War on Memory
Not to mention common sense
Like if you want using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
This is a riff on a Brad Slager article in Townhall from June 2024.
Ted Koppel, the longtime host of Nightline on ABC, delivered a CBS Sunday Morning segment that shows how far mainstream media outlets have drifted from respected journalism and descended into the fever swamps of political hit pieces that not only destroy their credibility but continue their long War on Memory.
Dateline: Gettysburg
Koppel hosted the piece from the battlefield park. Remembering that this broadcast was at the height of the 2024 presidential campaign season, he placed a looming Trump presidency in an American Civil War framework. While delivering his trademarked stern and delirious delivery, he presents what he describes as “A war on memory,” tempered by the fact he is at a battlefield.
The story soon lapses into melodrama with a shot of a statue of Robert E. Lee, which Koppel describes with, “Despite his crushing defeat, Lee looms majestically over the battlefield.” He sounds bothered by this paradox. Next he speaks with Chris Gwnn, Gettysburg’s Chief of Interpretation Education. Gwinn explains, almost angrily, that the persistent memory in the area is that the war had been a noble fight…but today a moral equivalency exists which Gwinn does not trouble himself to explain—we just have to know that today some Americans want a return to the Peculiar Institution. Gwinn says all the correct things (like a good Park Service employee) regarding this War on Memory, so he gets positioned as a political expert.
Dateline: Virginia
In Shenandoah County, Koppel spotlighted a pair of schools being re-renamed…horror of horrors… TJ “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee, monikers removed in 2020. Koppel regards this blasphemy as another example of his “War on Memory.” He did not acknowledge the earlier name changes were a denial of memory. Officials renamed the schools with non-triggering names during the “Summer of Blame,” 2020, like so many other institutions that year, along with the removal and destruction of monuments commemorating that era, such as the Lee statue which Koppel criticized yet still stands. The aim of this exercise was to whitewash the past while progressives targeted monuments and namesakes of our Founders because they had been slave owners.
That reality interrupts Koppel’s major thrust in his segment, which is to ultimately tar Donald Trump with these ahistorical references. He turns back to Gwinn, who then mentions seeing the Confederate flag brandished by some of the January 6 protestors: “They achieved something that Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia never even got close to. They’re physically in the halls of Congress with the same battle flag.” As I discussed a few weeks ago, the Park Service is fully woke by Congressional mandate, so to preserve his job, Gwinn had to hold to his master’s scripts.
January 6 was on par with the Civil War, and thus so is Donald Trump.
Koppel compared celebrations at the start of the Civil War to those at Trump's campaign rallies.
And yet, when the Civil War began with the surrender of Fort Sumter in 1861, there was throughout much of the land wild celebration and no inkling of the price to be paid. Wars rarely begin in a climate of foresight. So could the chest beating at a political rally provide real insight as to what could happen in the event of another Trump defeat?
Ted Koppel
Koppel mentioned that Trump’s critics were fearful of what would happen to the country with a Trump victory, and that there was a real danger of violence to be had if there was a Trump defeat. At a rally, he interviewed a man who claimed an armed reaction would likely follow a Trump defeat or incarceration.
Doomed either way?
It would seem that Koppel, based on his reading of the past, felt America would fall into a new civil conflict after 5 November 2024. This, from the newsman, was astounding, as he laid out a future with no hope, based on a history he hoped to eliminate, having recast it in his own twisted image.
As we know now, that predicted civil war did not start after the election.
Few earnestly expected it to (regardless of their screaming or severe intonations into the nearest microphone). Given the “Democratic resistance” has yet to come up with a coherent response to their electoral blowout last November, other than “we hate Trump,” or, alternately, “America is a racist, misogynistic country that needs reform and we want to reform it now at all costs because we hate Trump and all his supporters,” we shouldn’t expect one. While the War on Memory has been ongoing for some time, as “mainstream journalists” use their own biases to declare war on the past, we must all reach for our remotes and find something else to watch.
Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries
Steele is fighting another war, one that politics have not distorted, but neglected.
Two diligent scholars find and transcribe fading and crumbling diaries of a soldier in the American Expeditionary Forces in France. The Roads to the Great War website thinks it’s pretty good.
And Finally...
On 31 May:
1942: Operation MILLENIUM ends, the first RAF thousand-plane raid in World War Two. The target was the city of Cologne, Germany. While casualties and destruction were minimal compared to other—and larger—such attacks, the RAF showed it could mount such massive missions.
1971: The last Memorial Day legal holiday observed on purpose in the US on the original day, 31 May. That year, Congress declared Memorial Day would be on the Last Monday in May, under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968.
And today is NATIONAL SAVE YOUR HEARING DAY, a day when we’re supposed to use hearing protection around loud noises, like music concerts, lawn mowers, even hammers banging nails. I’m half-deaf from, well, small arms, artillery, air conditioners, generators, compressors…yeah, all that.
Every tyrant claims to be protecting us from tyranny.
The South was very right, and very wrong. It had no legitimate right to promote slavery, and every right to secede from the Union. Lincoln, while freeing slaves, set the wheels in motion for horrendous federal government overreach. And, it's a statistical fact (that I just made up, which means it's true in my heart) that 97% of journalists are clueless dolts.