Peace in Europe from 1945 through the fall of the Soviet Order was achieved in Yalta

The meeting was a failure in many ways but it succeeded in creating the harsh realities that gave Europe peace for about fifty years, a peace that even outlived half its chief guarantors, the Warsaw Pact, a divided Germany, and the Soviet Union.

Yalta Conference

Recall that in the 20th Century peace in Europe, or anyway absence of general war in Europe, has meant simply no war of Germany and its allies against France and its allies.

Put another way, no war of allied central European nations versus allied peripheral European nations.

The solution was a new order of European alliances splitting Europe down the middle and, not occupying or disarming, but partitioning Germany outright, dividing it between the two opposed alliances.

In retrospect, Versailles failed because it was not draconian enough toward Germany.

The French at Versailles had that right, anyway.

Wilson was the worst fool there.

The current guarantors are NATO, the EU, and other pan-European institutions, all which include Germany and very nearly all of Europe except Russia.

"Why gang of 8?" Steph asks.

China, Gang of Four.

When it started, journos caught the reference.

Nobody she asked, and I mean nobody, had the answer.

Really excellent video

The Abolitionists, a PBS American Experience series.

And very, very far from allowing any sort of moral equivalence to obtain between these folks and the slave owners and their broader alliance, the opponents of the abolitionists all over the country, including the mobs of the North.

Who, watching this, does not see that struggle as continuous with the struggles not only of the Civil War, but also of Reconstruction, and of the Civil Rights Era?

Or the struggle even today?

Oh, and last night there was the chilling Hitler on Trial, also on amazon video.

Also, in its way, the same struggle.

For liberté, égalité, and fraternité.

Did they tell us about this in school?

I went to high school in the mid 1960s and I don't recall being taught about Wilson's policy of squashing all news about the Spanish Flu in the US, making him partially responsible for the avalanche of American deaths.

Read accounts of Wilson and the war as well as Wilson and the flu and you will come to despise Wilson, if you don't already.

See this.

I stand by it.

Jihad is the Cold War's gift to the world

The word "pogrom" would be wholly out of place, however.

The extent of the violence in Elaine is greatly exaggerated by The Guardian, apparently to enhance weaponization of this history.

Wikipedia and USA Today give national totals for the Red Summer far lower than the total given by The Guardian for just this one small southern town.

The Guardian wants you to think of it as an episode of genocide, or at least of ethnic cleansing.

But in Ukraine alone and over 40 years, actual pogroms killed tens or hundreds of thousands and left millions homeless.

For comparison, Wikipedia: According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 [more than 80 years - PV] in the United States, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 whites.

More than 73 percent of lynchings in the post-Civil War period occurred in the Southern states.

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, 4,084 African-Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950 in the South.

That is not nothing, but it is by orders of magnitude a lesser atrocity.

Arkansas: tree honoring 1919 Elaine Massacre victims cut down

Officials are investigating after someone cut down a willow tree that was planted earlier this year to honor the victims of the 1919 Elaine Massacre in eastern Arkansas.

The willow was planted in April in rememabrance of the victims of the massacre, one of the largest racial mass killings in US history.

It occurred during the summer of 1919, when hundreds of African Americans died across the country, at the hands of white mob violence during what came to be known as the “Red Summer”.

Estimates of how many African Americans were killed in Elaine range from the low hundreds to more than 800, which would make it the deadliest such massacre in US history. 

Mass graves are thought to be situated around the town.

Whoa. The Dude abides.

Men Who Stare at Goats

Like police hiring psychics to find missing children.

Or there's The Men Who Stare at Goats

Even less funny.

Out of the mouths of babes and indiscreet politicians

Of course, CNN is delighted to do him as much harm as it can, as quickly as it can.

What a wonderful stroke of the hatchet!

'Watermelon smiles' and 'piccaninnies': What Boris Johnson has said previously about people in Africa

Many are those who agree with his assessments of who is at fault for what.

