President Trump’s “comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions,” is raising alarms about censorship, revisionism, and so forth. People may not be aware of the back story, as outlined by Roger Kimball at American Greatness.
“In recent years, the Smithsonian has gradually morphed from an institution for the ‘increase & diffusion of knowledge among men’ into a woke repository of progressive, anti-American shibboleths,” explains Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals. “Among other things, the colonoscopy-like review will counter the pervasive assumption that the history of the United States is tantamount to a history of oppression.” That was exactly what this writer discovered way back in the Clinton Era.
See “Institution with an Attitude,” in the Washington Post, published on October 13, 1996. Even then, the museums and exhibits gave the impression that history was a chronicle of oppression. As the left has it, that was the case until the arrival of enlightened types such as Karl Marx, whose contribution to economics, as Thomas Sowell explained in Marxism: Philosophy and Economics, was virtually zero.
As it happens, Karl Marx was a true believer in quackery such as phrenology, and all that implies. See Karl Marx, Racist by Nathaniel Weyl, the former Communist who shows up in The Man Who Invented Conservatism, Daniel Flynn’s new book on former Communist Frank Meyer.
These men regarded Marxist-Leninist states such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as the worst oppressors in history. That record is charted in the Museum of Communism in the Czech Republic, which the Soviet Union invaded in 1968 to quash the “Prague Spring.” See also the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C.
By contrast, the “1619 Project,” by writers at the New York Times, portrays the USA as oppressive and racist right from the start.
By contrast, the “1619 Project,” by writers at the New York Times, portrays the USA as oppressive and racist rig...