The man who told us so - What the West, and the Soviet Union’s victims, owe to Robert Conquest

THE intellectual history of the West in the 20th century was dominated by arguments over totalitarianism: its causes, effects—and possible justification. Even after flag-waving supporters of the Soviet Union had dwindled to irrelevance, the conviction that communism was a good idea poorly executed persisted in certain quarters. Others still thought the communist threat overstated, or drew equivalences between crimes committed in the name of socialism and those of Western anti-communism. The position that communism was a monstrously evil system responsible for unprecedented atrocities was held by only a minority of scholars. Robert Conquest, who died on August 3rd, was one of the most eloquent and implacable members of that camp. To the chagrin of his opponents, he turned out to be right.

Read more at The Economist Read More......

Barton: America’s Most Biblically-Hostile U. S. President

(Via David Crowe of Restore America/Hat tip: Stella Guenther)
David Crowe writes, "David Barton, President of Wallbuilders, historian and respected leader in the movement to restore the nation to our biblical foundations has written the most detailed, footnoted, and telling expose of the Obama Administration acts against Christianity, and preferentialism for Islam that exists." Read David Barton's study at Wall Builders... Read More......

Republicans repealed the Fugitive Slave Act

GRAND OLD PARTISAN, 6/28/2010 by Michael Zak - On this day in 1864, the Republican-controlled 38th Congress repealed the notorious Fugitive Slave Act. The law had enabled slave catchers to operate freely in northern states and to kidnap any African-American residing there. Merely by attesting that the person was an escaped slave, a slave catcher could chain him and drag him away to a southern slave market. Moreover, the law required all free people as well as all local and state and federal government officials to assist slave catchers. ∴ A pair of Democrats, Senator James Mason (D-VA) and Senator Andrew Butler (D-SC), had written the Fugitive Slave Act. ∴ The bill repealing the Fugitive Slave Act was written by a Republican congressman from Ohio, Rufus Spalding [pictured]. A Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, signed it into law.

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. --Abraham Lincoln, 1864 Read More......

The Man on Whom Everything was Lost

Photo: "Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in the early 1960's" (wikipedia)

Commentary Magazine, February 2008, by Joseph Epstein

ABSTRACT - Others have offered a kinder, gentler view of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. than the one provided by Edmund Wilson in his diaries. “He was a great historian and an incomparable witness,” said Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, in announcing the library’s acquisition of Schlesinger’s voluminous personal papers this past November. LeClerc went on to compare Schlesinger, who died a year ago at the age of eighty-nine, with Voltaire—to the latter’s detriment. Voltaire, after all, may have been “the historian of France, but he didn’t get in the inner circle the way Schlesinger did.” The recent publication of Schlesinger’s diaries* is a useful reality check on such claims. The book also provides an account of a career in American liberalism that is, in microcosm, a partial account of the career of the liberal temperament itself over the past half-century. [Full article requires subscription]

Note: A December 2002 Weekly Standard reprint of , Race and Republicans: From William Lloyd Garrison to Trent Lott by Alvin S. Felzenberg (June 7, 1999), attributes the loss of the Republican Party's illustrious history in civil rights achievement in part to " ...these left-leaning historians --Henry Steele Commanager, Allen Nevins, Claude G. Bowers, and the Arthur Schlesingers."

See Michael Zak's Grand Old Partisan Blog for January 31, 2008 for a shining example of one of the GOP's great achievements. Mr. Zak contends that it is the responsibility of Republicans to recapture the history of their party. Read More......