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HISTORY

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The New York Times Hasn’t Always Cared About Ukrainians By Jack Cashill

By on February 28th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/the_new_york_emtimesem_hasnt_always_cared_about_ukrainians.html

At his CPAC speech on Saturday, former President Donald Trump could not have been clearer in his denunciation of Vladimir Putin. “The Russian attack on Ukraine is appalling,” said Trump. “it’s an outrage and an atrocity that should never have been allowed to occur.”

Yet the fact that Trump called Putin “smart” and “savvy” is, for the New York Times, prima facie evidence of his affection for Mother Russia. Indeed, the Times had the nerve to run a delusional op-ed on Sunday headlined, “How the American Right Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Russia.”

Earth to the New York Times: No one on the right is pulling for Putin. The Times is pushing this Russia-love narrative both to salvage some political gain from Biden’s catastrophic foreign policy and to cover for its own historic indifference to the Ukrainian people.

The truth is that British and American conservatives have long cared about the Ukraine. Most still do. The international left, the New York Times in particular, cared more about the success of Josef Stalin’s lethal policies than it did the millions of Ukrainians those policies killed.

The New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, admitted to being “pleased as punch” when Stalin announced his Five-Year Plan in the fall of 1928. Stalin, as Duranty observed in his well-titled book, I Write as I Please, was the world’s “greatest living statesman.” A pioneer in the art of fake news, Duranty saw signs of greatness in Stalin’s plan “to socialize, virtually overnight, a hundred million of the stubbornest and most ignorant peasants in the world.”

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Who Was August Landmesser?: Paul Collits

By on February 24th, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/12/je-suis-august-landmesser/

Ezra Levant, a Canadian hero in the cause of freedom, and naturally branded “far right” and worse by his enemies, has done a powerful, indeed, a gut-wrenching story to camera about the hottest place in hell, and those who are destined to occupy that hideous place. He and others have referred to this as the curse of those who do nothing in the face of evil.

According to Scott Horton of Harper’s:

One of John F. Kennedy’s favorite quotations, which he attributed to Dante, was that “The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality”. Of course Dante never actually said that, but the sense of the statement is clearly to be found in these lines from the third canto of the Inferno. 

Many of those who are merely standing by during the Covid State crisis, in the view of many, the worst crisis in the history of modern “liberal” democracies, cluelessly look back and chastise those who in 1930s Germany did little or nothing to oppose the Nazi tyranny but simply went quietly, to get by. Don’t rock the boat, and they won’t notice us. We don’t really know what they are up to. Today we reassure ourselves that we would never have behaved like all those compliant Germans.

Levant chose to focus on a particular German who did stand out and stand up during the oppression. His name was August Landmesser (pictured above). He has become famous for the photograph of his refusal to perform the Nazi salute during a rally. His arms were firmly folded, in defiance of the overwhelming, lunatic majority all around him—the madness of a German crowd.

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An Undiscovered Coronavirus? The Mystery of the ‘Russian Flu’ Scientists are grasping for any example that could help anticipate the future of Covid, even a mysterious respiratory pandemic that spread in the late 19th century.

By on February 16th, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/health/russian-flu-coronavirus.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

By Gina Kolata

In May 1889, people living in Bukhara, a city that was then part of the Russian Empire, began sickening and dying. The respiratory virus that killed them became known as the Russian flu. It swept the world, overwhelming hospitals and killing the old with special ferocity.

Schools and factories were forced to close because so many students and workers were sick. Some of the infected described an odd symptom: a loss of smell and taste. And some of those who recovered reported a lingering exhaustion.

The Russian flu finally ended a few years later, after at least three waves of infection.

Its patterns of infection and symptoms have led some virologists and historians of medicine to now wonder: Might the Russian flu actually have been a pandemic driven by a coronavirus? And could its course give us clues about how our pandemic will play out and wind down?

If a coronavirus caused the Russian flu, some believe that pathogen may still be around, its descendants circulating worldwide as one of the four coronaviruses that cause the common cold. If so, it would be different from flu pandemics whose viruses stick around for a while only to be replaced by new variants years later that cause a new pandemic.

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Thomas Lipscomb: Hidden In Plain Sight The Key To The Kennedy Assassination Is On Public Display In The National Archives Emerald Robinson

By on February 15th, 2022

https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/thomas-lipscomb-hidden-in-plain-sight?fbclid=IwAR3VbolyoXybZeWYUNhIb9PeUNfl9BwbjTtQtZaUnhB9mLmkhpUlLGllwVg

NOTE: The renowned journalist Thomas Lipscomb has just completed a new manuscript (with Jerome Kroth) titled The Oswald Letter and it contains a number of staggering claims based on these federally released documents as well as fresh accounts from new eyewitnesses who have never before been interviewed. This is the third excerpt from The Oswald Letter to appear here on my Substack.

According to the catalog listing of the National Archives in Washington, this is the “Windshield Removed from the Presidential Limousine that Carried President John F. Kennedy During the Assassination.” It is still carrying its FBI evidence tab.

