{"id":62984,"date":"2017-05-05T07:00:17","date_gmt":"2017-05-05T12:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=62984"},"modified":"2017-05-04T21:10:51","modified_gmt":"2017-05-05T02:10:51","slug":"memoryhole-o-matic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=62984","title":{"rendered":"Memoryhole-o-matic!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A regular reader writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A year ago, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/quora\/2016\/07\/26\/could_the_u_s_have_avoided_the_civil_war.html\">Slate asked if the civil war could have been avoided and went back decades before the war to point to events<\/a> leading up to and potentially giving rise to the civil war, as well as potential ways conflict might have been diverted.<br \/>\nToday, I&#8217;m told that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/the_slatest\/2017\/05\/01\/trump_andrew_jackson_a_slaveholder_could_have_solved_america_s_slavery_question.html\">it is a stupid, crazy thing to ponder<\/a> and that the civil war happened in 1861, not decades earlier.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m not excited about Trump talking up a pro-slavery Democrat. But, I think the Left&#8217;s reaction is funny.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In the late thirties and early forties, after the USSR and Germany signed the Molotov\/Von Ribbentrop Pact, folk singer and communist Pete Seeger <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=41483\">wrote a series of songs castigating FDR<\/a> for criticizing Stalin&#8217;s new bestie Hitler. \u00a0 \u00a0Then, when Hitler abrogated the pact by invading the USSR, Seeger withdrew the songs from circulation &#8211; literally, asking fans to return their copies to the store &#8211; and wrote music praising FDR and the war effort.<\/p>\n<p>If Big Left couldn&#8217;t flush it&#8217;s own past down the memory hole on demand, the entire movement wouldn&#8217;t be intellectually sustainable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A regular reader writes: A year ago, Slate asked if the civil war could have been avoided and went back decades before the war to point to events leading up to and potentially giving rise to the civil war, as well as potential ways conflict might have been diverted. Today, I&#8217;m told that it is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62985,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62984\/revisions\/62985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}