Those Who Would Destroy American History Should at Least Know It before They Pick Up Their Sledgehammers

THE REAL NEWS TODAY IS THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW HISTORY BEFORE YOU BEGIN TO REVISE AND ERASE IT. That is the missing piece in today's frenzy by the American Progressive hard Left to erase America. • • • MICHAEL CURTIS. An essay by Professor Curtis in American Thinker on Thursday reminded me of the vast 94-year grasp of Michael Curtis on 20th century history. Born on September 11, 1923, Curtis has brought decades of deep thinking to bear on the issue of animosity toward Jews and Israel. But, he has a reach beyond Israel and the Middle East. In frequent columns for American Thinker, Michael Curtis has written on the fate of Christians in the Middle East, as well as on the role of the tribes that hold enormous power and transcend borders and official governments in the region. Curtis was born in London and educated at the London School of Economics and Political Science, before earning his doctorate at Cornell University in 1963 when he was appointed to a teaching position at Rutgers University, where he is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus in political science. As well as writing on the Middle East, he is renowned for work that looks at the origins of the political Right in modern France, and France’s complicated role in the Holocaust during the Vichy regime and the Nazi occupation in World War II. His study of the history of French political thought and 20th century French politics began with the first book he wrote after moving to the United States -- "Three Against the Third Republic" is considered the definitive study of early 20th century French politics and the rise of the Right after the Dreyfus affair. Published by Princeton University Press in 1959, it was recently re-issued by Transaction Press with a new introduction by the author. Professor Curtis’s Verdict on Vichy (2002) was named one of the best books of the year by England’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. • In Thursday's American Thinker essay, titled "Christopher Columbus Gets the Sledgehammer," Michael Curtis begins by saying that "Every schoolchild knows that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. He and his men sailed in the Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria." • It was that opening sentence that jolted me. If what I read, and watch, and hear from young friends with children and older friends with grandchildren is to be believed, today's schoolchildren know almost nothing about history, including their own, whether they are American, British or from eleswhere in Europe. • • • THIS WEEK IN HISTORY. Perhaps it was the rainy weather, but I couldn't help myself from going to < History.com > to see what has happened this week in history. Here's what I found. • • • POMPEII. In 79 AD -- 1,938 years ago -- Mount Vesuvius, the volcano near the Bay of Naples in Italy erupted and buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii under a thick carpet of volcanic ash. The dust “poured across the land” like a flood, one witness wrote, and shrouded the city in “a darkness...like the black of closed and unlighted rooms.” Two thousand people died, and the city was abandoned for almost as many years, until 1748, when a group of explorers looking for ancient artifacts arrived in Campania and began to dig. They found that the ashes had acted as a marvelous preservative. Underneath all that dust, Pompeii was almost exactly as it had been 2,000 years before. Its buildings were intact. Skeletons were frozen right where they’d fallen. Everyday objects and household goods littered the streets. Later archaeologists even uncovered jars of preserved fruit and loaves of bread. Many scholars say that the excavation of Pompeii played a major role in the neo-Classical revival of the 18th century. Europe’s wealthiest and most fashionable families displayed art and reproductions of objects from the ruins, and drawings of Pompeii’s buildings helped shape the architectural trends of the era. Today, the excavation of Pompeii has been going on for almost three centuries, and scholars and tourists remain just as fascinated by the city’s eerie ruins as they were in the 18th century. • Ever since the ancient Greeks settled in the area in the 8th century BC, the region around Mount Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples has attracted wealthy vacationers who wanted to enjoy the sun and scenery. By the turn of the first century AD, the town of Pompeii, located about five miles from the mountain, was a flourishing resort for Rome’s most distinguished citizens. Elegant houses and elaborate villas lined the paved streets. Tourists, townspeople and slaves bustled in and out of small factories and artisans’ shops, taverns and cafes, and brothels and bathhouses. People gathered in the 20,000-seat arena and lounged in the open-air squares and marketplaces. On the eve of that fateful eruption in 79 AD, scholars estimate that there were about 20,000 people living in Pompeii and the surrounding region. • The Vesuvius volcano did not form overnight, of course. Scholars say that the mountain is hundreds of thousands of years old and had been erupting for many centuries. In about 1780 BC, for example, an unusually violent eruption (known today as the “Avellino eruption”) shot millions of tons of superheated