Category: History
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The Fall of Saigon
Fifty years ago today. I wrote in my journal (30 April 1975): Saigon was overrun by the communists today. 150 billion dollars and 50,000 American lives wasted during the war. 58,00 is now the standardly cited figure. Goeffrey Wawro, The Vietnam War: A Military History (Basic Books, 2024, 652 pp.): The war had killed 58,000…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Billboard Top Ten in October, 1963 at the Height of the Profumo Affair
Some of us are old enough to remember John Profumo and his entanglement with sex kitten Christine Keeler, which eventually lead to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's resignation in October of 1963: At a party at the country estate of Lord Astor on July 8, 1961, British Secretary of State for War John Profumo, then a rising…
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Is it 1933 again or 1938?
I say it's 1938. What am I asking? What am I saying?
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RFK Jr. on WWIII
Pay attention to his endorsement of DJT. I am assuming you want to live a few years longer. For historical context, listen to JFK's 22 October 1962 address to the nation on the Cuban Missile Crisis. I shudder to think what might have happened if any of the following had been in charge in those…
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Repost from Election Day, 2016: Catholics Must Support Trump
This is an unredacted repost from 8 November 2016. My opinion of Trump is higher now than it was then. But the piece is basically on the right track and I stand by it. I threw the dice for Trump and the sequel showed that I was right to do so. I was vindicated in…
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Trotsky’s (Misplaced) Faith in Man
On 20 August 1940, 84 years ago today, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico City where an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day. Yet another proof of how the Left eats its own. The last days of Lev…
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The Reichstag Fire and the January 6th ‘Insurrection’
How close is the analogy? And what could the analogy be taken to show? Is there an historian in the house?
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Lenin: 100 Years Later
Here: Academic Marxists of various stripes still appeal to Lenin’s 1917 pamphlet The State and Revolution in an effort to find a more “libertarian” Lenin. But this is at once a chimera and a bad joke. Like Marx himself, but even more intensely and ferociously, Lenin combines a Jacobin defense of terror and tyranny with a…
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Why Isn’t There a Palestinian State?
A history lesson in under five minutes. A more nuanced narrative from eight years ago. Is there an historian in the house?
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On this Date in 1970
Kent State Shootings. Comparison with current campus unrest. Neil Young's Ohio.
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‘Nuclear’ Thoughts on Dylan’s Birthday
We've gotten used to living under the Sword of Damocles: One of its more famous [invocations] came in 1961 during the Cold War, when President John F. Kennedy gave a speech before the United Nations in which he said that “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the…
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Hegel on History: Another Case of Misattribution
Misattributed to Hegel: "We learn from history that we do not learn from history." Close, but that's not what he says. I haven't checked the following quotations, but they look good to the eye of one who has read his fair share of the Swabian genius. HT: Seth Nimbosa Was die Erfahrung aber und die…
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It is 410 A. D.
Alaric is sacking Rome. An obscure Roman philosopher is penning an agenda for the salvation of the republic. His writings are lost to history. In any case, too little, too late. Will we share his fate? Three years after the Visigoth invasion, a Christian Platonist and mystic in North Africa puts pen to paper. As…
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His Story
History is largely His Story, but part of that story is how place was made, by men mainly, but not solely, for Her Story.
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Beware the Ides of March, Vladimir
"They are come, but not yet gone." Thus spoke the soothsayer to Julius Caesar when the dictator perpetuus said to the soothsayer that the Ides of March had come and he was still alive. Dictator perpetuus has an overly confident ring to it much like eintausendjähriges Reich. Some history here. The Death of Caesar (1798) by Vincenzo Camuccini