All This, And World War II

As I wrote on the Pajamas homepage in the link to Ronald Radosh’s post featuring a new video of ACORN’s Bertha Lewis in action, come for the McCarthy references, stay for the comparison of the tea parties morphing into FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.

The clip features Lewis sagely opining:

Any of these groups that says, “I’m young, I’m Democratic, and I’m a socialist,” is okay with me. You know that’s no light thing to do — to actually say, I’m a socialist. You’ve got to know, actually, we are living in a time that’s going to dwarf the McCarthy era. It is going to dwarf the internment of World War II. We are right now in a time that is going to dwarf the era of Jim Crow and segregation.

They are coming. And they are coming after you. And they are going to be brutal and oppressive. They’ve already shown it. … This is not rhetoric or hyperbole — this is real. … This tea party so-called movement — a bowel-movement in my estimation — and this blatant uncovering and ripping off the mask of racism.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey wonders if President Obama, a former associate of Lewis’s august firm, is aware of the massive divisions between the Soviets and the Americans that caused World War II to flow directly into the Cold War:

The “atmosphere of mutual trust”? This could only be uttered by a man with the certainty of the uneducated about World War II — the kind of man who could have the Americans liberating Auschwitz, for example. Neither FDR nor Winston Churchill trusted Josef Stalin or the Russians any more than absolutely necessary, and for good reason. And to they extent they did at Potsdam, it turned into a 50-year nightmare for eastern Europe, which the Russians occupied until the end of the Cold War.

Surely, Barack Obama had to be aware of that history. It was in all the papers in 1989. As one commenter put it at Reuters:

You mean we support the mutual trust between the US and Russia like the one that allowed Soviet troops to reportedly rape from tens of thousands to two million women after the capture of Berlin, and 50,000 during and after the occupation of Budapest?[The one that allowed the Soviets in former Axis countries, such as Germany, Romania and Hungary, to viewe cities, villages and farms as being open to pillaging and looting? The one that allowed the Soviets to dominate, rule, and oppress eastern Europe for the next 44 years? That kind of mutual trust?

Yeah, that’s exactly what Obama means, unfortunately.

As Ed writes, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those academics who learn the politically-correct, facile interpretation of history are doomed to look like fools when they open their mouths.”

Call it “epistemic closure,” for lack of a better phrase.