I especially love when you touch on that awful thing, the “s” word. I simply love how that term has become this sort of label that the right slaps on something that they wish to fail. Kind of the way it was thrown on Obama’s health care plan.

I kind of feel that semantics are a very important part of conversation too. How can we, as people, communicate effectively if we do not agree on what the words we are using mean. Like when conservatives say that our country is founded upon Judeo-Christian values simply because some of our founding fathers use “God” every now and then. They fail to realize, or choose to ignore, that our founding fathers were deists which meant that they believed in God but not the church or its theology.

Anyway, nice blog, I really enjoyed it.

The historian often needs to be on the front lines when ideologues are misrepresenting historical memory for propaganda purposes.

In fact, there are many well-documented accounts of successful, non-violent resistance to oppression. There was much non-violent resistance to the Nazis in WWII. Then we have the shining examples of Gandhi (whose spearheaded a movement leading to India’s independence), Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement; and the work of Cesar Chavez. More recently, former Soviet Republics such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania, led the way to independence – and the dismantling of the former Soviet Union – largely through non-violent means.

Why aren’t these non-violent examples taught with the same rigor as the endless litany of war that comprises so much history “education”? (that’s what I remember from my school days – history as a catalogue of war!) To my mind, it stems from ignorance, failure of the imagination, or just plain refusal to see….

Assuming that the dissidents in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany did have firearms, and used them to resist arrest, how long would they have been able to do so?

People who resist arrest using firearms usually die sooner, or have to surrender sooner or later.

The best chance of avoiding arrest in a totalitarian state is to avoid and evade the police, not confront them, and if possible skip across the border into a free(er) country, assuming that there is one nearby.

The Vatican still refuses unfettered scholarly access to its Nazi era archives. Its publications have spent more time issuing unsubstantiated apologias for Pius XII’s record than even praising the work of Catholic clergy who were documented as having acted heroically.

Right wing political parties in Japan have worked hard prevent acknowledgment of Japanese war crimes in China and Korea.

Though the youngest survivors are well into their 90s, The Turkish government exerts a great deal of energy to silence discussion of the Armenian Genocide, filing criminal charges against Turkish citizens who dare to write and investigate the episode, making military and diplomatic alliances contingent on the word “genocide” not being used, et cetera.