"Shutting down Memorial is also another step in Mr. Putin’s effort to recast Russia’s legacy as a series of glorious accomplishments and soften the image of the often-brutal Soviet regime. While the state opened a comprehensive
Gulag history museum in Moscow and Mr. Putin laid flowers at
a new monument to the victims of Soviet repression, the increasingly emboldened Kremlin has moved aggressively to remove alternative interpretations of Russian history by organizations it does not control.... In recent years, Mr. Putin has shown a keen interest in shaping interpretation of Russia’s history, publishing his views in lengthy
articles about the Soviet Union’s key contribution to the victory over Nazism and 'the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.' His viewpoint includes a renunciation of the democratic steps taken in the 1990s, which included reforms, self-criticism and social and economic upheaval.... 'There’s an old, banal formula that whoever doesn’t know the past is doomed to repeat it,' [said Jan Z. Raczynski, chairman of the board of Memorial International.] “The situation of the past decade shows we are moving in that direction.... The general prosecutor said we try to portray the Soviet Union as a terrorist organization... Well, we don’t have to try. The Soviet Union was a terrorist organization. In no other country were so many citizens imprisoned under false political accusations.'"
ADDED: The formula is "banal" because it's oft-repeated. It's a repetition about repetition. Yes, but
who said it first?Variations on the repeating-history theme appear alongside debates about attribution. Irish statesman Edmund Burke is often misquoted as having said, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with the aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” while British statesman Winston Churchill wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
AND: What are we doing now that is a repetition of the past that we don't know is a repetition because we haven't learned history?
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31 comments:
Liquidated . . . That's funny coming from Duranty's spawn.
It is interesting that the obvious parallels between Putin's censorship/propaganda and the left's 1619 project/CRT garbage and BLM propaganda don't smack these stupid journalists silly.
Thank God something like that could not happen in the United States!!
"It is interesting that the obvious parallels between Putin's censorship/propaganda and the left's 1619 project/CRT garbage and BLM propaganda don't smack these stupid journalists silly."
This is something I thought about while putting the post together. The big difference is that Putin wants his people to love the country and to think well of its history, so he's more like the American right-wingers who want schools to exclude the "1619 project/CRT garbage and BLM propaganda." The left wants something more like what Memorial International was doing.
It's interesting that this difference didn't smack you silly!
Ann Althouse said...
It's interesting that this difference didn't smack you silly!
I apologize for not making everything crystal clear for you. I know you are perpetually stuck in this right/left paradigm and you hate us and will act like this as a result.
The "1619 project/CRT garbage and BLM propaganda." is an attempt to rewrite history.
Putin is trying to rewrite history to cover the left's agenda.
Memorial International was an attempt to preserve history as it actually happened that reflects poorly on the left.
American Right-wingers want our history to be preserved and told honestly because it reflects favorably on freedom and capitalism and natural rights.
Putin is whitewashing communism's past. But nobody did that more vociferously than the NYT's. The NYT's is an evil publication demonstrated repeatedly over decades.
What are we doing now that is a repetition of the past that we don't know is a repetition because we haven't learned history?
Too easy. The 1970s Fed responded to supply shocks (oil price increases) by goosing aggregate demand, thereby leading to high inflation. Sound familiar?
Since 1938, the USA has enforced its Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), which is similar to the law that Russia is enforcing against the organization called Memorial.
In recent years, the US Government has used FARA to persecute political opponents. For example, several of Donald Trump's supporters were persecuted on bogus FARA "violations" by Trump-hating officials of the DOJ, of the FBI and of Robert Mueller's Special-Counsel gang.
FARA prosecution were threatened against Trump's supporters so that they would snitch or would compose false accusations against President Trump, so that he might be impeached and removed from his elected position.
"What are we doing now that is a repetition of the past that we don't know is a repetition because we haven't learned history?"
Pretty much everything from what I can see. I can think of entire lists of things we're doing that we should know better than to repeat. It has not been that long since the 20th century, but it seems as if the entire 100 years has been forgotten, or frankly, never learned.
And this: "The big difference is that Putin wants his people to love the country and to think well of its history, so he's more like the American right-wingers who want schools to exclude the "1619 project/CRT garbage and BLM propaganda."
