Just as a nihilistic criminal such as a serial killer cannot easily be prevented from striking again, so a lone wolf and small-cell terrorist cannot easily be forestalled from wreaking havoc.
Calling out these myths is more than setting the historical record straight. The “propaganda of history,” as W.E.B. Du Bois reminded us a century ago, becomes a way of “giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment”—for soothing and justifying inaction in the face of persistent racial inequality.
At a dramatic moment in Tony’s Blair’s testimony before the Iraq Inquiry back in 2010, he argued that the invasion had saved the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqi children who would otherwise have perished at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. But Blair was wrong.
The Battle of Culloden of 1746, where British troops defeated the Scottish Jacobite army for the final time near Inverness, has long been mis-represented for political purposes.
The Kerner Report confronted a tense nation with data about structural racism throughout the country and made recommendations to solve the problem. But America looked away.
Today, guns draw political authority not only from foundational views of the Second Amendment but also from the narrative of their timelessly central place in history.
