The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Winners Write the History Books

Posted on | December 27, 2012 | 14 Comments

“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

America spent four decades locked in an eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union and, when the Berlin Wall came down, most of us thought that we had “won” the Cold War.

Alas, little noticed by most Americans, intellectual subversives sympathetic to the Soviets had ensconced themselves in academia, making the “long march through the institutions” so that our nation’s children are now indoctrinated with a Marxist worldview. This fact — the Sovietization of American history — is now belatedly apparent to John Hinderaker in Minnesota’s public-school social studies standards:

As you read them, you imagine a senile old man, shuffling around in his pajamas and muttering, “Race, class, gender…race, class, gender.” Everything is about demographic interest groups.

Hinderaker notes the anti-heroic concept of the social studies standards, which slight the great deeds of great men, among them the gallant soldiers of the First Minnesota Infantry Regiment.

Well . . . there are still five A’s in RAAAAACISM, after all. Lessons celebrating the heroism of the First Minnesota would, according to the contemporary view, fail to represent non-white, non-male contributions to society. Why should the daughters of Hmong immigrants, for example, be taught to revere these dead Anglo-Saxon men?

History — excuse me, social studies — is now no longer about the facts of the past, but is rather a form of political propaganda, carefully airbrushed in much the same way that Stalinists removed Leon Trotsky from historic photos of the Russian Revolution.

Those facts which do not fit the political purposes of the indoctrinators are omitted or suppressed, and the lessons are reformulated in keeping with Marxist doctrines of historical materialism, class struggle, imperialism, exploitation, “false consciousness” and so forth.

So . . . why aren’t you home-schooling your children?

 

Category: Culture, Education, History

Comments

14 Responses to “The Winners Write the History Books”

  1. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 27th, 2012 @ 12:54 pm

    We need to take control of the media. We need to fight back.

    As for those rich Republicans who gave millions to Karl Rove, perhaps they should buy a few bankrupt publications and let some conservative pundits try to turn them around? That may have a bigger long term impact and with the boost of actually having a chance to make a few bucks and be a decent investment.

    As for the short term: The GOP needs to say no to the Democrats driving off the fiscal cliff…

    Of course Bonehead Boehner needs to be far smarter about explaining why the GOP opposes this (and he is failing in that regard), but the blame needs to be directed to where it belongs: Barack and Harry.

  2. Captain Whitebread
    December 27th, 2012 @ 12:57 pm

    My son has two years left of high school. I always ask what he’s learning in school, and call out the BS when I hear it. It’s too late in the game to pull him out of public school, but I’m working as hard as I can to teach him historical fact. He wants to learn a trade instead of “listening to all the crap” in college. He’s learned that from my pursuit of a degree recently…why does someone studying for an IT degree need Diversity Studies? Yet that was a required class…

    My daughter and SIL have already decided they’re homeschooling my granddaughter.

  3. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 27th, 2012 @ 1:05 pm

    Our GOP leadership needs to stop acting badly…

  4. Dan Collins
    December 27th, 2012 @ 1:10 pm

    Social studies, the make-busy-and-keep-hormone-laden-middle-schoolers-off-the-street branch of academics, is now the trunk. How dismal.

    Back in the Seventies, all those people who tore up their draft cards and fled to Canada to avoid going to Vietnam were brought back with amnesty to become teachers. They turned around and made Socrates drink the hemlock for ‘corrupting the youth of Athens.’ ‘Know yourself’ was replaced with mental hygiene.

    ‘Yourself’ isn’t a noble savage, people.

  5. Quartermaster
    December 27th, 2012 @ 1:10 pm

    Smitty committed *heresy* but writing raaaaacism with 6 As instead of 5.

  6. Quartermaster
    December 27th, 2012 @ 1:13 pm

    To ask Bonehead to take some responsibility and fight goes against his establishment DNA. they negotiate rather than stand on principle. They want to get some that stuff the Dims feed on so they can pass some of it to their cronies. That’s why they must go.

  7. A lesson every American better remember « The Daley Gator
    December 27th, 2012 @ 4:57 pm

    […] Stacy McCain reminds us that history is written by the winners America spent four decades locked in an eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union and, when the Berlin Wall came down, most of us thought that we had “won” the Cold War. […]

  8. Ed Driscoll » Our Advocacy-Obsessed Apparatchik MSM
    December 27th, 2012 @ 7:31 pm

    […] from this quote from William F. Buckley’s 1959 book Up From Liberalism, as posted today by Stacy McCain, and it neatly sums up the MSM’s goals: “In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the […]

  9. Garym
    December 27th, 2012 @ 7:59 pm

    “History — excuse me, social studies — is now no longer about the facts of the past, but is rather a form of political propaganda, carefully airbrushed in much the same way that Stalinists removed Leon Trotsky from historic photos of the Russian Revolution.”
    Actually, it is now called “Global Studies.”

  10. richard mcenroe
    December 27th, 2012 @ 8:01 pm

    The winners write the history books… but Smitty, this “winning” generation cannot/does not read. This is a flaw we can exploit.

  11. Quick Hits – Closing The Tabs Edition | The Lonely Conservative
    December 27th, 2012 @ 10:59 pm

    […] in our public schools have no idea what a free market would look like. See Legal Insurrection and The Other McCain for more on this topic. The progressives have been writing the history and economics books for […]

  12. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 28th, 2012 @ 10:26 am

    http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-most-telling-post.html DaTechGuy on history…we are failing our kids.

  13. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 28th, 2012 @ 10:27 am

    That is so friggin true.

  14. Bob Belvedere
    December 29th, 2012 @ 7:33 pm

    Best wishes to you son. We need more people in the trades. He can study History in his spare time.