[Peace-discuss] Civil War

[C. G. Estabrook]

I'm not quite sure what the jibe is about, Chuck.  Is it because of my 
skepticism about 9-11 Truth?

As to arguing "about stuff that happened seven score and six years ago," 
I think Orwell had it right in Winston Smith's ruminations in 1984:

"...where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which 
in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie 
which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the 
lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran 
the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present 
controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, 
never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting 
to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending 
series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called 
it..."

Life, in its boring, predictable fashion, imitates art.  Reporter Ron 
Suskind describes "reality control" in a conversation with a senior 
adviser to Bush (Rove?) in 2002:

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based 
community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions 
emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and 
murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut 
me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he 
continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own 
reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you 
will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can 
study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors 
... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

Why argue about stuff that happened long ago?  "The struggle of man 
against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting," wrote Czech 
novelist Milan Kundera.  "...totalitarianism ... deprives people of 
memory and thus retools them into a nation of children...” -- a 
reference perhaps to Cicero's "Not to know what happened before you were 
born is to be a child forever." --CGE


Chuck Minne wrote:

> I agree completely. My rather circuitous point was much of what we 
> believe is bullshit, an example being much about the Civil War. And is 
> Zinn perfect? How does he report 9-11 and/or Iraq? Carl is the only one 
> who is infallible, he's better than Jesus, or me.
> 
> */Bill Strutz <billstrutz at yahoo.com>/* wrote:
> 
>             However, we are shooting ourselves in the foot if we argue
>     about stuff that happened seven score and six years ago.  Do we
>     really care what the Civil War was about?  Or is it that one person
>     has to prove himself right, and another person has to prove him
>     wrong?  Let's stay in the present.
>