At one time, Americans believed that the wholesale rewriting of history happened only in the Soviet Union.
“The problem with writing about history in the Soviet Union,” went the joke, “is that you never know what’s going to happen yesterday.”
A classic example of this occurred in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
Lavrenti Beria had been head of the NKVD, the dreaded secret police, from 1938 to 1953. In 1953, following the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Beria was arrested and executed on orders of his fellow Communist Party leaders, who feared they were targets of a coming purge.
Lavrenti Beria
But the Great Soviet Encyclopedia had just gone to press with a long article singing Beria’s praises.
What to do?
The editors of the Encyclopedia wrote an equally long article about “the Bering Straits,” which was to be pasted over the article about Beria, and sent this off to its subscribers. An unknown number of them decided it was safer to paste accordingly.
During the 2016 Presidential election, the Republican party furiously rewrote history in a desperate attempt to win the White House.
Specifically, its members tried to convince Americans that:
- President George W. Bush “kept us safe” (excluding, of course, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, which snuffed out the lives of 3,000 Americans); and/or
- President Bush isn’t to blame for 9/11—it’s his predecessor, Bill Clinton (who left office more than a year and a half before 9/11).
Joseph Stalin was depicted in Soviet “history” texts as the architect of Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany during World War II.
No “historian” dared mention that Stalin’s wholesale purges of the Red Army in the 1930s had made the country vulnerable to the German attack in 1941. As had Stalin’s “nonaggression” pact with Germany in 1939, where he and Hitler aggressively divided Poland between them.
Joseph Stalin
But Russians no longer have a monopoly on rewriting history.
In 2015, Jeb Bush entered the “Rewriting History for Americans” sweepstakes.
On October 16, 2015, during an interview on Bloomberg TV, Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate for President in 2016, dared speak (for Republicans) the unspeakable:
“When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time. He was President, OK? Blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was President. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”
Bush was quick to respond on Twitter: “How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.”
Jeb Bush
Trump replied:
“At the debate you said your brother kept us safe–I wanted to be nice & did not mention the WTC came down during his watch, 9/11.”
And: “No @JebBush, you’re pathetic for saying nothing happened during your brother’s term when the World Trade Center was attacked and came down.”
Suddenly, on February 13, another Republican Presidential candidate rushed to rewrite 9/11: Florida United States Senator Marco Rubio.
According to Rubio: “The World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton didn’t kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance to kill him.”
And on the following day, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he again made the charge: “If you’re going to ascribe blame, don’t blame George W. Bush, blame a decision that was made years earlier, not to take out bin Laden when the opportunity presented itself.”
All of which ignores such embarrassing truths as:
- During the first eight months of the Bush Presidency, Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council, was not permitted to brief President Bush, despite mounting evidence of plans for a new Al-Qaeda outrage.
- From January 20 to September 11, 2001, Bush was on vacation, according to the Washington Post, 42% of the time.
- National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice initially refused to hold a cabinet-level meeting on the subject of terrorism. Then she insisted that the matter be handled only by a more junior Deputy Principals meeting.
- Paul Wolfowitz, the number-two man at the Department of Defense, said: “I don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden.”
- Even after Clarke outlined the threat posed by Al-Qaeda, Wolfowitz—whose real target was Saddam Hussein—said: “You give bin Laden too much credit.”
- Finally, at a meeting with Rice on September 4, 2001, Clarke challenged her to “picture yourself at a moment when in the very near future Al-Qaeda has killed hundreds of Americans, and imagine asking yourself what you wish then that you had already done.”
- Seven days later, Al-Qaeda struck, and 3,000 Americans died horrifically—and needlessly.
- Neither Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld nor Wolowitz ever admitted their negligence. Nor has any of them been brought to account.
People who say the Republicans are “batshit crazy” for denying responsibility for 9/11 clearly haven’t read—or understood—George Orwell’s novel, 1984.
The unnamed Party’s slogan is: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
The same holds true for Republicans: They hope to rewrite the past, as Joseph Stalin did, to wash away their crimes and errors–and pin these on their self-declared enemies.
And thus gain—and retain—absolute power over 300 million Americans.
