A Link between the past and present

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” – George Orwell.

History often seems no more than our collective memory of yesterday. More often, our history is what the media choose to portray. I believe I’m paraphrasing George Orwell when I say that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies pass as history.

Recent biographies of Nixon, “rehabilitating” the man and his legacy, despite a plethora of evidence to the contrary, serve well to illustrate this practice of historical revisionism.

Nixon’s career embodied all that is wrong with the American political tradition today. Since his ignominious departure from office, his legacy of deceit and corruption has been preserved and perpetuated through the policies of his successors.

It is for this reason that Nixon’s history must be sanitized; his legal transgressions trivialized, his war crimes dismissed and his accomplishments exaggerated. We cannot continue to vilify Nixon when the same standards used to condemn him apply equally to our own generation. Therefore, as a society, in order to forgive our own crimes against humanity, we must first forgive Nixon his.

If such a place exists, is there any doubt that such a man resides in Hell?