Saw a “meme” calling for the tearing down of a statue of Lenin, because he was responsible for “starving five million Ukranians in one year!” *sigh* Boggled my mind. I related that to my (librarian) Wonder Woman and she had the same reaction I did: “Get your facts right!” Yeh, in 1921, Lenin had grain shipped from Ukraine to Moscow (food shortage in Moscow was the stated reason) for a while, but relented when Ukranians experenced a drought. Eight years AFTER Lenin died (1932) STALIN began his program of deliberately starving Ukraine into submission. Low end estimates of deaths: ~7,000,000. Stalin, not Lenin.
Gee, I thought EVERYONE knew this stuff. . . but I mistakenly attributed a higher level of literacy to “everyone” than I should have.
This kind of stuff ain’t rocket science. Folks have to work really hard to be this ignorant.
Folks DO work that hard. I read yesterday about a minister who wants Washington’s name expunged from neighborhoods in Chicago because he owned slaves, and because the constitution held his race to only be 3/5 human.
Never mind that a free black man counted as 100% or that an enslaved white man as 60% for the purpose of counting electors and representatives only, with the purpose of reducing the policy impact of slave holding states. No. A grievance is better to be cherished than truth. To be outraged, or at least to be seen as outraged trumps knowledge.
The thinking (I use the word loosely) seems to be that it is better to be ignorant of our past than to understand it and learn from it. And so they do work really hard to be that ignorant.
Meanwhile Tennessee Democratic Representative Steven Cohen is quoted in this morning’s Washington Times saying “There are no good Klansmen” as he issues yet another call to impeach President Trump. This because the President called for moderation, saying there were fine men on both sides of the issue.
Imagine that, a Democrat finally admitting that Robert C. Byrd was evil. Oh wait, he didn’t actually name the former “Exalted Cyclops” of the Klan. My mistake. 😛
*sigh*
I have almost (almost) given up on explaining the Constitution to people who are determined to “mistake” its clear meaning and purposes, intentionally, who care not a whit for what the Founders themselves said was their meaning and intent but who simply want to create their own false “meanings.”
It’s not so much ignorance, per se that chaps my gizzard as intellectual sloth and willful ignorance, which each comprise roughly half the coin (bound together by outright lies) of what amounts to the most pernicious, destructive, and downright evil self-induced stupidity.
As for Byrd, et al, there is no decade, from the point of its inception up to this present day, in which the Democrat Party has not been the instigator or willing participant in racial bigotry and oppression.