lava, ash and rocks about 22 miles into the sky. That catastrophe destroyed almost every village, house and farm within 15 miles of the mountain. Even after a massive earthquake struck the Campania region in 63 AD -- a quake that, scientists now understand, was a warning rumble of the disaster to come -- people still flocked to the shores of the Bay of Naples. Pompeii grew more crowded every year. Sixteen years after that telltale earthquake, in August 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted again. The blast sent a plume of ashes, pumice, other rocks, and scorching-hot volcanic gases so high into the sky that people could see it for hundreds of miles around. The writer Pliny the Younger, who watched the eruption from across the bay, compared this “cloud of unusual size and appearance” to a pine tree that “rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches”; today, geologists refer to this type of volcano as a “Plinean eruption.” As it cooled, this tower of debris drifted to earth : first the fine-grained ash, then the lightweight chunks of pumice and other rocks. It was terrifying -- “I believed I was perishing with the world,” Pliny wrote, “and the world with me." Most Pompeiians had plenty of time to flee, but, for those who stayed, conditions soon grew worse. As more and more ash fell, it clogged the air, making it difficult to breathe. Buildings collapsed. Then, a “pyroclastic surge” -- a 100-miles-per-hour surge of superheated poison gas and pulverized rock -- poured down the side of the mountain and swallowed everything and everyone in its path. By the time the Vesuvius eruption sputtered to an end the next day, Pompeii was buried under millions of tons of volcanic ash. Some people drifted back to town in search of lost relatives or belongings, but there was not much left to find. Pompeii, along with the smaller neighboring towns of Stabiae and Herculaneum, was abandoned for centuries. • Mount Vesuvius has not erupted since 1944, but it is still one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. Experts believe that another Plinean eruption is due any day -- an almost unfathomable catastrophe, since almost 3 million people live within 20 miles of the volcano’s crater. • Thus, 3,000 years of history has taught the people living in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius nothing. • • • THE WAR OF 1812. On August 24, 1814, the British captured and burned Washington DC. During the War of 1812, British forces under General Robert Ross overwhelmed American militiamen at the Battle of Bladensburg, Maryland, and marched unopposed into Washington DC. Most congressmen and officials fled Washington as soon as word came of the American defeat, but President James Madison and his wife, Dolley, escaped just before the invaders arrived. Earlier in the day, President Madison had been present at the Battle of Bladensburg and had at one point actually taken command of one of the few remaining American batteries, thus becoming the first and only sitting President to exercise in actual battle his authority as Commander-in-Chief. General Ross and British officers dined that night at the deserted White House. Meanwhile, British troops, ecstatic that they had captured their enemy’s capital, began setting the city aflame in revenge for the burning of Canadian government buildings by US troops earlier in the war. The White House, a number of federal buildings, and several private homes were destroyed. The still uncompleted Capitol building was also set on fire, and the House of Representatives and the Library of Congress were gutted before a torrential rain doused the flames. It was on August 26, 1814, that General Ross realized how untenable was his hold on the Washington area and ordered a withdrawal from Washington. • Thus, the British learned nothing from their defeat in the Revolutionary War about the impossibility of garrisoning British troops in America. • • • THE FIRST ICBM. On August 26, 1957, the Soviet Union announced that it had successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of being fired “into any part of the world.” The announcement caused great concern in the United States, and started a national debate over the “missile gap” between America and Russia. For years after World War II, both the United States and the Soviet Union had been trying to perfect a long-range missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Building on the successes of Nazi Germany in developing the V-1 and V-2 rockets that pummeled Great Britain during the last months of World War II, both American and Russian scientists raced to improve the range and accuracy of such missiles. Both nations relied heavily on captured German scientists in their efforts. In July 1957, the US seemed to win the race when the Atlas, an ICBM with a speed of up to 20,000 miles an hour and an effective range of 5,000 miles, was ready for testing. The test, however, was a disaster. The missile rose only about 5,000 feet into the air, tumbled, and plunged to earth. Just a month later, the Soviets claimed success by announcing that their own ICBM had been tested, had “covered a huge distance in a brief time,” and “landed in the target area.” No details were given in the Russian announcement and some commentators in the US doubted that the ICBM test had been as successful as claimed. Nevertheless, the Soviet possession of this “ultimate