Tag: Historical Alternative

History Revisionism

We know that Donny and his merry band of idiots have their own version of American history…..and now Donny wants to make sure that history fits his vision of events from our past.

He has ordered the Smithsonian to fall in lie with his perverted vision…..

The Trump administration informed the Smithsonian Institution on Tuesday that it will check its current and planned exhibitions’ displayed wording, websites, and social media “to assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.” A letter from the White House said the museums will have 120 days to make any changes the administration wants, the New York Times reports. The changes could include “replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions,” the letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch says.

The letter provides the first details of the administration’s plan to scrutinize the Smithsonian, per the Washington Post, to ensure adherence to Trump’s goals of removing what he called its “improper ideology” in favor of “truth and sanity.” The Smithsonian released a statement later Tuesday pledging cooperation with the administration and saying its work “is grounded in a deep commitment to scholarly excellence, rigorous research, and the accurate, factual presentation of history.”

A historian called the Trump administration plan an affront to the professionals trained to ensure historically accurate presentations, per the Wall Street Journal. “If those things are taken out of the hands of historians, the public stands to lose a great deal in having reliable and engaging content that tells a whole and complex story of the American past,” said Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association.

This is, as I have said making history fit into the warped ideals of Donny and the mental midgets behind him….

The Wall Street Journal reports on Tuesday that U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House is keeping an eye on the Smithsonian Museum to ensure that its exhibits on display for the United States’ 250th anniversary “align with” the president’s personal “interpretation of American history.”

According to the Journal, the administration this week sent a letter to the Smithsonian announcing it was seeking what the paper describes as a “far-reaching review” of its “museum exhibitions, materials and operations” that will include everything from “public-facing exhibition text and online content to internal curatorial processes, exhibition planning, the use of collections and artist grants.”

The goal of the review is to ensure the materials comply with an executive order Trump signed earlier this year that called for “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

(commondreams.org)

Truth and sanity?  Nothing in the Donny led government is about truth and sanity.

This will do more damage than good….denying history or trying to transform into some unrecognizable POS is NOT the way to instill ‘truth and sanity’ into the subject.

A white nationalist vision of American history is one that centers the role of white Americans above all others and, in fact, typically treats the history of the nation and the race as one and the same. For white nationalists, the United States is a nation created and founded by white people, and American history necessarily spurns the contributions of all other groups. The sins of slavery, segregation, and violence are excused as minor blemishes made along a path toward greatness. It was the accomplishments of America’s great white men, we are led to believe, that brought us the prosperity for which we should all be so thankful. To question them—even if they enslaved, raped, and killed for power, expansion, or wealth—would be to question America itself.

Various versions of this story exist. For decades, the most pervasive version of this mythology lived in the American South. From practically the day after the Civil War, white Southerners crafted a white nationalist morality tale—in popular culture, veterans’ organizations, and the Lost Cause ideology—of lazy Black slaves with generous white masters who in the 1860s did their best to fight off a war of “Northern Aggression” that threatened white Southern freedom. For most of the twentieth century, this story was advanced by groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or UDC—activists who dedicated much of their lives to celebrating white Confederate heritage. They published textbooks, erected monuments, and led public ceremonies honoring the legacy of the Southern white men who tried to destroy the United States.

https://newrepublic.com/article/198384/trump-white-nationalist-vision-future-history

Remake history in HIS image will do nothing to save the nation from imminent destruction.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Revisionist History

There is a plan under foot, especially in Red States, to teach an sanitized version of history….to the point of banning some of our history from being taught.

These attacks on education is making the Red State citizens a stupid pack of idiots…..non-issues are being used to re-write American history….

Apparently these attempts are successful so successful that even Russia will try there hand at rewriting history…..

After being accused of committing atrocities in Ukraine, and facing global opposition for its invasion, Russia is taking a step to control the narrative among its people early. The Education Ministry has announced the starting age for compulsory history lessons in its schools will be 7, down from 10. It’s part of a campaign to stress patriotic education, the Moscow Times reports. In Russia’s history lessons, Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov said: “We will never allow it [to be written] that we somehow treated other nations—our fraternal nations of Ukraine and Belarus—poorly. We will do everything in our power so that historical memory is preserved.”

Historical education will be added to the teaching of other subjects, as well, per the Times. It’s important that students learn their nation’s history, President Vladimir Putin told “The Power Is in the Truth,” a schools forum. “A deep understanding of our history, and a respectful, thoughtful attitude to the great patriotic, spiritual, and cultural heritage of the Fatherland enables us to draw correct conclusions from the past,” Putin said. As of Sept. 1, schools will begin each week by raising the Russian flag and singing the national anthem, Kravtsov said.

Think about that!

Russia is doing the same thing that our Red States are doing….suppressing history…revising events to suit an ideology…..

