hour workday, the right to organize, and laws regarding workplace safety. You’re welcome.
Incidentally, the Bolsheviks hated anarchists too. They assassinated Durruti in Spain and destroyed the CNT/FAI, allowing the fascists to take over the country. In Ukraine, the Red Army spent 4 years exterminating the anarchist Makhnovshchina, then murdered 10,000,000 Ukrainians to make sure it could not reform.
They totally had it coming, man. Getting educated and owning shit - the nerve of some people!
I think it’s one of the great ironies of American history that had the south not started the Civil War they’d probably have kept their slaves much longer. Lincoln said repeatedly he didn’t intend to free them, but when the war came he basically changed it to “well, since we’re in the area might as well get her done”.
Some theorize without the war slavery would have been ended gradually- “all children born to slaves after January 1, 18___ will be free” and “all slavery will end 25 years from this date” sort of thing. Personally I can’t see that ever happening because slaves were simply too valuable to think anybody would voluntarily let them go and the Federal government never could have raised the money to buy them (which is to say it’s possible they could have come up with the funds, but no Congress ever would have approved the expenditure and with good reason; why should a shop owner in a free state have to pay taxes to pay for slaves?) I think war was inevitable, but I doubt it would have come under Lincoln had the south not started it.
Which of course leads to “would Lincoln be any more remembered than Franklin Pierce or Chester Arthur if he’d been a peacetime president?”
Ahh, no. We have all those things because some people, a while back, went out and organized and struck and got bruises and broken bones and sometimes dead, and because they got lawyers and did the unglamorous but necessary work needed to change the laws. And that spirit is, sadly, in short supply today.
But you weren’t one of those people.
This reminds me a bit of the Dudley Moore/Peter Cook exchange. Moore was the interviewer, Cook was the upper class twit.
Cook: I am a social activist. I get things done. You know, I was very much against the American war in Vietnam.
Moore: Well, so were millions of other people.
Cook: But I wrote a letter.
Yeah, it was all because of the anarchists. Nobody else had anything to do with that. :rolleyes:
They murdered the Ukrainians because the Ukrainian people, not just a handful of Ukrainian anarchists, weren’t so enthusiastic about the brave new world the communists were imposing on them. As for assassination, you must be aware that the anarchist movement had a considerable fondness for assassination, bombing and other forms of terrorism. Nor were their targets exclusively the wealthy and powerful. I recall reading of an anarchist who bombed a cafe where some office workers ate, and killed dozens of people because they weren’t quite as poor as their factory worker neighbors. The stereotype of anarchists as mad bombers has a strong foundation in reality.
It doesn’t really matter. Anarchists and communists are both totalitarians. If you ever had a chance to put your crackpot Utopian schemes into practice, you’d have butchered as many as Stalin and Mao.
Nice! I needed a laugh.
Oh, yeah, you can totally create a stateless society without brutal coercion on a mass scale. You can do that. Really. I would laugh, but you make me feel like puking.
And why so many jobs are now overseas. Thank you.
Anyway, the biggest myth I can think of is that Hitler was elected in any reasonable sense of the word. By the early 1930s, Germany had failed: Vicious thugs representing both Communists and Fascists were roaming the streets, which seems symmetrical until you learn that the Weimar government was decidedly in favor of anyone who could rid them of those damned Communists. Hitler rose on the backs of the Brownshirt street gang with the implicit support of the existing Weimar power structure that ignored the Brownshirts’ violence. Voting was pointless; the events of 1933 were all but fore-ordained.
“There’s some lovely filth down here, Dennis!”
SmashTheState did not say that it was because of Anarchists, it was because of “radical assholes”.
Have you ever met a happy bomber?
Well, I know a demolitions technician who’s got a revolving-door prescription for Prozac. Does that count?