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.
Today, the Republican party is furiously rewriting history in a desperate attempt to win the 2016 Presidential election.
Specifically, its members are now trying 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
Recently, Jeb Bush has 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.”
Jeb 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
Not one to let Bush–or anyone else–have the last word, Trump blasted more Tweets:
“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.”
Now another Republican Presidential candidate has taken to rewriting 9/11: Florida United States Senator Marco Rubio.
This came during the Republican Presidential debate in Greenville, South Carolina, on February 13.
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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A WARNING FOR TRUMP–AND AMERICA
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on February 3, 2016 at 12:01 am“We will have so much winning if I get elected [President] that you may get bored with winning.”
It was vintage Donald Trump, speaking at a September, 2015 Capitol Hill rally to protest President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
(That was before February 1, 2016, when Trump learned he had been beaten by Texas U.S. Senator Eduardo Cruz in the Iowa caucuses for the Republican Presidential nomination.
(The man who had boasted, “No one remembers who came in second” found himself in exactly that place. And tens of thousands of Twitter users gleefully retweeted the quote to celebrate a defeat that Trump had said was impossible.)
“Believe me, I agree, you’ll never get bored with winning. We never get bored. We are going to turn this country around. We are going to start winning big on trade.
“Militarily, we’re going to build up our military. We’re going to have such a strong military that nobody, nobody is going to mess with us. We’re not going to have to use it.”
Donald Trump
Trump’s boast reflected he mindset–if not the words–of an earlier CEO whose ego carried him–and his country–to ruin.
Ever since Adolf Hitler shot himself in his underground Berlin Bunker on April 30, 1945, historians have fiercely debated: Was der Fuehrer a military genius or a disastrous imbecile?
Literally thousands of books have been written on Hitler’s six-year stint as a field commander. But for an overall view of Hitler’s generalship, an excellent choice is How Hitler Could have Won World War II by Bevin Alexander.
Among the fatal errors that led to the defeat of the defeat of the Third Reich:
As the war turned increasingly against him, Hitler became ever more rigid in his thinking. He demanded absolute control over the smallest details of his forces.
This, in turn, led to astonishing and unnecessary losses among their ranks.
One such incident was immortalized in the 1962 movie, The Longest Day, about the Allied invasion of France known as D-Day.
On June 6, 1944, General Erwin Rommel ordered the panzer tanks to drive the Allies from the Normandy beaches. But these could not be released except on direct orders of the Fuehrer.
As Hitler’s chief of staff, General Alfred Jodl, informed Rommel: The Fuehrer was asleep–and was not to be awakened. By the time Hitler awoke and issued the order, it was too late.
Nor could Hitler accept responsibility for the policies that were leading Germany to certain defeat.
He blamed his generals, accused them of cowardice, and relieved many of the best ones from command.
Among those sacked was Heinz Guderian, creator of the German panzer corps–and responsible for the blitzkreig victory against France in 1940.
Another was Erich von Manstein, designer of the strategy that defeated France in six weeks–which Germany had failed to do during four years of World War 1.
Finally, on April 29, 1945–with the Russians only blocks from his underground Berlin bunker–Hitler dictated his “Last Political Testament.”
Once again, he refused to accept responsibility for unleashing a war that would ultimately consume 50 million lives:
“It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was desired and instigated exclusively by those international statesmen who either were of Jewish origin or worked for Jewish interests.”
Hitler had launched the invasion of Poland–and World War II–with a lie: That Poland had attacked Germany. Fittingly, he closed the war–and his life–with a final lie.
Joachim C. Fest, author of Hitler (1973), writes of the surprise that awaited Allied soldiers occupying Nazi Germany in 1945:
“Almost without exception, virtually from one moment to the next, Nazism vanished after the death of Hitler and the surrender.
“It was as if National Socialism had been nothing but the motion, the state of intoxication and the catastrophe it had caused….
“Once again it became plain that National Socialism, like Fascism in general, was dependent to the core on superior force, arrogance, triumph, and by its nature had no resources in the moment of defeat.”
The ancient Greeks believed “A man’s character is his destiny.” For Adolf Hitler–and the nations he ravaged–that proved fatally true.
It’s to be seen whether the same will prove true for Donald Trump–and the United States.
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