Rather fewer are those who share the scornful dismissiveness of his "watermelon smiles" remarks.

Maybe Trump, though.

Who will ever forget his tirade about immigration from "shithole countries", referring to Haiti and various other places, including some African states.

Clear and true vs fuzzy, murky, and wrong

Fuzzy, murky, and wrong:

Five myths about socialism

Clear and true:

What Americans Must Know About Socialism

Whitewashing is a thing. A different thing, I mean.

First, this is history I did not know, and it seems entirely appropriate to call this sort of thing "whitewashing", however inadvertent or thoughtless.

Not the downplaying or covering up of the evils of persons or events (though just such covering up, intentional or not, is one and perhaps the most common meaning of "whitewashing"), but memorializing history in a way that makes it only white history, ignoring the leading and broader participation of persons of color.

If American history is our history, that "our" cannot refer only to whites and that history as narrative cannot relate history as though the only leaders, or only participants, were white.

Second, if statues to these women to commemorate the good they did despite their nearly nazi racism are OK at all then so much more must be statues of Jefferson, Washington, and others commemorated not for their crimes but for the good they did or stood for.

A Whitewashed Monument to Women’s Suffrage

The New York City commission that oversees public artworks embraced a lily-white version of history in March when it approved a monument to the women’s rights movement that is scheduled to be unveiled in Central Park next year.

The two white women depicted in sculpture — Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony — played influential roles in the 19th-century struggle for women’s suffrage. 

But the duo also represented a classist and often racist faction of the movement that declined to accept African-Americans as equals.

Stanton invoked white supremacist slanders when she opposed the 15th Amendment — which ostensibly granted black men the right to vote — casting men of color as “Sambos,” tyrants and incipient rapists. 

She and Anthony compounded that offense by rendering black suffragists nearly invisible in “History of Woman Suffrage,” the multivolume history that still dominates popular thinking on the early women’s rights struggle.

It would repeat that insult to feature these two women alone in Central Park’s first suffrage monument. 

To do so would also make the city seem willfully blind to the work of black women who served at the vanguard of the fight for universal rights — and whose achievements have already shaped suffrage monuments in other cities.

Read the rest of this information rich and spot on piece.

This piece was published yesterday in the Times and the comments section is already closed.

That is absurd and annoying.

Jihad is the Cold War's gift to the world

Communism had no legs and was never going to engulf the world.

The only dominoes ever in play were a few strays in Southeast Asia and some flotsam in a few equally meaningless locales.

But the fantastically militant and global anti-communism of the "bear any burden, pay any price" types led Reagan and his advisors to seriously believe a Russian client state in Afghanistan was more dangerous than the Muslim crazies - Red Mosque types are an example (see Netflix, Among the Believers) - they funded and gave weapons to in order to drive out the reds.

Ronald Reagan personally and repeatedly called them "freedom fighters," though freedom was the furthest thing from their agenda.

He and his henchmen pretty much created the Taliban and handed over Afghanistan to them.

And that was actually worse for us, for Afghanistan, and for the world than a Soviet client state in that country would have been.

Particularly in view of the near approach of Communism's expiration date in Russia and Eastern Europe, an imminent collapse that, to the end, anti-communist intellectuals of the right were absolutely certain could never happen.

Right wing dictatorships, they insisted, had no staying power and would always fall to domestic forces creating liberal regimes within a few decades, at most.

But Communist regimes were different.

Communism is forever, they said.

Communism can only be overcome by attack from without.

As for the global ambitions and penchant for uninhibited violence of the Muslim fanatics they set loose on the world, not for a moment did they think of them as posing any serious threat to us, our allies, the world, or even the specifically Muslim world.

Ronald Reagan gave us 9/11 at the World Trade Center.

The Cold War, based as Jimmy Carter said on an "inordinate fear of Communism," gave us Jihad.

