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Some commenters on this article don't understand why Trump saying the Constitution is the culmination of "1000 years of Western Civilization" is, in my words, chilling. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/09/white-house-history-conference-curriculum.html
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I used "chilling" in that graf 2x, the second time noting that Trump's #1776Commission for "patriotic education" was "another chilling nod" to 1930s fascist regimes. So, a question for #twitterstorians and general readers alike... 2/n
Do have the sense that your average general reader has heard of the "thousand year reich" or no? Because not a damn thing happened in 789 AD of which the Constitution can be viewed as the culmination. 3/n
A callback to the Magna Carta would have made sense, and that would be "800 years." The speechwriters didn't round it up to an even millennium just for the hell of it. 4/n
The speechwriters went with "a thousand years of Western Civilization" to stir echoes of a thousand year reich. Otherwise we have this white supremacist White House arguing that Western Civilization is but a thousand years old, and that's not an argument they would make. 5/n
(Fun fact: the idea of "Western Civilization" as a coherent whole, a single tradition stretching from Ancient Greece to the shores of America, was invented in the 19th century.) 6/n
Anyway, I don't know if the Slate commenters are uninformed or are just pretending to be. But when I and the folks in my feed heard "a thousand years of Western Civilization," it sounded Hitleresque. Anybody else hear it differently? 7/7
Anyway, if somebody here has a Slate commentor account, feel free to share a link to this thread for those who didn't get the reference.