But is it?

The Secret Service had the Presidential limousine shipped from Dallas to the White House garage the night of the assassination. Then they sent it to the Ford Factory at River Rouge in Detroit, where it was built, for refitting.

When a senior manager there, George S. Whitaker, came to work two days after the assassination, he was ordered to immediately report to the glass plant lab. He was let in through locked doors and found two of his men had already removed the limousine windshield.

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Are the JFK assassination lies finally coming apart? By Thomas Lifson

By on February 15th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/are_the_jfk_assassination_lies_finally_coming_apart.html

We are closing in on 60 years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, and in that time, there have been endless independent investigations disputing, or occasionally endorsing, the conclusions of the Warren Commission.  If I were reading instead of writing this blog post, at this point, I would be worrying that yet another boring recitation of arcana from the mountains of evidence was about to be presented to me.

But excerpts from a new book about to be published on the assassination blew my socks off.  It contains what looks like solid evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone and that Kennedy was killed by a bullet fired from in front of his limousine, one that entered the car through the windshield.  Lee Harvey Oswald’s purported location in the Texas School Book Depository was to the side of and behind the car, so he could not have fired a bullet that entered the car through the windshield.

I am so old that I watched the assassination of Oswald on live television and heard him say, “I’m just a patsy” right before he died, words that have haunted me ever since.  Those are not the words of an entirely innocent man, who would have said, “I didn’t do it,” or similar words of denial.  No, Oswald’s words suggested knowledge of larger forces that participated and his realization that he had been played.  And a desire to tell his story.  A desire that Jack Ruby thwarted seconds later.

Emerald Robinson has published on Substack a fascinating excerpt from a book manuscript titled The Oswald Letter, written by Thomas Lipscomb with Jerome Koch. 

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The 1918 flu didn’t end in 1918. Here’s what its third year can teach us.By Jess McHugh

By on February 13th, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/02/06/1918-flu-fourth-wave/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

In New York City in 1920 — nearly two years into a deadly influenza pandemic that would claim at least 50 million lives worldwide — the new year began on a bright note.

“Best Health Report for City in 53 Years,” boasted a headline in the New York Times on Jan. 4, 1920, after New York had survived three devastating waves of the flu virus. The nation as a whole, which would ultimately lose 675,000 people to the disease, believed that the end might finally be in sight.

Within a few weeks, however, those optimistic headlines began to change. Before the end of the month, New York City would experience a surge in influenza cases. Chicago and other urban centers reported the same.

‘The 1918 flu is still with us’: The deadliest pandemic ever is still causing problems today

Residents should prepare themselves for an “influenza return,” New York City health commissioner Royal S. Copeland warned. He predicted that the virus variant responsible for the surge would be milder and that those who had fallen ill the previous year would be immune. He was wrong, at least in part: While many places worldwide did not see a fourth wave of the great influenza pandemic, several metropolises — including New York City, Chicago and Detroit — had another deadly season in store.

As the coronavirus pandemic creeps into its third year, and the death toll in the United States reaches 900,000, the 1918 influenza pandemic can offer some insight into how this chapter of history might draw to a close. But an “ending,” when it comes to viruses such as these, is a misleading word. Eventually, experts say, the novel coronavirus is likely to transition from a deadly and disruptive pathogen to a milder, more seasonal nuisance.

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Let the Genocide Games Begin! By Rick Moran

By on January 31st, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/01/30/let-the-genocide-games-begin-n1554381

This Thursday, thousands of athletes from more than 100 nations will arrive in Beijing to participate in the Winter Olympiad, a made-for-TV spectacular.

In 2011, NBC agreed to a $4.38 billion contract with the International Olympic Committee to broadcast the Olympics through the 2020 games, the most expensive television rights deal in Olympic history. NBC then agreed to a $7.75 billion contract extension in 2014, to air the games through 2032.

Over the fortnight during which the games are played, the spectacle will be watched by more than a billion-and-a-half people at one time or another, including an unknown number of Uyghur Muslims. The significance of carrying on with the games at this point in the history of the Uyghurs is that China is seeking to destroy their culture, their way of life, and their religion in the name of conforming to the Communist ideology.

In December, an independent tribunal found the People’s Republic of China guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt, of committing crimes of torture, crimes against humanity, and genocide against the Uyghur people.

The U.S. State Department has also condemned the PRC, accusing them of “arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government; forced disappearances by the government; torture by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison and detention conditions; arbitrary detention by the government, including the mass detention of more than one million Uyghurs and other members of predominantly Muslim minority groups in extrajudicial internment camps and an additional two million subjected to daytime-only ‘re-education’ training; … arbitrary interference with privacy; pervasive and intrusive technical surveillance and monitoring; serious restrictions on free expression, the press, and the internet, including physical attacks on and criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others as well as their family members, and censorship and site blocking; … severe restrictions and suppression of religious freedom; substantial restrictions on freedom of movement; … forced sterilization and coerced abortions; forced labor and trafficking in persons.”

