Showing posts with label Solzhenitsyn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Solzhenitsyn. Show all posts
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
The Politics Of The Memory Hole, And The Value Of Memory
People with memories, and who know how to write, are a problem for totalitarians.
Pat Buchanan is one of those troublesome people. He addresses the hysteria about 'right-wing fanatics' that the Left is attempting to foment, in order to silence any and all who might object to their leadership. He takes on Frank Rich's assertion that the right 'went off the rails' in the mid-60's in the wake of civil rights legislation.
Was Rich awake in 1964? Because it wasn't the right that went off the rails. The really big riot in 1964 was in Harlem, lasting five days, with 500 injured and as many arrested. The Watts riot in 1965, Detroit and Newark in 1967, Washington, D.C., and 100 other cities in 1968, all bringing troops into American cities, were not the work of George Wallace populists or Barry Goldwater conservatives. They were the work of folks who went "all the way with LBJ."
Buchanan cites several more examples, all damning of the Left, because it was the Left that embraced political violence as the generation that now leads the majority in Congress was in its formative years.
OS remembers those years too, as a young person, watching the country come unwound, and attending the funeral of a young friend of the family, a Marine killed by the Viet Cong during a 'Christmas Truce' called by the Viet Cong. In those days, the Left was referring to young men like him as 'murderers'. He was anything but, but it little mattered to the totalitarians in training, who idolized Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, mass murderers all.
It is a cultural issue, at bottom, is it not? At the underpinnings of the discipline, history needs to be taught in terms of 'This happened on such a date, and these particular people performed these acts'. Without the ideology or hysteria, just the facts, ma'am. These things, although unromantic, really matter. It's more fun to opine than research and report accurately.
Otherwise, everything goes down the 'memory hole', history is re-written to suit today's exigencies, and the entire concept that words have meaning deteriorates rapidly. Entire chapters of the past vanish. People vanish as well, as if they never existed.
A quick review of the fate of Russia as the USSR should be an object lesson. The few souls like Solzhenitsyn, who carefully preserved history with specificity, ended up underground and/or dead or exiled, their work passed hand-to-hand in dark of night. Bonhoeffer's great essay 'After Ten Years' lived buried in his back garden, unearthed after he was hanged a few days before the collapse of Nazi Germany.
The cultural collapses long predated the political ones. They always do.
Pat Buchanan is one of those troublesome people. He addresses the hysteria about 'right-wing fanatics' that the Left is attempting to foment, in order to silence any and all who might object to their leadership. He takes on Frank Rich's assertion that the right 'went off the rails' in the mid-60's in the wake of civil rights legislation.
Was Rich awake in 1964? Because it wasn't the right that went off the rails. The really big riot in 1964 was in Harlem, lasting five days, with 500 injured and as many arrested. The Watts riot in 1965, Detroit and Newark in 1967, Washington, D.C., and 100 other cities in 1968, all bringing troops into American cities, were not the work of George Wallace populists or Barry Goldwater conservatives. They were the work of folks who went "all the way with LBJ."
Buchanan cites several more examples, all damning of the Left, because it was the Left that embraced political violence as the generation that now leads the majority in Congress was in its formative years.
OS remembers those years too, as a young person, watching the country come unwound, and attending the funeral of a young friend of the family, a Marine killed by the Viet Cong during a 'Christmas Truce' called by the Viet Cong. In those days, the Left was referring to young men like him as 'murderers'. He was anything but, but it little mattered to the totalitarians in training, who idolized Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, mass murderers all.
It is a cultural issue, at bottom, is it not? At the underpinnings of the discipline, history needs to be taught in terms of 'This happened on such a date, and these particular people performed these acts'. Without the ideology or hysteria, just the facts, ma'am. These things, although unromantic, really matter. It's more fun to opine than research and report accurately.
Otherwise, everything goes down the 'memory hole', history is re-written to suit today's exigencies, and the entire concept that words have meaning deteriorates rapidly. Entire chapters of the past vanish. People vanish as well, as if they never existed.
A quick review of the fate of Russia as the USSR should be an object lesson. The few souls like Solzhenitsyn, who carefully preserved history with specificity, ended up underground and/or dead or exiled, their work passed hand-to-hand in dark of night. Bonhoeffer's great essay 'After Ten Years' lived buried in his back garden, unearthed after he was hanged a few days before the collapse of Nazi Germany.
The cultural collapses long predated the political ones. They always do.
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