The anti-PC speech code in Poland

Netanyahu juge "inacceptables" les propos du Premier ministre polonais sur la Shoah

Il s'agit du dernier épisode en date dans la guerre des mots que se livre Jérusalem et Varsovie depuis l'adoption par le Parlement polonais d'une loi interdisant l'utilisation de l'expression "camps de la mort polonais" et punissant de trois ans de prison toute personne accusant l'Etat polonais de participation aux crimes nazis.

As today's Germans attempt to deny their unique responsibility for the Holocaust by exaggerating the roles of Russians, Ukrainians, and especially Poles, there has been push-back.

The Polish government, which already criminalizes various forms of hate speech, including anti-Semitic speech, has lately gone so far as to criminalize use of the expression "Polish death camps" and to punish by three year in prison anyone accusing the Polish state of participation in the Nazi's crimes.

[Of course, the Nazis destroyed the Polish state, murdered millions of Poles, and planned to murder or deport to Siberia some 85% of Poland's pre-war population.

And it was they who built and operated the death camps located in Poland.]

All which has given rise to protest against the polish measures by the Israeli political right, though the rejection of responsibility by the Polish government has been supported in the Israeli press.

Aux yeux des conservateurs au pouvoir en Pologne, la loi signée début février par le président polonais vise à empêcher l'utilisation de l'expression "camps de la mort polonais" à propos de ceux installés par l'Allemagne nazie en Pologne occupée.

Mais les responsables israéliens, toutes tendances confondues, y voient une tentative de nier la participation de certains Polonais à l'extermination des juifs.

A Bill of Rights? Why, whatever for?

While the ink was still wet, people were objecting the new government was not to be trusted without a Bill of Rights.

To which defenders replied it would be a government with no powers not expressly granted, and the powers expressly granted did not include the power, for example, to establish religion or restrict freedom of speech or the press.

If they were right, anything struck down for conflict with the Bill of Rights since their adoption could have been struck down as exceeding the powers of the federal government.

Do we believe that?

Under which enumerated power did the Congress suppress porn or seek to suppress abortion or gay marriage?

Or crossing state lines for immoral purposes?

Or sending porn through the mails?

Or mere possession of child porn?

If they can stop porn through the mails can they stop the New York Times?

Ratification.

What it says and what we wish it said

George Mason complained that giving the president the power to pardon was a bad idea because he could pardon guilty people with whom he was in cahoots, his friends or relatives, or even himself.

He made these and other complaints while the convention was wrapping up in Philadelphia, the final draft had been accepted, and people were getting ready to sign the new Constitution and go home.

Nothing was done about any of them.

Everybody was sick of it, all the deals and compromises had been made, and it was time to get out and get on with life.

Looking back, we have to wonder whether we have to agree that, as written, the president can pardon guilty people with whom he is in cahoots, his friends or relatives, or even himself.

And we have to regret the Framers never took the time to expressly rule out at least self pardons, and nor did anyone add such a provision to the initial list of amendments that became the Bill of Rights.

Perhaps this is one of the times we would want the Supremes to step in with a more creative spirit than usual, if the matter does arise, the spirit of The Living Constitution.

Ratification, Pauline Maier.

The morning after

Monroe wrote to Jefferson, partly in code, expounding his dissatisfaction with the constitution produced by Philadelphia.

He was seriously annoyed by the equal representation of the states in the senate, but most bothered by the lack of a congressional veto on state laws, essential to prevent state violations of the constitution and encroachments on federal powers.

John Marshall would fix that by insisting the power to nullify state laws that conflicted with the constitution belonged to the federal courts.

A better solution, really.

Much better than the idea that a power to nullify federal laws that conflict with the constitution belongs to the state courts.

Ratification.

The awful state of the union

The prologue has enough detail to horrify anyone who, looking back, would have wanted the union to succeed.

The government created by the Articles of Confederation was far from up to the job.

