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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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apparently remained too much of a gentlemen to have them arrested and prosecuted

Convenient. "Dany just kinda forgot about the Iron Fleet..."

Corruption was actually a big faux pas among British gentlemen back in those days, and it would have been politically useful for Chamberlain (not averse to undermining his enemies) to expose it by Churchill et al.

Unz’s account cogent enough that academics should seriously engage with it and it be taught in schools as Unz wants it to be?

Academics HAVE engaged with revisionist arguments. The problem is that, while (Nazi-sympathising) revisionists can often do a good job in trouncing amateurs due to knowing more of the basic facts ("You didn't know that the Sudetenland was German speaking? Let me tell you what else they kept from you...") they don't actually have arguments that stand up under academic scrutiny.

There are sensible forms of WWII revisionism, e.g. the representation of pre-1939 Allied foreign policy has become mythologised by Churchill worshippers and perma-hawks. It was a failure of appeasement and deterrence, but the inefficacy of the latter in containing self-destructive dictators was perhaps too frightening to contemplate during the Cold War.

World War II is extremely overstudied at this point, its lessons are overinterpreted, and in many countries it is taught far too much in schools, at the expense of events that are either more relevant to understanding the modern world (e.g. Russian, Chinese, and internal American history) or more integral to specific nations' current conditions and identities (the Reformation, the Crusades, the Industrial Revolution etc.). Obviously WWII helped form the modern world, but the Cold War did so more recently. And, at this point, I think we've finally got past the horror of progressives at the mere thought of teaching children about the evils of International Communism, lest it create McCarthyism, war frenzy, and the destruction of all life on Earth.