this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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I mean the last time was 1965 to defend civil rights protesters from local law enforcment/thugs - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/us/lbj-national-guard-alabama-1965.html.
History won't look kindly on this incident, and I think the issue here is that if it isn't illegal it still shouldn't be seen as acceptable by anyone.
Side bar: I don’t think the way “history” remembers current events matters anymore. The way news spreads and is remembered is so different now than it was in 1965 that I don’t think history will view our current time that much differently than we did. Just my theory.
So the US has a nationwide history based competition called National History Day. If you haven't heard about it I suggest you look it up, it's basically science fair for history.
I mention it becuase for them to consider a historical event to be valid, it needs to have been at least 25 years after the event. 25 years is a long time, 9/11 will only just be valid next year. I'm pretty sure everyone looks at that event differently now then they did at the moment.
My point being that part of what makes history "History" is time, reflection, and a little bit of hindsight. How this event will be remembered will depend on what events come after and what Trumps legacy ends up being. I suspect it will be one looking at major international shifts caused by an untrustworthy US, but I may be wrong.
Yeah, this makes sense. I wasn’t exactly thinking about the impacts of current events on the future, and that playing into how things are remembered, but that’s a good point.
I think part of what I was getting at is that history is often blurred by memories of the events and the limited media and reporting that stood the test of time. A narrative will form and there will be limited amounts of stats that contradict it.
This aspect will be different going forward. The memory is less relevant since we have an overwhelming amount of media and reporting that lives on. And we also have massive amounts of first hand video footage that.
Maybe history will just be defined by who creates the best narrative out of this massive amount of data. And people will still ignore the contradicting evidence. It happens in real time anyway.
That's a good point that we now have a lot more information/recordings about events. It definitely makes history different. I wonder though if that will actually make the job of historians harder.
Does volume of content indicate what the majority thought/experienced or is there bias in what was saved/preserved?
Not to mention, who is paying to save/keep all of this content. We've found that the internet can remember forever, but doesn't necessarily remember everything (what would happen if YouTube shut down?).
Ahem, Kent State would like a word.
The president didn't order the national guard. This is specifically about when a president orders a state national guard.
The difference there was that the governor called in the national guard in that instance.
1965 was the last time the president took control of the national guard against the governor's wishes. So in 1965 Lyndon Johnson took over the guard to protect civil rights protesters, this time Trump took over the national guard to suppress protests about ICE activity.
Edit: The distinction matters because the governor always has control of their states guard. Additionally, a governor can more or less give control of the guard to the federal government if it would help coordination/etc. In this instance though, Trump took control of the guard without the governors support/approval.