To the Editor:

Martin, in last week’s editorial, you provided a perfect example of the challenges of our discourse. Even after reading it a couple of times, I couldn’t discern what statements you were disputing or asserting. I finally got to the nugget where you insisted that General Brown made a statement, but “it just sounded like he didn’t, in military salad vocabulary.” Is that kind of like editorial salad vocabulary? You conjured a conspiracy theory that the General lied to promote his sub rosa ideologies, violative of the chain of command, because you think he is advocating something you don’t agree with. We will all pay a terrible price if this is how we consider informed expert opinion and advice. And I don’t go anywhere near a donut these days.

In December, campaigning in Berlin, New Hampshire, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley responded to a voter about the causes of the Civil War that began in her home state of South Carolina, by describing it as a “conflict over how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” she said among other absurd things.
When the questioner responded, “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word slavery.” Haley shot back, “What do you want me to say about slavery?” before abruptly adding, “Next question.”
In subsequent interviews, Haley was clearly irritated about the criticism of her statement, but blamed it on a “gotcha question” from Democrats planted to embarrass her (are there any Republicans in politics who will own their errors?) She then conceded that slavery was a cause of the War, “everybody in the South knows that” (and some of her friends are Black), suggesting that it goes without saying. Rubbish.

Either Nikki is a victim of the current anti-history movement seeking to reinvent consideration of slavery and its present effects, or she is tailoring the truth so as not to offend her delicate constituents, and only cops to truth when cornered.
Recently, in Temecula, CA, the local school district board voted 3-2 to reject the state-approved history book in favor of a substitute which does not discuss causes or assess blame for the Civil War except in the most general terms. God forbid that the War and its dreadful aftermath, the long-term effects of slavery, our true history, should be confronted. No one must feel uncomfortable that their ancestors committed some terrible wrongs while others had to die to stop those wrongs and save the Union. The War is over, the perpetrators and defenders are all dead, but the experience is still deeply embedded in our society. And Temecula, et al., doesn’t want to hear it.

Like Haley, some people still censor or deny uncomfortable historical truth, as if that will change reality.

Kelly Scoles,
Fillmore, Ca.