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Thomas Paine Publishes Common Sense- January 10, 1776

By on January 10th, 2022

On January 9, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a pamphlet that set the American colonies afire with a longing for independence.

Paine was born in England to a poor family and received little schooling. For several years he drifted from job to job – corset maker, seaman, schoolteacher, customs collector, tobacco seller  – without success. His prospects were few when he met Benjamin Franklin, then living in London, who suggested he go to America. Sailing across the Atlantic, Paine caught a fever and was carried ashore half dead in Philadelphia. Once recovered, letters of recommendation from Franklin helped him get a job as a magazine writer.

It has been said that Paine “had more brains than books, more sense than education, more courage than politeness, more strength than polish.” But he could work magic with pen and paper. In Common Sense made bold arguments that Americans should demand their freedom. “The birthday of a new world is at hand,” he insisted. He attacked the idea that people must live under a king, and urged a break from Britain.

“O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!” he wrote. “Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! [America] receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”

Paine’s words sounded like a trumpet blast through the colonies. Thousands snatched up the pamphlet and decided that he was right. As Thomas Edison, one of America’s great geniuses, wrote 150 years later, “We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. . . . In Common Sense Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable.”

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Misrepresenting Madison, Destabilizing Democracy By Thomas Koenig

By on January 10th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/misrepresenting-madison-destabilizing-democracy/#slide-1

A Columbia law professor takes to the New York Times to libel the Constitution’s chief architect and to propose system-unsettling changes to our politics.

T here is much talk of the impending death of American democracy. Some of it is worth reading and worrying about. A volatile situation is brewing as partisan tribes become more internally homogenous and distanced from one another — geographically, ideologically, and culturally.

We can ward off potential disaster via piecemeal changes geared toward lowering the temperature and weakening the power of the most extreme elements in our politics; we will catalyze disaster through brash, systemic overhauls. Enter Columbia Law professor Jedediah Britton-Purdy and his recent New York Times opinion piece, “The Republican Party Is Succeeding Because We Are Not a True Democracy.”

In support of his advocacy for constitutional change by simple majority, Britton-Purdy draws a straight line from our supposedly antidemocratic constitutional structure to much of the Republican Party’s (ongoing) descent into conspiracy and rejection of the democratic process during the Trump era.

He argues that “an antidemocratic system has bred an antidemocratic party,” while claiming that key Founders such as James Madison harbored “elite dislike and mistrust of majority rule” that they then translated into an antidemocratic document. That’s not true.

The current iteration of the Republican Party has many problems. But we can’t let partisan arguments slip into libels of the Constitution and its Framers for a simple reason: Recommitting ourselves to their insights regarding government and human nature — and the Constitution they framed embodying those very insights — is the only way we’ll forge a functional politics. Defaming the dead isn’t a good call when it is their wisdom that could help lead us out of our present mess.

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American Slavery in the Global Context By Dan McLaughlin

By on January 8th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/01/24/american-slavery-in-the-global-context/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

No topic in American history is more enduringly controversial than slavery. It sits at the heart of every indictment of America and our founding principles. It is central to battles over critical race theory, the removal of monuments, and the renaming of places and institutions. It is invoked in debates over policing and welfare.

For the New York Times’ 1619 Project, slavery is foundational to American identity. Its beginning is our “true founding.” We should “reframe our understanding of U.S. history by considering 1619 as our country’s origin point.” Slavery is “the seed of so much of what has made us unique” and should sit at “the center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” Yet this claim lacks the global perspective we need to examine what is actually uniquely American. Where did American slavery come from? How did it differ from other systems of bondage and forced labor?

Slavery was a human crime of which Americans were one part. It proliferated for millennia before slaves are first known to have been sold in Virginia, in 1619. It persisted long after it was abolished in the United States in 1865. It was practiced by people far from our shores without American influence. People were enslaved in virtually every society from which American slaves were descended. Few of the world’s major civilizations have been innocent of it.

In the story of world slavery, Americans loom much larger in the history of abolition than in the history of enslavement. Seymour Drescher, one of the great historians of slavery, summarizes the landscape in 1775:

Personal bondage was the prevailing form of labor in most of the world. Personal freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution. In 1772, Arthur Young estimated that only 33 million of the world’s 775 million inhabitants could be called free. Adam Smith offered a similarly somber ratio to his students and prophesied that slavery was unlikely to disappear for ages, if ever.

Slavery and its close cousin, serfdom, were the lot of a vast proportion of the human race, beginning in ancient times and continuing for over 1,300 years after the fall of Rome in the fifth century a.d. Slavery’s origins cannot be located; it predates history, and in many parts of the world it appears as early as there are historical records. It appears in Genesis, Exodus, and the Code of Hammurabi. It was pervasive in classical Athens and Sparta and in republican and imperial Rome. Under Augustus Caesar, a third of the population of Italy were slaves. Aristotle defended slavery as the natural order of humanity — among non-Greeks. Few other ancient writers even considered the morality of slavery.

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