History Matters
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Why is Helen Keller an important figure in American history?
- What was the name of the first permanent European settlement in North America?
- Did Native Americans participate in the first Thanksgiving?
- What group of people did most of the scalping in colonial America?
- Who was the first European to discover North America?
- Who did Abraham Lincoln free with the Emancipation Proclamation?
- What were Abraham Lincoln’s personal views on African-Americans?
In George Orwell’s landmark novel 1984, protagonist Winston Smith works for a government organization called The Ministry of Truth. He is responsible for rewriting historical documents so they support the official party line of Big Brother. In one memorable passage within the novel, Winston completely fabricates a war hero and constructs an entire official history for a person who never existed. Like all parts of that brilliant and visonary novel, we can see our contemporary society reflected in Big Brother’s futuristic fictive totalitarian government.
U.S. citizens are quick to declare pride in their country and their historical legacy, but very few of us actually know the truth about the last two hundred years.
Twenty one of the fifty states in the U.S. have state adoption committees, who wield an enormous amount of power. These committees approve or reject a textbook’s use for the entire state, and establish their own expansive criteria for doing so. For example, the Texas state adoption committee will not approve any textbook that “seeks to undermine authority.” Although most states have not implemented this system, California, Texas and Florida all have adoption committees. Since these states are so populous, textbook publishers must omit or incorrectly print certain details about American history in order to satisfy those states’ substantial market sizes (Alan touched upon this briefly in an earlier post.) These state adoption committees tend to be fairly conservative, and look unfavorably upon any textbook that is overly critical of U.S. foreign policy blunders or interactions with native people.
For example:
- A textbook that covers the Seminole Wars has no chance of receiving approval in Florida.
- No textbook that acknowledges Texas as once being part of Mexico has any chance of approval in that state.
- Textbooks which mention lynching and frankly discuss the Mississippi government’s role in promoting Jim Crow laws and attempting to suppress the Civil Rights movement have been repeatedly denied adoption rights in that state.
So an elite few filter the information that may be accessed by an overwhelming majority of Americans, and this has a pronounced effect on the way we perceive reality. It’s really not any different from the mass media or political discourse. Even though many people are still manipulated through those information avenues, most educated Americans have become distrustful of politicians and network news anchors. However, I feel like many of those same Americans have come to think of history as something transfixed and objective, undeviating from one monolithic text etched in stone upon a slab of marble somewhere. That’s not what it is at all.
I’ve posted the answers to the posed questions in the comments section. Personally, I did not learn the correct answer to any of these until I went to college–in some cases, it was after I graduated from college. If you had asked me these questions during my senior year of high school, I would have answered all of them incorrectly.
Recommended reading:
Lies my Teacher Told me, James W. Loewen
A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
A People’s History of the American Revolution, Ray Raphael
…sigh… Why McLean & Aerosmith…
This man makes me so hopeful for the future of our once great nation… I know I’m preaching to the choir with these, but good watching/reading from a man who can speak for all Americans almost regardless of your political leanings…
“What do you do… what DO you do?”
This is from a little more than a week ago on Slate.com… Click…
Remember when Brit Hume asked the Republican’s about the “mall and bomb” scenario in order to see how willing the candidates would be to torture?
“Here is the premise: Three shopping centers near major U.S. cities have been hit by suicide bombers. Hundreds are dead, thousands injured. A fourth attack has been averted when the attackers were captured off the Florida coast and taken to Guantanamo Bay, where they are being questioned. U.S. intelligence believes that another larger attack is planned and could come at any time. First question to you, Senator McCain. How aggressively would you interrogate those being held at Guantanamo Bay for information about where the next attack might be?”
That scenario has been pointed to as being “24″-like, and in honor of that, this fantastic piece on Slate raises some of the questions that should have been asked, based on other famous incidents… Among them:
“A tornado has transported you to a magical land, where a jubilant throng of midgets greets you as liberator. They direct you toward a road paved with yellow bricks. We’ll start with you, Mayor Giuliani. Would you consider capturing one of these exotic creatures and subjecting him or her to enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding and electric shock, if it means extracting vital information that will determine whether the yellow route leads home—or into a trap?”
…
“Listen carefully: A computer from the future has sent a shape-shifting cyborg, made of prototype liquid metal, to kill you. At the last moment, the governor of California appears, saying, “Come with me, if you want to live!” We’ll start with Governor Huckabee. Would you agree to run with this bizarre, Republican hybrid, if it requires you to soften your stances on gay rights and climate change?”
…
“For unexplained reasons, you find yourself reliving a Groundhog’s Day festival throughout eternity. Let’s start with you, Senator McCain. After, say, 10,000 of these repetitive days, would you consider capturing one of the locals and subjecting him or her to enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, to gain answers about your predicament, or—for that matter—as a means of breaking up the endless monotony?”
That last one rang true with me… I believe every candidate should be required to discuss what, exactly, they would do if “Groundhog’s Day” happened to them… I can tell you as President, once I knew the day always reset, I would launch our nuclear arsenal at least once or twice, just to see what happens…
“Attempted Infringement” is back on the table…
I thought this bill was dead and buried.. Story off arstechnica… Click…
One of the bill’s controversial features is the fact that people can be charged with criminal copyright infringement even if such infringement has not actually taken place. “Any person who attempts to commit an offense under paragraph (1) shall be subject to the same penalties as those prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the attempt,” says the bill.
