If you want to see how thoroughly we are in the grips of PC censorship, just read this horrifying story from the Telegraph. It has the evidence: the famous pic of Churchill, and the cleaned-up version now on display in a British museum.
It’s part of a larger problem, one that existed long before Soviet airbrushes and Reuters photoshops: the battle for control over the past. He who writes history manipulates contemporary consciousness in order to affect the future. As Voltaire nicely put it, “History is a bag of tricks we play upon the dead.”
Which brings me to the central crisis in America today: increasingly, our people don’t know much of anything about the past. Look at the history curricula at the top universities, and marvel, as I do, at the near-total lack of courses in military history. It’s been airbrushed out. I can’t help believing that this is purposeful. The academic elites don’t want Americans to know that the history of man is basically the history of war.
Peace has many dangers, including the potentially fatal belief that all disputes can be negotiated.
And including the somewhat less dangerous conceit that real men don’t smoke cigars. Pfui.
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