First Man in Space: Cancelled

Who Was The First Astronaut? Yuri Gagarin Facts and Biography.

It never happened!

One of the most memorable events of my boyhood was when Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth in outer space, in 1961. The first man in space! Once it was only science fiction. Now it was news. An epochal event in world history.

But let’s rewrite history! Let’s condemn ourselves to ignorance! Because we’re mad at Putin for invading Ukraine, therefor Yuri Gagarin’s space flight… never happened!

An international Space Symposium conference, held at Colorado Springs, has canceled its annual “Yuri’s Night” and erased his name from their deliberations (https://www.rebelnews.com/yuri_gagarin_name_censored_from_space_symposium_conference).

That’ll learn that Putin guy!

Yuri died in 1968, in a plane crash.

Have we been reduced to lying about our history? Are we going to rewrite the history books every time there’s a new flap in international relations? Well, here in America we’re tearing down our statues. Of course we’re going to scrub Yuri Gagarin every time we’re mad at Russia.

Has lying become this fallen world’s preferred means of communication?

Yuri did something that no human being had ever done before. It took courage. It took dedication. It took guts.

But it takes no courage at all to pretend he didn’t do it.

We’re Back (and Here’s Some Nooze: Erasing George Washington)

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(We had to go to the hospital today for Patty to have a CT scan, don’t ask me why, and then off to the supermarket, and now… some nooze.)

Eighty-three years ago, a Russian-born communist painted a huge mural (1,600 feet long) on the walls of what is now a public high school in the San Francisco school district. His theme was the life of George Washington, and he chose to emphasize Washington as a slave owner and a persecutor of Native Americans. Why this thing was painted in the first place–at public expense–is a mystery to me. But it was 1935, and on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s watch, a lot of hammer-and-sickle-friendly artwork got created.

Now the San Francisco school board has decided to destroy it (https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/california-school-board-voted-paint-021440930.html). Seems it makes the students “uncomfortable.”

When I was a kid in school, everybody used to mock the Soviets for constantly rewriting history. Now we do it, too.

But this is complicated, because the mural was, all along, a rewrite of history, and rather a hostile one at that. Academics all around are pleading with the board not to rewrite it again by painting over the mural with some pap about minority self-esteem.

Yes, George Washington owned slaves. At the time, slavery was lawful in every region of the earth. That doesn’t mean it was good. There were already abolitionists at work, like Betsy Ross and, later, William Wilburforce, who led the successful fight to abolish slavery in the British Empire, legislated by Parliament in 1833.

George Washington does not need me to defend him. Take away Washington, and the United States is never born. And this world, fallen though it is, would be infinitely the poorer for that.

Today we love to judge historical figures by our own moral and legal standards of 2019. But how would we fare, if they judged us by theirs?

But the Lord our God judges all; and we do well to remember it.