Not least threatening were the rebellions in the Northeast, most notably Shay's Rebellion, in which the rebels' demands were variously reported, reports ranging from tax relief for desperate farmers to complete abolition of all debts, public and private, and a complete, leveling redistribution of wealth.

The Articles gave the confederation no clear authority to put down rebellion, no navy, no power to tax, no authority to regulate foreign commerce, and an army of under 700 it couldn't pay any better than it could pay other officials or its own debts.

And, anyway, everything had to be decided by Congress, some things requiring the votes of 7 states and some 9.

But delegates from 9 states were rarely present and, often enough, not even from 7.

The prologue also contains summaries of various plans for a new national government sent to George Washington by friends who urged him to attend the Philadelphia convention as a Virginia delegate, and preside.

None of them thought the Confederation Congress could adequately reform the Articles, none had any faith in the amendment process of the Articles, and none had faith in the possibility of unanimous consent by the states.

All their models for a replacement for the government of the Articles featured separation of powers and a bicameral legislature.

The Confederation Congress itself called for the Philadelphia convention to do the drafting.

Ms. Maier is a fine writer, in a class with Barbara Tuchman and C. V. Wedgewood.

Ratification.

The soul of republicanism: no hereditary political power or office

Maier reports Washington's qualms about the Society of the Cincinnati in her prologue.

They had made membership in this influential body, an association of veteran officers of the Continental Army and Navy, hereditary, provoking Aedanus Burke to object that this "would lead to creation of an hereditary aristocracy, which was totally at odds with the republican system established by the Revolution," she says.

Later in the prologue, Maier writes of the situation in 1786, "The very future of the republic - a government without hereditary rulers, in which all power came from the people - seemed in doubt."

Ratification.

The Society became and remains hereditary, all the same, like the DAR.

But Burke's fear, though proved wrong, illuminates the meaning of republicanism in the America of that time, as does Maier's remark.

But note, too, the absence of offices reserved for clergy and, in the eventual constitution, of establishment.

Indeed there is no mention of God in it, and religion is only mentioned, in the unamended version, to exclude religious tests.

Historians, political scientists, and philosophers are sometimes more sanguine than lawyers

And perhaps more honest as well as more candid.

Pauline Maier, Ratification, 2010.

Introduction, 

. . . Readers who want a careful analysis of The Federalist, for example, will have to go elsewhere.

Except for the state of New York, it was less influential in 1787 and 1788 than in later times, when it was too often read as if it were a dispassionate, objective analysis of the Constitution, not a partisan statement written in the midst of a desperate fight in a critical state.

She seems to think there is such a thing.

Fair enough.

A fateful reversal of alliances

In 1936, because Hitler had publicly and genuinely supported the Italian conquest of Ethiopia while the Western powers - the Brits, the French, and the small fry of Europe - privately accepted but publicly opposed it, Mussolini, out of pique and against the true preference of nearly everyone else in Italy's classe politique, refused to oppose Hitler's re-militarization of the Rhineland in utter defiance of Germany's treaty obligations to the Versailles victors who, thanks in part to the Duce's agitations twenty years before, included Italy.

One pigheaded buffoon can ruin things for tens, hundreds of millions.

Reading Milza and Berstein, Le fascisme italien, 1919-1945.

By the way, both the US and the USSR had refused to comply with the largely hypocritical and fake League of Nations sanctions against Italy, ostensibly aimed at punishing and stopping its war of conquest.

History, quickly

From the Great Depression to the end of the Cold War, American unions and their own inordinate fear of Communism (Jimmy Carter certainly had that part right) made US plutes go easy on American workers.

The perceived threat - or temptation - of Communism is gone, and so are the unions.

And the most common forms of serious dissent are found among lower class whites who join racist militias, watch Fox News, read Breitbart, or vote Republican so the nigras won't steal the country from them.

And especially like Trump.

With a populace like that, they know it's their chance to beat the shit out of the little guys.

The little guys will hold their coats and cheer them on.