Category Archives: History

History, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

The Warsaw Uprising

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Thoughts on the seventieth anniversary:

I think it’s fair to say that the world has learned something from the war and the Holocaust. When hateful people begin referring to enemy groups as insects or clods of human feces or as sons of pigs and monkeys, we all know now, much better than we did in the 1930s, that this is part and parcel of the dehumanization that invariably precedes genocide. This is a hopeful collective memory earned from the war, and of course it applies universally.

Needless to say, there have been other, literally monumental efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, and of the heroisms great and small of World War II. But as the generation that lived during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the war flies from us with each passing day, we Jews, anyway, ought to know better than to rely on stone and glass monuments and buildings and sculptures and physical structures to preserve memory. That is not the Jewish way. Other civilizations throughout history have built great buildings—pyramids and palaces and castles and cathedrals and great walls, and some have even carved huge idols in mountainsides. Yet all of those civilizations have either perished, been layered over to oblivion, or are likely one day to be layered over. Jews instead built palaces of memory in the hearts and minds of their children using words and melodies, not bricks and stone. Jews have translated their historical experiences into ramparts of the spirit.

That’s the purpose of the Seder, to preserve memories, and rituals like that grow more important as the events of seven decades past pass from living memory with the aging and deaths of their participants.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

To Be A Racist Bigot In America

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…is just fine, “…as long as you’re a bigot in support of Democratic causes. Which, come to think of it, is how things were in Bull Connor’s day, too.”

I’m going to start calling them out on their racism at every opportunity. They’ve been doing it to me for years, and when I call them out on it, it will have the additional virtue of being actually true, and not just a dishonest Alinskyite tactic.

History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Inspiration Apollo

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Amy Shira Teitel writes that Apollo 8 was not done for the purpose of inspiration, though that was a huge side effect.

Here’s what I wrote in the book:

…despite all of the precautions, NASA did demonstrate its willingness to risk the lives of its astronauts, when in a daring mission, it won the space race in December of 1968 with the Apollo 8 mission around the moon. What was daring about it?

The previous April, there had been a partial disaster during an early test of the new Saturn V rocket, whose express purpose was to send astronauts to the moon. It suffered from the same “pogo” problems that had earlier afflicted the Titan, almost shaking the vehicle apart during ascent, with some structural failure in the first stage. Two of the second-stage’s five engines failed, and the single third-stage engine failed to reignite in orbit. Von Braun’s team went to work to sort out the problems, and a few months later, after some ground tests, declared it ready to fly again. NASA was under some pressure because there were rumors that the Soviets were going to send some cosmonauts to circumnavigate the moon with the Zond spacecraft by the end of the year (they had already sent some animals on such a trip).

While it wouldn’t have been a loss of the space race, the goal of which was to land on the moon, and not just fly around it, being beaten to that next first would have been another blow to the national psyche after Sputnik and Gagarin, and the first space walk. The lunar module wasn’t ready yet, and not expected to be until the spring of 1969, so NASA decided to scrap their plan of doing an earth-orbit rehearsal, and instead decided to go for the moon on the very next flight of the Saturn V, and without another unmanned test flight despite the problems on the previous flight. They were willing to throw the dice, and the astronauts (Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders) were willing to risk their lives, because it was important. The whole purpose of the program was to demonstrate that our system was superior to the Soviets, and to be afraid to fly would have rendered it pointless. It is hard to imagine today’s NASA taking such a risk with its astronauts’ lives, because nothing NASA is doing today is perceived as being sufficiently important.

[Cross posted at Safe Is Not An Option]

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The State Of The Union

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…is inappropriate:

Jefferson’s happy settlement lasted for just over a century, until, in the heady progressive climate of 1913, Woodrow Wilson brought the damn thing back. Given Wilson’s attitude toward limited government, toward the Constitution, and toward the American settlement, that it was he who did this should raise alarm bells even in the ears of the speech’s defenders. With the admirable openness that marked his unadmirable hostility to America’s founding ideals, Wilson announced that he would restore the speech because it was fitting for a strong and king-like president with an agenda — in other words, he directly reversed Jefferson’s logic. A brief respite followed the Wilson administration: After delivering his first in person, Calvin Coolidge agreed with Wilson’s characterization of the event, and, wishing to be anything but a king-like president, re-abolished the practice, delivering the remainder of his reports in writing and setting an example that was followed by his successor, Herbert Hoover. But it wasn’t to last. FDR had higher pretensions and brought the speech back. With a few exceptions (none based on principle), it has stayed with us ever since.

One more reason that Wilson was such an awful president, and Coolidge is ovunderrated. The SOTA is nothing but an opportunity for political grandstanding.