Christmas this year has seen the massive use of a comparatively new and particularly absurd tactic by the Christophobic forces—War on Christmas Denial.
The Deniers parrot, to the extent of well over a hundred op-ed articles and editorials, that no effort has been made to repress Christmas, usually adding that saying otherwise is evil/selfish/anti-religious-minority and other pleasant sentiments. I remarked on this last week.
The VDARE.com Christmas Competition archive is of course a comprehensive refutation of this assertion, which serves mainly to demonstrate the extreme hive-mindedness of the secular left — and their immense MSM access. Another is John Gibson’s valuable The War on Christmas.
Since the assertion is so obviously absurd to any one with memory of more than a few years, or capable of doing a little research, it has the capability of seriously discrediting the anti Christmas forces. The Los Angeles Times realized this, and on Christmas Eve test-flew another argument: that the (tacitly admitted) War on Christmas is losing steam:
“IT JUST DOESN’T seem like Christmas this year—because there have been so few stories in the media about how the holiday is under siege by secular progressives…by and large, it’s been a quiet season.”
(A lull in the war on Christmas By M.Z. Hemingway December24, 2006)
(Of course, it is obvious that in a year where Christmas War Denial articles outweighed Affirming articles more than 5 to one, to say nothing of the grim silence maintained by some other outlets, that the incentives for working journalists to find and offer Christmas War stories to their employers were decidedly negative. Look at how slowly the Sasha Cohen Carol shut-down story spread.)
This concept apparently did not occur to the Los Angeles Times author, but the article does do a good job of documenting that things had become pretty bad before the O’Reilly etc. involvement of last year
“The salvos between politically correct busybodies and pious protesters in 2004 were equally intense. Denver prohibited a church group from participating in its annual Parade of Lights because it wanted to sing Christmas songs; a New Jersey high school barred its band from playing religious-themed Christmas music; a Kansas newspaper published a correction apologizing for calling a Community Tree a Christmas Tree; and a priest got in trouble for telling kindergartners that Jesus—not Santa— was the reason for Christmas.”
A further sign that the Los Angeles Times feels that the Denier stratagem is unviable appeared in another Christmas Eve article, this time an Editorial:
Christmas, now and then December 24 2006
This is a survey of 125 years of Christmas coverage by the newspaper, which effectively concedes Denial is factually wrong:
“PERUSING 125 YEARS of Christmas editorials in the Los Angeles Times is a dizzying experience…journalistic sensibilities have shifted so radically…Up until the 1960s, many of these annual paeans read as if they were written by Christian pastors, and wouldn’t sound out of place if read aloud during a Sunday church sermon.Few things could signal the about-face more sharply than an editorial from 1989 that urges people to say “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas,” so as not to cause offense to non-Christians.
(VDARE.com italics.) A smoking gun! [Christmas Is Everywhere but It's Not for Everyone, December 17, 1989]
The Paper goes on to say
“our new, somewhat retro, policy is: People should wish each other happiness or merriment in whatever packaging they’d like. Peace on Earth, above all!”
VDARE.com observations:
1) The only reason this change is occurring is because the MSM has realized the peasants are very angry. Go Peasants!
(As noted yesterday, we think this is not the case at the National Review. The shift on Christmas there is to facilitate war.)
2) Taken together, these two Los Angeles Times articles decisively demonstrate that the main treatment theme about the War on Christmas by most of the MSM this year was wrong. Wrong to the point of dishonesty.
What a surprise.
Merry Christmas!
