re: #86 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

Link to a right wing (Dalrymple is one of the editors) conservative site, not because I agree with much of their articles, but because this story gives us insights to what is happening in the (so-called) intellectual conservative circles:

Revisionist History

My feeling is that the nostalgia for isolationism is so strong, even though like all nostalgia our memories are at best partial and possibly false, that in light of Trump, Brexit, etc. there is the urge to look back at the middle of the 20th century and think that WWII was wrong.

Not in the sense of trying to justify Hitler and Nazi Germany (though indeed neo-Nazis do try that), but in the sense that one’s country should just sit out these things, or delay interaction as much as possible.

Yes, all history is revisionist. But I have to wonder what the end game is to some revisions. Purely academic inquiry seems to not be as important as much as casting a new sales pitch for old ideologies.

It’s a numbers-filed-off variant of the classic “Lincoln wanted a war” argument that the “Lost Cause” crowd is fond of. If you’ve ever heard a wingnut natter on about how Lincoln provoked the war by refusing to abandon Fort Sumter and that he went to war rather than pursuing diplomacy, then Hitchens’ arguments are nothing new and make even less sense. Attacking the war by saying that it wasn’t about the Holocaust is like saying that the Civil War “wasn’t about slavery,” it’s a way to insist that any noble goals of the war were convenient lies to mask wars of aggression.