Right wingers don't want to exclude the 1619 Project to make Americans love their country more. They want to exclude it because it's fiction. We want to exclude it to protect the truth of who we are. Not to hide the truth, but not to change it to meet a false narrative, either. That is more in line with a Soviet or Putinesque approach. The Left is always more Soviet in it's approach.
Althouse: "The left wants something more like what Memorial International was doing."
Nope.
The left is spending all of its time attempting to rewrite all US history to conform to todays political narrative.
To deny this would be silly.
So no, efforts to preserve actual history within Russia by Memorial is the opposite of what the left in the US is doing....in addition to teaching our children that their skin color and "gender" define them above all else.
"Shutting down Memorial is also another step in Mr. Putin’s effort to recast Russia’s legacy as a series of glorious accomplishments and soften the image of the often-brutal Soviet regime."
He's just deferring to the judgment of agency professionals, which represents the unquestioned historical consensus.
I’ve generally seen the “doomed to repeat” quote attributed to Santayana. He likely wrote it before Churchill. Santayana also wrote something like “In a moving world, constant readapting is the price of longevity”. That reads well, but it seems to contradict the history aphorism. If we are repeating history, we surely have a kind of longevity, and at the same time we certainly are not readapting.
The Great Patriotic War continues along the lines laid down by Stalin which has been summed by the failed Italian dictator,
"Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."
It sounds like a DC gulag and nationwide witch hunt... 20+ trimesters in progress.
the left's 1619 project/CRT garbage and BLM propaganda
Plausible, but fake. Critical Racist's Theory presumes diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry) a la diversity, inequity, and exclusion. And Some, Select [Black] Lives Matter. One step forward, two steps backward. Baby Lives Matter
I've read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. What I find odd reading them today is how much these stories decades old relating to events even decades earlier seem to fit current events. Fountainhead is pretty much the story of MSM manipulation of information alongside "professional" organizations to create false narratives to discredit those they politically disagree. It even has former media moguls falling from grace and then being attacked by the media empire they helped to create. I find this comforting, because it means what we are seeing today happened in the past and we overcame it. I'm not too comforted by the notion that part of overcoming it involved a very deadly war.
It does seem like the Russian Museum simply documented historical EVENTS.
Nobody is attempting to expunge historical events, like slavery, from US school curricula.
As CRT/1691 espousers readily admit, the point is to indoctrinate a singular historical THEORY of systemic oppression, one that's couched in racist notions and solutions.
Germany has only produced one Hitler, but Russia seems to produce psycho despots at regular intervals. Putin isn't so crazy right now, but, as he grows older and crankier, I wonder who will be around to tell him to cool it. ...Re history repeating itself: When the Bolshies took power they took pains to open up the tombs of the hallowed Orthodox saints and holy men. There was an Orthodox belief that the remains of holy men were so pure and sanctified that they did not rot and stink. The Bolshies displayed their wretched cadavers in front of their shrines to let the faithful know how foolish such beliefs were. The Bolshies later went on to spend considerable time and money to preserve the sacred corpses of Lenin and Stalin in pristine condition and display their remains to the faithful.
In my opinion a lot of people ascribe to the Prof opinions, motives, and emotions that aren't obvious from her posts.
Anyway, I'm old enough to remember when Memorial was said to be a nest of neo-Nazis.
The trouble with history is that we seem doomed to repeat it whether we remember it or not, and most of us don't, especially our leaders. There's another proverb to the effect that great wars break out when the last survivors of the previous one--who knew how godawful it was and couldn't forget it--are gone.
Uh-oh.
Following up my comment at 2:44 PM
Partisan officials of DOJ/FBI enforce the FARA in a partisan manner.
For example, Trump-hating government officials enforced FARA aggressively against Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort. Such enforcement was intended to compel Flynn and Manafort (and other Trump supporters) to snitch or to compel false testimony so that Trump might be impeached and removed from his elected office.
In contrast, those same officials did not enforce FARA against Tony Podesta, a supporter and donor for Hillary Clinton. They simply advised Podesta to accomplish a FARA registration belatedly. After Podesta followed those officials' advice, he was allowed to go his merry way.
In Russia, their similar law is likewise enforced in a partisan manner, so that the regime's opponents are pressured and punished and so that the regime's supporters are coddled and acquitted.
John Lukacs said that one great difference between Hitler and Stalin was that Hitler came out of the heart of European culture and took over the what was in many ways the most advanced country in the world, which was surprising.
