Fort Sumter, the Civil War, and godless Communist superscience

April 12th is really a big day, isn’t it?

150 years ago today, the Confederates began firing on Fort Sumter, starting the American Civil War. Four years and 600,000 killed after that, General Robert E. Lee, brought to bay at last, surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant, ending the war. And so began a long and storied political tradition of arguing that one’s political opponents would have supported slavery (second in popularity, of course, to arguing that one’s political opponents are even worse than Hitler).

50 years ago today, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space (and, much more importantly, the first man to return in one piece from space). Combined with Sputnik, this touched off a panic and a race to improve science and technology in the United States, which feared that the free world would be overcome by godless Soviet superscience.

But, fifty years later, the Soviet Union has fallen, and Russia’s chief exports are not godless Soviet superscience but oil, high-quality vodka, malware, and distributed denial of service attacks against websites known primarily for hosting vast quantities of Harry Potter/Twilight slashfic.

History is strange.

-JM