The Right Side?

This post is a decided tangent for Tracking Nana, which is basically about investigating one particular incident in Southwestern history (and about exploring the New Mexico back country). But given my fascination with historic accuracy, it grates every time the President confidently assures me he’s on “the right side of history,” and I’d better get with the program because the “arc of history” is bending his way. These vaguely Marxist appeals to the inexorable march of human progress, coupled with the constant exhortations that Islam is a “religion of peace” make me suspect that either he doesn’t know any history himself or he’s cynically confident that, after 40 years of public education reform, his audience knows even less of the past than he does.
Since the Attorney General has warned us that we’re now officially entering the “if you can’t say anything nice, shut up” phase of the public debate regarding Muslims, I want to put my thoughts on  The Ottomans out there before it becomes illegal.
Final thought: “Confusing what you think immediately, politically desirable with the Will of History, Evolution, or God is almost certainly an excuse to stop thinking altogether. … Beware anyone who imputes to History an inevitable, self-directed, Forward march, as if it were as fixed as a bar code, as predetermined as male-pattern baldness, as sovereign as any voluntaristic deity.”