weapon,” coupled with recent successful tests by the Russians of atomic and hydrogen bombs, concerned America. If the Soviets did indeed perfect their ICBM, no part of the United States would be completely safe from possible atomic attack. Less than two months later, the Soviets sent the satellite Sputnik into space. Concern quickly turned to fear in the United States, as it seemed the Russians were gaining the upper hand in the arms and space races. The American government accelerated its own missile and space programs. The Soviet successes -- and American failures -- became an issue in the 1960 presidential campaign. Democratic challenger John F. Kennedy charged that the outgoing Eisenhower administration had allowed a dangerous “missile gap” to develop between the United States and the Soviet Union, and Kennedy made missile development and the space program priorities for his presidency. • But, Russia and much of the world have learned nothing in the 60 often fear-laden years that ICBMs and nuclear warheads have been with us as they refuse to confront North Korea and Iran. • • • CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. In his Thursday's American Thinker essay, "Christopher Columbus Gets the Sledgehammer," Michael Curtis reflects on the position of Columbus as the popularly regarded discoverer of the Americas, although he was anticipated by the Viking Leif Erickson in the 11th century. Curtis notes that : "Columbus is acclaimed as the starter of the European colonization of the New World, starting with the 2,500 who arrived with him in 1493. He did not find gold, but he did find natives, and his treatment of them has given rise to controversy. Among other things, he headed the transatlantic slave trade. There remains controversy over the extent of his actions and those of his men. Differences exist among historians over the nature and degree of his responsibility for the poor treatment, at one extreme termed genocide, of native peoples -- namely, the Taino people of Hispaniola and the Arawak people. Included in the criticism are the pressure of overwork; the importation and spread of European diseases, possibly syphilis; and the imposition of a form of slavery and sexual slavery." In the United States, his name, Columbus or Columbia, began appearing as a synonym for "America." He is honored by statues, and his name is given to the US capital, the District of Columbia, and the capital cities of Ohio and South Carolina, plus a busy traffic circle and intersection in Manhattan, and the Columbia river. • Professor Curtis then discusses the troubles and confusion, "caused by the fact that a number of cities in the United States have been the setting for the destruction of monuments of those disliked for various reasons. These have mostly been prominent figures of the old Confederacy in the South. On this issue, the country is divided, and an increasing volume of voices, not only President Donald Trump, has asked where this destruction will stop." • In all the "dislike for various resons," Curtis reminds us that Christopher Columbus, whatever else he did, never fought for the Confederate side in the US Civil War, and he may not have owned personal slaves : "Yet, in 2015, red paint and a hatchet were applied to a statue of Columbus in Detroit, and another in Boston was painted red. A more serious event occurred in the middle of the night on August 21, 2017, when a monument to Columbus built in 1792, erected by a Frenchman and the oldest in the country, was vandalized in northeast Baltimore. A group calling itself Popular Resistance used a sledgehammer to deface the base of the monument. A relevant video by someone naming himself Ty called Columbus a "genocidal terrorist" and declared, without detail, that the future is racial and economic justice. For this group, Columbus represents the initial invasion of European capitalism into the Western hemisphere and the capitalist exploitation in the Americas on the backs of indigenous peoples." • Professor Curtis, like President Trump, asks : "Where does the destruction stop?" He notes that the Reverend Al Sharpton appears to have called for the destruction of the Jefferson Memorial. But, says the Professor, there are two issues : "One is that destruction becomes infectious....and the second wider problem is whether 19th-century behavior -- and with Columbus, 15th-century behavior -- should be judged by 21st-century morals and standards. Or should it be recognized as part of the history of the country, unwelcome though it may be to some? A number of the Founding Fathers owned slaves. Are their monuments to be destroyed, or are they to be kept because the Founders established the Constitution?" • Curtis speaks with the authority of scholarship and the wisdom of age when he says he fears that history is being erased -- already, a number of cities in the US have decided to change the name of Columbus Day to "Indigenous Peoples Day." Abraham Lincoln, says Professor Curtis, "is probably one of the few beyond reproach. It is wise to remember his words about the two sides in the Civil War in his Second Inaugural on March 4, 1865 : "both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other." • • • ABRAHAM LINCOLN. Is Professor Curtis wrong about Lincoln? TheHill on Thursday published a piece about former Speaker Newt Gingrich comparing Progressive critics of President Trump to "slave newspapers" attacking