THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

To a Marxist, History takes the place of Allah for Islam and Jehovah for Jews. I was raised in the Bible Belt, so a majority of the people I was raised around considered any doubt about Jonah being swallowed by a big fish (not a whale) was on a par with outright atheism.

The last thing a Marxist would want to know is that I detect exactly the same hysteria from Marxists as history changes daily. Marxism is totally dependent on the history Marx grew up with.

You are mostly not old enough to remember the picture of Natural History I grew up with. You BELIEVE me when I describe it, but you don't UNDERSTAND me when I am describing it.

You simply cannot really empathize with the mindset of a whole WORLD, especially Intellectuals, who thought that man was the only territorial animal, that only men and ants fought border battles, that in a herd of natural animals, Freedom, Equality and Fraternity were part of the Natural Order.

One of the major blocks to conservatives trying to take on Marxists was that conservatives had exactly the same world view Marxists did. The only serious difference was that for conservatives all knowledge started in Israel while for Marxists all knowledge started a hundred miles or so west, in Egypt.

What you could easily miss here is that, while a factual error is a matter of Googling, an entire mentality BUILT on a historical error is an entirely different thing. For decades I watched as two sides fought it out over a history that never existed, a history that was being undermined every day with new scientific advances.

And neither side noticed.

I remember in the old Inspector Clousseau movies when the straight man was George Sanders playing a respectable English-type gentleman who knew the Inspector was a retard. That gentleman did some of the best acting I have ever seen, because he did no acting at all.

He just stood there, but he stood there RIGHT. His expression never changed as he watched Clousseau try to act like a past-master at billiards, which he had obviously never played in his life, doing the usual Peter Sellers bit of ending up trying to shoot with the cue between his legs, breaking it, and so forth.

The English gentleman just stood there, watching, with a perfectly straight face. It was funnier than any "reaction" shots might have been.

This is an old tradition. In Buster Keaton movies poor Buster would Drop his sandwich, get it tangled in his tie, have a building fall around him, his most dangerous stunt, but Keaton's dignity never faltered. He never looked embarrassed, in fact, what was hilarious was that his face never changed the slightest.

Keaton, in other words, was doing Inspector Clousseau and the English gentleman himself, with his reactions to himself.

The English gentleman made use of his seeing the reality. He had done the murder so he asked for Clousseau to be in charge of the case.

My entire life I have watched Great Intellectual hosts who were flattered to have Great Spokesmen sit with them and seriously discuss nonsense that had been out of date for decades.

I try hard to take a George Sanders attitude to it.