Bloody tyranny was expected from the semi-barbaric Muscovites.
we have Jan 6th protesters rotting in jail awaiting trial. One year after the the event. The Russians are trying to forget their Gulags, we have them on-going.
When the NYT reported about the FARA prosecutions against Trump supporters such as Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, the articles pretended that that the prosecutions were legitimate. For example, Flynn received X dollars for lobbying for the Turkish Government and then advocated on behalf of the Turkish government, but failed to accomplish a FARA registration promptly. The substance of the charge against Flynn was reported somewhat.
In contrast, when the NYT reports about the Russian government's charges against Memorial, the actual charges are not explained to the readers. Instead, the whole story is about Vladimir Putin wanting to shut down Memorial because Putin is a Stalinist and because Memorial is trying to expose Stalinist crimes.
Of course, however, Memorial is being funded by foreign agencies, such as the CIA, and is refusing to report those foreign donations as required by the Russian law that is similar to our FARA. Nothing about that is reported in our newspapers.
Our newspapers do not report that our own USA has a similar law, FARA, that is used to persecute and pressure political opponents.
Every action by Congress, the Media, and the FBI surrounding the Jan 6th protest would've made Joe Stalin Proud.
And Ashli Babbitt is still dead, by the way.
I do not think it is a direct replica of the past, but the left is sure eating it's own at a rapid pace. If the restraints imposed by the Federal system and the Constitution fail, then we could see a repeat of the French Revolution in this country. If they ever manage to take our guns, then in my opinion if the left gets power there will be a bloodbath first and camps second. You think that Stalin couldn't happen here? Take a good look at the leadership of the Democratic Party.
What's the big deal?
Democrats have erased history by tearing down statues of their confederate generals.
Putin will have to make more effort to equal the US DOJ political prisoners. Hundreds of them with no trials, no evidence.
"No, no, these people are using red posters and those other people were using blue posters" is all fake differentiation.
The essence here is, both the Putin regime and the Biden regime are using government power to rewrite history and shape it in the manner that most pleases themselves.
Ann asks: “ What are we doing now that is a repetition of the past that we don't know is a repetition because we haven't learned history?”
History says that what, in his book A Conflict of Visions, Sowell calls the “constrained vision” (although I prefer Pinker’s renaming this in his magnum opus The Blank Slate to the Tragic Vision), generally is far more successful at actual progress towards happier, healthier, more prosperous, more peaceful, longer life than the “unconstrained vision” (Pinker: Utopian Vision) that is prevailing among our betters today. The two visions correspond roughly to the modern-day descendents of classical Burkean conservatism and and the heirs of early 20th century progressives, respectively. In The Blank Slate, Pinker goes so far as to declare the Tragic Vision as decisively winning in the real world of results that better obtain the Jeffersonian ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, in addition to the more prosaic advances mentioned earlier. We should recall, for example, what “…and human nature born again”, a Utopian Vision if there ever was one, got the French - such as up close and personal audiences with Doctor Guillotin’s hungry invention.
Everyone should read and ponder on The Blank Slate; I don’t agree with everything in it, but if we took Pinker’s advice and tried to deal with our evolved human nature as it is instead of largely denying human nature even exists, we as a nation and world would be much better off.
How do we have moral standing vs Putin, where we have feet of clay with a corrupt, biased, politicized system of justice.
The revolver news articles about Jan 6 are terrifying.
I dont know who wrote what Ann re-posted, but I wouldn't think anything he says is accurate or based on any detailed knowledge. Santayana is in fact, IMHO, not a "Spanish philosopher". He did have a Spanish surname and a Spanish father and lived in Spain til he was 8 years old. But he was fully Americanized in Boston after age 9 by his Sturgis relatives. His writings are in English. He was a Harvard Professor who wrote in English. I don't believe ANY of his philosophical writings are written in Spanish. He never moved back to Spain. Calling him a "Spanish philosopher" is bit like calling Alexander Hamilton a "Nevisian statesman" because he was born on Nevis and lived on Nevis until his teens, or Andrew Carnegie a "Scottish industrialist", or referring to Obama as "Indonesian President" because he lived there from 6 to 10 and spoke the language. These descriptions are not 100% wrong, but they suggest the writer may be missing the main point because he really doesnt know very much about the person he is talking about. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. Sorry to be pedantic, it's a minor point but...
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