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"1984, ABC NEWS, ASHLEY WARDEN, CBS NEWS, CENSORSHIP, CHILLI'S, CNN, EMPLOYEE RIGHTS, FACEBOOK, FIRST AMENDMENT, GEORGE ORWELL, HARALSON COUNTY MIDDLE SCHOOL, JOHNNY COOK, JOSEPH MCCARTHY, NBC NEWS, POLICE, SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAMS, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, TWITTER
FIRST AMENDMENT DANGERS
In Business, Law, Social commentary on June 13, 2013 at 12:07 amWARNING: Believing that the First Amendment gives you the legal right to express your opinion may be hazardous to your career.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Of course, that refers only to Congress. It says nothing about employers–and especially those self-appointed pseudo-gods who claim to be the personification of virtue and infallibility.
If you doubt it, just ask Johnny Cook, who until recently worked as a bus driver for the Haralson County Middle School in Georgia.
In late May, a sixth-grade student boarding Cook’s school bus said he was still hungry. Cook asked why, and the student said he hadn’t been given any lunch.
The reason: He had been forty cents short for buying a reduced lunch. So he hadn’t been given anything, not even the peanut butter offered to everyone else.
Furious, Cook vented his spleen on his Facebook page on May 21:
“This child is already on reduced lunch [program] and we can’t let him eat. Are you kidding me? I’m certian there was leftover food thrown away today.
“But kids were turned away because they didn’t have .40 on there account. As a tax payer I would much rather feed a child than throw it away. I would rather feed a child than to give food stamps to a crack head.”
Just two days later, Cook was fired over that post.
Johnny Cook and friends
The “official reason,” as given by Superintendent Brett Stanton, was that Cook had violated the school’s social media policy by daring to express his opinion publicly.
The policy states:
“Students who post or contribute any comment or content on social networking sites that cause a substantial disruption to the instructional environment are subject to disciplinary procedures.
“Employees who post or contribute any comment or content on social networking sites that causes a substantial disruption to the instructional environment are subject to disciplinary procedures up and including termination.”
This is similar to the policies–and atmosphere–of the Joseph McCarthy “smear and fear” era of the 1950s. You didn’t have to actually be proven an actual Communist, or even a Communist sympathizer.
All that was neeeded to condemn you to permanent unemployment was to become “controversial.” That way, the employer didn’t have to actually prove the employee’s unfitness.
The Almighty Employer need only declare: “Your usefulness to me is over.”
Consider the statement offered by Superintendent Stanton: “I can assure you it did not happen,” he told the CBS affiliate in Atlanta.
And how could he be so certain? Because, said Stanton, he had thoroughly investigated the incident.
“The video surveillance footage clearly shows that the student never went through the lunch lines at the county middle school,” Stanton said.
Therefore, Stanton said, the boy couldn’t have been offered the bagged lunch for students in his situation.
When asked if someone should have noticed the boy wasn’t eating lunch, he had a ready excuse for that: “When you have almost 1,000 students, it’s very difficult to notice.”
Stanton wouldn’t discuss Cook’s termination because it’s a personnel matter, but did say the school district has a strict Facebook policy.
CBS Atlanta contacted the sixth-grader’s family–who backed up Cook’s story.
Cook, who is married and the father of two kids, told CBS Atlanta that he felt in his “heart of hearts the kid was telling the truth.”
A petition has been posted to Change.org demanding that Cook be reinstated. It has so far gained more than 10,000 signatures.
Nor is Cook the only victim of employers who have no regard for the First Amendment.
Ashley Warden, a waitress at an Oklahoma City Chili’s insulted “stupid cops” on her Facebook page. In 2012, her potty-training toddler pulled down his pants in his grandmother’s front yard–and a passing officer gave Warden a public urination ticket for $2,500.
Warden was quickly fired. In an official statement, Chilli’s gave this excuse:
“With the changing world of digital and social media, Chili’s has Social Media Guidelines in place, asking our team members to always be respectful of our guests and to use proper judgement when discussing actions in the work place. After looking into the matter, we have taken action to prevent this from happening again.”
Put more honestly: “We have taken action to prevent” other employees from daring to exercise their own First Amendment rights.
Employers need to be legally forced to show as much respect for the free speech rights of Americans as Congress is required to.
Until this happens, the workplace will continue to resemble George Orwell’s vision of 1984–a world where anyone can become a “non-person” for the most trivial of reasons.
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