Saturday, June 07, 2008

Peace activism

This article at the BBC's website asks:

What do you know about Charles Lindbergh?

You probably know he was an American aviator. He achieved overnight world stardom when he became the first person to fly non-stop across the Atlantic, solo, in 1927.

You might also know that Lindbergh was strongly opposed to American involvement in World War II - until Pearl Harbor, after which he volunteered to fly combat missions in the Pacific.

And you might know that in later life he became a prolific author, an explorer and an environmentalist.
It was quoted in part earlier by General Theory of Rubbish as follows (emphasis added):
You might also know that Lindbergh was a peace activist who opposed American involvement in World War II ...
Stealth edit?

Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathiser, as Gen Theory points out. If there was a stealth edit, this blog post might very well have prompted it. We can read more about Lindbergh at Wikipedia, which also goes on to comment:
Lindbergh's anti-Communism resonated deeply with many Americans while eugenics and Nordicism enjoyed social acceptance,[52] with enthusiasts such as Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and George S. Patton.
Well, perhaps. But eugenics was championed, far more notoriously and energetically, by
H.G. Wells, Emile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, William Keith Kellogg and Margaret Sanger.
This is made clear by the Wiki entry on eugenics itself. The main characteristic of the latter list is that it includes well known left-wingers.

Let's recap: it looks like the BBC initially characterised Nazi sympathies as "peace activism". The Wiki entry for Lindbergh gives a distorted list of eugenics supporters to make it look like a conservative phenomenon.

Why am I surprised by neither of these things?

Via

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

According to News Sniffer there were seven revisions - the bit about being a "peace activist" is not present in the seventh revision, but is present in the sixth and prior revisions.