Abraham Lincoln. On Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight, Gingrich described a Civil War history professor he knows who told him Lincoln's inaugural address was criticized in similar ways to the criticism Trump faces : "He has made the case that the parallels between Trump's inaugural and Lincoln's inaugural and the reactions to them are amazing. If you go and you look at how South Carolina's slave newspapers responded to Lincoln and then you look at how the left responded to Trump, they are almost verbatim parallels." Gingrich told Carlson he believes the gap between the left and the right is getting wider and compromise wouldn’t work. He added that he doesn’t want to see a civil war, but he believes the “left is going to get crazier and crazier. One side or the other wins,” he said. • On Monday, the Federalist Papers published an article by Brian Thomas, who wrote : "Democrats like to pretend they have a long history of fighting racism, but the truth is that it was Democrats who supported slavery, upheld Jim Crow laws, and were so deeply involved in the Ku Klux Klan that the 1924 Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City is called the 'Klanbake' convention. Republicans fought against slavery in the south while Democrats defended it, and while Democrats pushed for segregation and Jim Crow laws, Republicans supported the Civil Rights act of 1964." • A recent article by Scott Osborn of "I Have the Truth" sheds light on the Democratic Party’s true history : "After World War I, the popularity of the Klan surged due to connections of its public relations leadership to those who had promoted the successful Prohibition Amendment to the US Constitution, becoming a political power throughout many regions of the United States, not just in the South. Its local political strength throughout the country gave it a major role in the 1924 Democratic Party National Convention....The notoriety of the “Klanbake” convention and the violence it produced cast a lasting shadow over the Democratic Party’s prospects in the 1924 election and contributed to their defeat by incumbent Republican President Calvin Coolidge....Since its founding in the late 1820s, the Democratic Party has defended slavery, started the Civil War, and opposed Reconstruction. The Democratic Party imposed segregation. Its members engaged in the lynchings of blacks and opposed the civil rights acts of the 1950s and ’60s. During Reconstruction, hundreds of black men were elected to Southern state legislatures as Republicans, and 22 black Republicans served in the US Congress by 1900. A few decades later, the only serious congressional opposition to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 came from Democrats -- 80% of Republicans in the House of Representatives supported the bill. Less than 70% of Democrats did. The Democratic Party did not elect a black man to Congress until 1935. The true history of the Democratic Party is an embarrassment to modern Democrats who pretend that conservatives espouse bigotry." • Last Friday, American Thinker asked in an article : "Tear down Lincoln’s words, too?" The American Thinker Editor said : "With the Lincoln Memorial vandalized, a statue of Lincoln burned in Chacago, and trained thugs in black masks tearing down the past, let them tear Abe Lincoln's words down, too. From the Gettysburg Address : 'Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure....But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.' And from the Second Inaugural : 'With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.' " the American Thinker Editor note : "And yes, Lincoln was also hated and despised, just like our current President." • But, black Americans seem to have learned nothing from Lincoln and the Republican Party's devotion to their freedom because they remain chained to the Democrat Party that oppresses them. • • • ERASING HISTORY : RIGHTEOUS OR WRONG-HEADED? On July 22, American Thinker published another Michael Curtis article titled "Making Changes to Erase History: Righteous or Wrong-Headed?" Curtis says that in the United States, "reassessment of the past has become not only a political tool, but also a reminder of the complexities of history. Everyone can recognize that invidious discrimination is unacceptable, but so is a conviction of historical certainty. Tension between those extreme views is now familiar in the United States -- mostly in the American South, where many are concerned with removing symbols, primarily Confederate monuments and flags, that are seen as representing racism and discrimination." Thus, says Professor Curtis : "The American South is thus consciously reassessing history. The mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, has asserted that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of humanity. Accordingly, the New Orleans City Council on December 17, 2015, voted 6-1 to remove four monuments, built between 1884 and 1915, from their prominent perches in the city. They included statues of General Robert E. Lee, General PGT Beauregard, and Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and also the obelisk dedicated to the Battle of Liberty Place, the uprising in 1874 by a white group to overthrow the racially integrated governance set up in the city after the Civil War. In all the eleven former Confederate states, controversy has ranged over the official honoring of the