Online and offline, digi-fascism thrives from designing an illusionary world of individual experiences and spaces in which the supposedly oppressed and insecure can feel at ease. Now they are protected from an accelerated and ever increasing complexity of modernity.

Right-wing extremist’s propaganda constructs this idyllic and pre- or better: anti-modern world as a place in which an imagined white majority no longer needs to fear the loss of its social privileges. Ideologically speaking, digi-fascism follows an old but proven playbook.

The Rise of Digi-Fascism

States like Texas and Minnesota want to do away with the Public Education Act…that is they do not think they should be educating children….how damn sad is that movement?

All I can do is shake my head at the stupidity and the wholesale ignorance in this world….it is a pandemic and I refuse to let stupidity and ignorance infect me.

Turn The Page!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Closing Thought–11Jun21

I have written many times about the educational system in this country and especially the crap they teach in the South…..and Georgia has proven my disgust once again….

Georgia’s state Board of Education this week became the latest government entity to take a firm stance against teaching about racism in schools, or at least against teaching anything that makes white Republicans uncomfortable. The Georgia Board of Ed adopted a resolution insisting that the USA and Georgia are definitely not racist places, while calling for limits on how public schools should be allowed to discuss and teach about racism.

The resolution itself — authored by National Review writer and professional culture warrior Stanley Kurtz, author of many serious works of scholarship like Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism — calls for supposedly colorblind educational practices that will not “indoctrinate students in social, or political, ideology or theory” or “promote one race or sex above another,” and how could anyone possibly object to that? Like, unless you apply those concepts very selectively and in bad faith, or are actively letting Stanley Kurtz decide what is “isms,” but only a cynic would suggest rightwing officials could be capable of such a thing.

Among other things (we have the full list below), the resolution says no element of public education should do terrible things like tell innocent schoolchildren that

any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex;

or that

with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality
https://www.wonkette.com/georgia-schoolchildren-will-just-have-to-learn-all-history-from-confederate-statues

Another revisioni9st look at American history.

What are these a/holes afraid of?

They want to hide the truth in the hopes that it will go away…in doing so they feed suspicion and hate.

Pathetic and disgusting!

Turn The Page!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scibo”

Closing Thought–07May21

I live in what is being called these days as the “New South”….I have questioned the title for some time…..my premise is that very little has changed from what is the “Old South”…….the racism that all seem to think that is on the wane is far from……

Those in-bred spineless white boys that keep winning thanx to the legislation that the old white boys keep enacting prove their bias….and the most recent example is from Tennessee……this idiot wants to re-write history with the hope of continuing the racial bias…..

A Tennessee Republican falsely declared Tuesday that an 18th-century policy designating a slave as three-fifths of a person was adopted for “the purpose of ending slavery,” commenting amid a debate over whether educators should be restricted while teaching about systematic racism in America. During lengthy debate on the GOP-controlled state House floor, several Black lawmakers expressed concerns about the bill’s impact on how certain subjects would be taught in schools, specifically highlighting the Three-Fifths Compromise, the AP reports. The policy was made during the nation’s Constitutional Convention in 1787 and classified that three-fifths of a state’s slave population could be counted toward its total population when apportioning taxes and states’ representation in Congress. Historians largely agree the compromise gave slaveholding states inordinate power over choosing a president—and decisions of the Continental Congress. That clout eventually faded when Northern state populations began to rapidly rise.

Rep. Justin Lafferty, who is white, stood up and talked at length about what he saw as sparking the compromise. At one point he asked colleagues to note on paper their best guess for the reasons that led to the policy. “By limiting the number of population in the count, they specifically limited the number of representatives who would be available in the slave holding states and they did it for the purpose of ending slavery,” said Lafferty, from Knoxville. “Well before Abraham Lincoln. Well before Civil War.” None of the other lawmakers in the chamber directly challenged Lafferty’s false claims but some applauded when he finished talking. While the House overwhelmingly approved the legislation on Tuesday, the GOP-controlled Senate chamber refused to accept the House bill hours later. Its fate now remains unclear in the final days of the legislative session.

Historical revisionism just to keep the minorities in their “place”.

I would say that the New South smells as racist as the Old South….What about you?

Turn The Page!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

An Education Of Lies

It all began with the 1776 Commission Report.

But wait!

What is the 1776 Commission?

First of all this Commission to revise history had NO historians in the make-up….

The “1776 Report,” released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, followed Donald Trump’s September announcement to form a commission to refute teachings on systemic racism, critical race theory, and deeper examinations of how slavery has affected American society.

The “crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison, that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together, will destroy our country,” he said at the time.