While copyright infringement is sometimes believed to be solely a civil matter, that’s not the case. US Code 17, section 506 (a) spells out the conditions for criminal infringement under which the government can actually do the prosecuting, and they are quite modest. The infringement must be willful and the material in question must have a total retail value of over $1,000. This wouldn’t be a difficult threshold for many P2P users to clear, except for the fact that this section also requires that the infringement be done “for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain.”
The attempted infringement clause actually falls under this criminal infringement statute, meaning that it won’t apply to file-sharing unless the courts suddenly take a hugely expansive view of “commercial advantage or private financial gain,” and it’s unlikely the government has some new interest in such cases.
The statement “I intend, willfully and deliberately, to pirate Photoshop”, if this bill is passed, could now equal jail time… That’s fucking insane…
Hmmm… Gravel and Kucinich didn’t raise their hands…
They aren’t talking about something they ordered or signed up for, they were provided the jet by someone who owns one for free… Why would someone do that? What do you think the cost of flying a person roundtrip to South Carolina in a private jet is? I’d guess something more than $5,000 for fuel and pilot/stewardess payment. Think what you will…
I once knew a man from Nantucket…
Don’t ask, I have no idea…. Praise Jebus.
“What the kids are listening to…”
So, as you all know, I’m always trying to keep my finger on the pulse of the young kids… ok, that sounds kinda bad.. Anyways, this is where it’s at right now…
“Nobody seems to care…”
From Carlin’s latest standup act “Life Is Worth Losing”… The whole thing is up on youtube if you’d like to see it…
Whatever to some of the text at the end, but a great bit by Carlin…
God’s Answer to YouTube
YouTube clearly has a liberal, secular bias. Thank Jesus that someone is around to start a video sharing website that can provide us with all the televangelists, Christian Rock concerts and Creationist documentaries that we so desperately need!
Some delectable samples:
History Lesson, Part I: America v. El Salvador
Ten, twenty, thirty years from now–whenever this war has reached its miserable conclusion–what will American History textbooks have to say about it?
Will they condemn the Bush administration for its ineptitude and innumerable blunders? Or will they attribute the war’s mishandling to some other factor? What will our children learn about this malicious chapter in our history? Will it be swept under the rug of our collective conscience, to collect dust with the Spanish-American War, the Iran-Contra scandal, the Seminole Wars, Fat Man and Little Boy? All of those things would be terrible embarrassments to America’s legacy, if we actually remembered them the way that they happened.
This terrifies me. After the torrents of garbage we’ve been forced to digest over the last seven years, it frenzies my brain to think that this could all just vanish into the future, that we could walk away from this experience without having learned anything.
The only way to prevent future Vietnams and future Iraqs and future Panamas is to start telling the truth about what has already happened. Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it, so now it’s time to know, bitches.
Let’s start with America’s involvement in El Salvador during that country’s civil war. The El Salvadoran Civil War, which ran from 1980-1992, began when leftist guerilla forces ousted the conservative party’s Carlos Humberto Romero from power.
Romero was a member of El Salvador’s Conservative party, and had for many years ignored the country’s enormous class divide. In response, a collective of insurgents named the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) began attacking military targets in an effort to bring decent housing, food, and other basic civil rights to El Salvador’s lower classes.
The United States government, fearing that the Soviet Union was financing the FMLN, began financing Romero’s military to prevent a Communist takeover of the country. Specifically, the United States sent El Salvadorans to The School of the Americas, where they received instruction on how to defeat their enemy. The SOA taught them that the only way to defeat guerilla forces is to demoralize their civilian sympathizers. Kill their children, their elderly, and their infirm; torture their wives; burn their villages, and they will lose the will to fight. Again, the United States of America financed and operated this institution. Our government also sent Romero’s military huge amounts of aid in the form of weapons, ammunition, and explosives.
These American-backed military forces later became known as “death squads.” They began behaving exactly as we had instructed them: torturing and murdering people suspected of harboring FMLN sympathizers. It was quite common for them to slaughter entire villages and communities, terrorizing peasant farmers and children who had no involvement in the unrest.
The Catholic Church, in an extraordinary break from tradition, began criticizing the El Salvadoran government’s behavior. The famous Oscar A. Romero implored the government to disband the death squads, and even went so far as to criticize the United States for their complicity in this meaningless violence. A high ranking death squad general named Roberto D’Aubuisson ordered the assassination of every priest who criticized their actions, including Romero. He also executed the rape and murder of three American nuns (Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, and Dorothy Kazel) who were providing medical support to death squad survivors.
The United States government immediately tried to suppress and conceal the story about the nuns, but it eventually reached the general public. At first, Ronald Reagan tried to suggest that the nuns were trafficking weapons to Communist insurgents and probably died while engaged in a roadside altercation with Salvadoran government military forces. Then, he realized that only someone suffering from Alzheimer’s disease would believe that a group of nuns got in a shootout with Salvadoran death squads. The overwhelmingly negative public reaction to this event forced the United States government to pull its financial backing from the death squads. Of course, our Congress did nothing to help resolve the civil war it had essentially created, and the violence raged for a decade longer before El Salvador was finally able to bring about peace on its own.
Next week: The Spanish-American War. You’ll gain a newfound sense of irony when you see overweight rednecks sitting on lawnchairs with shotguns, “defending” the Texas border.
