History
October 22, 2017 — Scott Johnson
The New York Times has humiliated itself with the series of essays on the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution that it has published under the rubric of Red Century. Michelle Malkin peeked in on it here. I peeked in on it in “The Times revisits the old-time religion” and drew on the great Harvey Klehr’s contribution to the series in “The romance of Soviet stooges.” This week’s New York
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October 21, 2017 — Scott Johnson
I watched all 18 hours of the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick/Geoffrey Ward documentary The Vietnam War. Ten years in the making, it draws on enormous resources to fix our history in falsity. It seeks to endow the war as portrayed by the antiwar left with the status of the authorized version. A credulous consumer of the antiwar literature of the era, I began to get a clue around about the time
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October 18, 2017 — Scott Johnson
I posted my “Notes on the Ken Burns version” as a placeholder until the time more knowledgeable observers than I published their comments on the updated left-wing version of the Vietnam War. In place of fairness it gives us a pretense of Olympian if sorrowful detachment. In place of a fair representation of the men who fought the war, it gives us voices ranging from disillusion to shame. The Ken
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October 15, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Tim Marshall is the provost of the university known as The New School. A friend forwards Marshall’s email on Curriculum Disruption Week with the assurance that “this is not a parody.” It’s not a parody, but it is almost funny! One might also say the descent to hell is easy. It turns out that we are in the middle of Curriculum Disruption Week. Provost Marshall announces: Leading up to the
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October 14, 2017 — Scott Johnson
I put everything I had to offer on the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick/Geoffrey Ward documentary The Vietnam War into “Notes on the Ken Burns version.” I think the documentary seeks to fix the record in falsity. To take only one example, as I say in my “Notes,” Burns and his colleagues were apparently unable to find a soldier to recall his service in anything other than shades of disillusion, disgust and
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October 11, 2017 — John Hinderaker
I don’t think we have written about the article by Professor Bruce Gilley of Portland State University titled “The Case For Colonialism,” which was published in Third World Quarterly. I haven’t read the article, but this is the abstract. It sounds as though the article is in line with my own thinking on the subject. While it certainly had its dark side–e.g., pretty much anything involving Belgium–European colonialism was, on
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October 9, 2017 — Scott Johnson
President Trump has issued the traditional proclamation recognizing Columbus Day with unambivalent praise. That seems eminently reasonable to me. Columbus Day is intended to commemorate the first link in the chain of events leading to the founding of the United States. Those of us who love the United States are inclined to celebrate the day. Trump puts it this way in the proclamation: “The permanent arrival of Europeans to the
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October 7, 2017 — Scott Johnson
I want to add a few notes to Paul’s comments as well as my own on the gargantuan Ken Burns/Lynn Novick PBS documentary The Vietnam War. I think it warrants more informed commentary than my own, but let me these offer notes while we wait for knowledgeable observers such as Mackubin Owens, Victor Davis Hanson and James Robbins to weigh in. As of this weekend, we do have George Veith’s
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October 3, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
For years, John and I have defended the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, rated by most historians as a failure and by some as among the worst in American history. This post is, I think, my most extensive commentary on the subject. In addition to defending Grant’s presidency, my post considers why historians have treated it so unfairly. The answer, I argued, is that historians found it in their interest
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October 1, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
I didn’t watch all 18 hours of Ken Burns’ series about the Vietnam War, but I forced myself to endure roughly two-thirds of it. I found Burns’ version of the war biased and superficial. Scott has performed a service by posting a conference about the series held at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). As Scott says, Lewis Sorley’s presentation, which begins at 48:00, provides a devastating critique
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October 1, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Having lived through the period of maximum American participation in the Vietnam War as an interested observer and antiwar protester, I have come to doubt much of what I believed to be true at the time. For example, I took at face value the pseudo scholarly 1967 account of The United States in Vietnam by George M. Kahin and John W. Lewis. Kahin and Lewis asserted that the conflict was
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September 29, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Jews begin the observance of Yom Kippur at sundown tonight with the Kol Nidre prayer service. A couple of years ago a Christian friend asked to join us at the service we attend. During the service she pointed in our prayer book to an adaptation of the prayer composed by the reformist German Rabbi Leo Baeck for delivery in German synagogues during the Kol Nidre service on October 10, 1935.
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September 27, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Many decades ago, what is now the Style Section of the Washington Post was called the Women’s Page (or Pages, I don’t remember which). I never read the Women’s Page, but a bit of gossip in today’s paper strikes me as perfect grist for that mill. To be fair, it also relates to style, or the lack thereof. The Post tells us, per a new book, that heiress Bunny Mellon
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September 27, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Michael Walsh likes to say of the left, “They never stop; they never sleep; they never quit.” Which is why Michael advises that our constant disposition should always be: crush the left. A small but telling case in point is Alger Hiss. Is there anyone still around who thinks he wasn’t guilty of being an agent of Soviet influence, if not much worse? You’d have thought that Allen Weinstein’s Perjury
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September 27, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Dwight Eisenhower was one of the greatest Americans of the twentieth century. As Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, he led the United States to victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. As president of the United States, he presided over a period of normalcy and peace with many accomplishments that benefited the country. A memorial is to be erected on the mall in Washington, DC, in his honor.
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September 26, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Mark Moyar is the historian and author of Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954-1965, the revisionist history of the Vietnam war as well as other important books. Mark is director of the Project on Military and Diplomatic History at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). There is no one whose opinion of the 10-part, 18-hour PBS documentary history of the war by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick I
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September 18, 2017 — Scott Johnson
I think we have a bone to pick with Google, but I am grateful for the Google doodle reminding us that today is the anniversary of the birth of Samuel Johnson. On the occasion of the 300th anniversary last year, Alan Jacobs offered the fine Books & Culture tribute “Man of sorrow.” I awakened to Johnson under the tutelage of Professor Jeffrey Hart, who required us to absorb Johnson’s great
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