The report is a clear rebuke of the “1619 Project,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning report by the New York Times published in 2019. It argues the true founding of America was not in 1776 as the new nation declared its independence from Britain, but in 1619 when the first enslaved people were brought to the shores of the Virginia colonies. The Times’ report, led by reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, set off a firestorm among conservatives, especially as many educators embraced its overall message, and sought solutions for history lessons that often watered down or ignored parts of American history that grappled directly with oppression and subjugation of people on the basis of race.

If you would like to read this ‘report’ for yourself…..

Click to access The%20President%E2%80%99s%20Advisory%201776%20Commission%20-%20Final%20Report.pdf

Now this pack of BS will be taught to the children of South Carolina (of course it will start there)…..

Republican state legislators in South Carolina on Wednesday introduced a bill that would require public school students to receive conservative historical education consistent with the “principles and concepts” of former President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission Report, a move that ignores the widespread rebuke of historians and progressive activists that accompanied its initial release.

S. 534, the Restore America’s Foundation Act, would mandate at least 30 hours of “instruction in United States foundational history” for the state’s public middle and high school students, WCSC reports.

“We have, in today’s society, a lot of disrespect for the flag, the national anthem, and that sort of thing,” the bill’s sponsor, State Sen. Dwight Loftis—a Greenville Republican—told WCSC. “The knowledge of where we came from and why our forefathers did what they did, I think it’s important that we know.”

However, critics note that Trump’s 1776 Commission—an 18-member panel that had no historians—whitewashes slavery and asserts universities are pushing anti-Americanism by exploring the nation’s roots of oppression, cruelty, exploitation, and greed.

https://www.rawstory.com/1776-report/

This sounds a lot like the revisionism I got while attending school in Mississippi in the 50s and 60s.

When will we face the truth about our history?

This is nothing but a tool to try and change the way our children view this country…..and the stupid will continue as long as there is NO standardized education.

How far will this ignorance extend?

Thoughts?

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Sore Losers

The analysis of the 2020 election is still going on…..and on…..

By now most everyone knows Biden won the election and by now we all know that Trump is being a dick by refusing to accept that he lost the election.

He may leave the White House but I doubt that he will ever admit that he lost the election because he was a terrible president.

First of all was the election of 2020 some sort of a mandate or just a ‘vote against Trump’?

My thought is that it was the later….there is NO Dem mandate….but others thoughts…..

Every election year is accompanied by countless analyses of why Americans voted the way they did. The 2020 election is no different. Liberal and Democratic Americans who were hoping for an overwhelming victory for Joe Biden were disappointed, although the Democratic candidate did defeat a sitting president by nearly 6 million votes. This is itself noteworthy considering how infrequently incumbent presidential candidates lose reelection in the post-World War II era.

The questions that arise now are simple enough: what caused Trump to lose the election, and to what extent did Americans vote for Biden, as opposed to voting against Trump? Answers to these questions emerge from a careful examination of pre-election polling and Edison’s national exit polling, the latter of which surveyed both in-person and mail-in/absentee voters to collect information on voters’ demographic backgrounds and their political and economic motivations. What we find is that mass anger at racial injustice, the disaster of Covid-19, and the depressed economy that accompanied it, were all chief difference makers in the election outcome.

Election 2020: a Democratic Mandate or a Vote Against Trump?

Now that I made that point…..the real reason for this post is to look back into history and see about the sore losers of the past…..

Trump isn’t the first sore loser in history. Many of them have whined their way into obscurity, but others have been able to do real damage. Driven by ego and resentment, some sore losers have engaged in the personal destruction of their opponents, their parties, or even their countries. A look back provides a sober counterpoint to the shrugs with which we might otherwise greet Trump’s tantrums.

https://arcdigital.media/what-if-he-never-concedes-5a47173806f0

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Theft Of Culture

As a historian and an amateur archeologist I find little more disgusting than the theft of artifacts….that is stealing a people’s culture and history.

One of the largest “hobby shops” is Hobby Lobby and the owner of the corporation has also opened a museum of the bible…..within that “museum” many stolen artifacts were found in the displays…..in short I wrote about these before…..first about 5 years ago and then 3 years on…..https://lobotero.com/2015/10/28/speaking-of-good-christians/ and https://lobotero.com/2018/05/03/the-theft-of-history/

I bring this up because more artifacts, which should belong to the Palestinians and the Israelis, the Dead Sea Scrolls on display in the “museum” have found to be fakes…..

It would be more accurate to call the “Dead Sea Scrolls” at a museum in Washington, DC, the “Old Sandal Fakes,” researchers say. A team of art fraud experts spent six months analyzing the supposed scroll fragments at the Museum of the Bible and concluded that billionaire Steve Green, owner of the Hobby Lobby chain, had paid millions of dollars for forgeries that were probably made from Roman-era shoe leather made to resemble ancient parchment, the Guardian reports. The company hired to examine the fragments said they all appeared to be “deliberate forgeries created in the 20th century with the intent to mimic authentic Dead Sea Scroll fragments.” The museum says it will remove the scroll fragments from display while it is closed during the coronavirus crisis.

