Air-brushing history
What does NCAA President Mark Emmert have in common with Josef Stalin?
Well, certainly not mass murder. The college-sports executive, however, seems to have one thing in common with the “Cain of the Revolution.” History, in the hands of either turns out to be not a record of things past (subject to whatever interpretation), but a malleable substance.
Among the sanctions levied against Penn State for the cover-up by its leading officials of the Jerry Sandusky-child sexual abuse scandal, Emmert announced that all of the school’s football wins over the last 14 years will be “vacated.” That means the numbers in the Win column simply disappear. The teams that lost those games, however, will not see their losses erased. The main effect is to strip the late Joe Paterno - head coach at Penn State since shortly after the Civil War and apparent participant in the cover-up - of his title of “winningest college football coach.”
This is not to defend him or anyone else caught up in the scandal. It’s about the truth. Maybe Emmert is a believer in the post-modernist dogma that the object observed is changed by the observer. If so, he’s added a new twist: a win disappears, the corresponding loss is not. Just what kind of observer is history being subjected to here?
The picture below is from a book that Leon Trotsky wrote shortly after his forcible deportation from the Soviet Union in 1929: The Stalin School of Falsification. The term “non-person” was coined for people like Trotsky who had fought - and lost - the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Over the course of time, Trotsky, who had been second only to Lenin in the revolution and the subsequent, victorious civil war (Trotsky was both creator and commander of the Red Army) was written out of Soviet history books.
In substance, of course, there’s no comparison between him and Paterno. As much as announcers like to call football players “warriors,” the game doesn’t compare to revolutionary insurrection or civil war. And if we let history judge, I think Trotsky will end up on the plus side, Paterno on the minus. But they were both “there.” That won’t change that no matter how much anyone plays with the records and the photographs.
The post-modernists are wrong. We don’t change history by looking at it. It changes us.