past, which, for the critics, represented ideologies, favoring segregation and slavery, in conflict with the Constitution and laws of the US and which did not meet current standards of equality and non discrimination. Each area in the South has chosen those who are currently unacceptable. The city council in Charlottesville, Virginia, in February, 2017, voted 3-2 to remove the 95-year-old equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee from Lee Park, which is to be renamed. The state of Tennessee in 2017 rejected the monument to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, slave trader and early member of and perhaps grand wizard of Ku Klux Klan." • Michael Curtis points out that the same phenomenon is occurring in Great Britain, noting the decision by Kings College, London : "which has acted in accordance with anti-establishment sentiment and is succumbing to student pressure. Its world famous Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience is moving busts and portraits of its founding fathers from its main entrance and replacing them with those of blacks, Asians, and ethnic minorities. According to officials, portraits of whites are too intimidating for ethnic minorities, and their substitutes are less alienating for students from a diverse cultural background." Curtis calls this an example of "discrimination against whites that is all the more disconcerting because of the stature of those removed. Missing in what is the largest center for research in its stated fields in Europe will be Dr. Henry Maudsley, a leading psychiatrist whose donation led to the founding of the medical school in 1924, and Sir Frederick Mott, who in 1896 proposed university training courses in psychiatry and who was responsible for important research on syphilis and its treatment. This discrimination follows that of two years ago, when Kings College removed a photograph of the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, because of his opposition to the redefinition of marriage." • Professor Curtis concludes : "Changes of this kind -- the removal of portraits of outstanding scholars and the change of teaching materials to feature a range of ethnic groups -- may have a tone of moral uprightness, but they also smack of political correctness gone mad....Where do the changes end? Perhaps removing Nelson from his column in Trafalgar Square because it offends French visitors?" • • • DEAR READERS, according to a new poll from Rasmussen Reports, the majority of registered voters agree with President Trump’s statement that it is “sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.” A full 50% of voters agree with that sentiment while only 37% disagree, while 12% don’t know what to think about it. • A poll taken by Marist for NPR and the “PBS NewsHour,” asked, “Do you think statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy should _____”? Respondents were allowed to pick from three choices: “remain as a historical symbol,” “be removed because they are offensive to some people,” or “unsure.” Overall 62% chose “remain as a historical symbol,” including 44% of Democrats and 40% of black Americans. • The online news outlet Restore American Glory says : "Democrats have apparently decided they finally have a winning issue on their hands, and they are jumping feet first into this divisive (and, truth be told, utterly meaningless) topic. Yes, let’s tear ’em all down! That’ll solve the problems facing the black community! That’ll put an end to police brutality! That’ll finally lift the black community out of poverty! Democrats : If there’s something we can do that won’t actually do anything, we’re all for it." • Take note -- in the Rasmussen poll, 43% of black Americans think that removing these Confederate monuments will only WORSEN race relations in this country!....Of course, they’ll still vote for the next Democrat, won’t they?" • So, black Americans have learned from history -- perhaps 43% of them -- what white Americans and minorities of all kinds recognize -- this Erase America movement is an attempt by an extremist fringe of the left to change what it means to be the United States. These hard Leftists -- Antifa, BLM, extreme feminists, academic liberals -- all come together around one basic and gigantically false premise -- it is that the US was founded in evil, developed in evil, and continues to exist in a state of evil. Restore American Glory states : "The Confederacy was not an aberration to them. Slavery was not a single dark stain on an otherwise good nation. To them, these are the symbols of a nation that was born in a cauldron of terror -- a nation that is to this day a symbol of fascism and white supremacy." • So, destroying statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are the least of our problems. These extremists -- supported loudly by the mainstream media and Progressive Democrats -- are gearing up to take aim at the Constitution, the American flag, the Rule of Law. They want to tear down America and remake it in their violent, socialist image. They are the new Confederacy, and civil war is their strategy. • It is easy to see why they want to erase American history. But, it is our duty not to let this happen. We must educate our children and to keep reminding our citizens of America's real history and its lessons for us today. As Pliny the Younger said : "No book was so bad but that some good might be got out of it."