The researchers say the forgers imitated the writing of ancient Hebrew scribes and coated the leather in “shiny amber material … most likely animal skin glue,” the BBC reports. In 2018—a year after the $500 million museum opened—scholars determined that at least five of its 16 scroll fragments were fakes. The original scrolls were found in caves on the shore of the Dead Sea in 1947. Experts say the researchers’ finding cast doubt on all 70 of the supposed scroll fragments that went on the market after 2002, when an antiquities dealer’s son claimed to have found them in a family vault. Dr. Jeffrey Kloha, the museum’s chief curatorial officer, says the “sophisticated and costly methods employed to discover the truth about our collection could be used to shed light on other suspicious fragments.”

Sucks being them, Hobby Lobby, when you try to prove something that may be unable to prove you will fall for every con known to man.

If any of those artifacts are real then they belong to the nation of their origin….the West has already stolen more artifacts than they have returned.

Just saying…….

Please take the time to read the links I have provided……

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

What If Archduke Ferdinand Had Survived?

Last year we celebrated the 100 year anniversary of the end of the Great War, World War One…..

As a history buff I am always interested in this war because it was the birth place of the world we live in today.

The War began when Archduke Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated in Serbia in 1914…and as I like to do….a “what if”……

What if the person that started the war had not died in Serbia in 1914……

World War One was a tragedy with particularly Austrian roots, sparked by the assassination of the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. But could the war have been avoided if he had not been killed? And would the Austro-Hungarian Empire have survived?

Those are the questions that have been posed at a conference at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna, which has been training diplomats since 1754.

For at least one person at the conference, the “what if?” question was personal. Maria Camilla Habsburg Lothringen, a descendant of Austria’s former royal family, says the scenario is “quite intriguing” and would have changed her family’s fate.

“We would maybe have a different position here in Austria. Maybe we would have more possessions and more responsibility in our functions.”

However she says the thought of royal responsibilities and the lack of personal freedom makes her a little “uptight”. And the war, she says, is clearly about far more than just the fate of her own family.

“World War One was such a dramatic occasion. To look back at the past and ask what went wrong and learn out of that is a very important thing.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-eu-29991018

Think if the war had been avoided….think of all the millions that would have lived to old age……think about the world we may have had to live in today.

Any thoughts to share?

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

Class Dismissed!

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

Why the right hates American history – Salon.com

I write about educational issues and especially when the Right tries to re-write history in our schools to fit some often perverted thinking….you know what I mean…..items like trying to sugar coat slavery…..

Have you ever read such pieces and then asked yourself…..why does the Right hate American history?

Well if you have there is an article that tackles this question….

Thomas Jefferson knew that education is vital to a functioning Democratic Republic. Conservatives have other ideas

Source: Why the right hates American history – Salon.com

Democracy: What A Way To Run A Country

I grow weary of the mental midgets that are always going on about our American Democracy….. we do NOT have a democracy and constantly repeating a lie does not make it so…..

Every election has me thinking about the political process in this country……we seem to be moving further and further away from the ideals that made this country great….or so it would seem.

With each election we are bombarded with slogans out the wa-zoo…..most of them have nothing to do with reality and that is no more obvious than when some candidate starts a diatribe on our “democracy”…..

Since I have taken upon myself a post on our democracy…..then you know what is to follow right?  That’s right a little historical context……(pause here for the high sighs……. the groans and moans)……..

Back in the days when I was lecturing when I was there talking about political theory….there was always someone that wanted to throw the democracy thing out there trying to catch the old Prof. off guard……

The truth is that the Founding Fathers had a pack of differing opinions on how to run this country…..and most did not want a democracy…….James Madison summed it up fairly well…..

“Hence it is that democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths … A republic, by which I mean a government in which a scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect and promises the cure for which we are seeking.” — James Madison, Federalist Papers No. 10.

We, the people, were never intended to run the country….rather we were to pick an elite to be our representative…..hence the term “representative democracy”…..even the great philosopher Socrates had a extreme dislike for democracy….he compared it to a ship of mutinous fools….to quote Socrates….”The ship’s captain is locked away, the navigator ignored and the crew  has ears only for the foolish words of their rebellious demagogue leader who just promises them what they want”………..democracy, in other words,  is leadership by the stupid, who make unrealizable promises to the ignorant……..( damn!  sounds a lot like our present day campaigns……why change what is so successful?).

Keep one thing in mind……you were NEVER intended to be eligible to be president…this country was formed by rich people for rich people…you are an inconvenience that they tolerate……

And the beat goes on………to New Hampshire.