Historical Amnesia
BY Herschel Smith
5 years, 9 months ago
Via WRSA and Instapundit, this commentary from Quillette:
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.
This has all been going on for a very long time. Statism and self-hatred didn’t begin in the 1960s. It was well-ensconced into the culture by the time I matriculated.
I recall sitting in history classes at Clemson University in 1977, and rather than survey the philosophical thought that led to the American war of independence, which would have kept my attention even if I disagreed with his view, he prided himself on using every class to choose the most irrelevant and meaningless event, spending massive amounts of time doing things that were useless to the class, except for trying to convince them of the evils of colonialism or how America would have been better off with just the noble savage.
So if you ask the typical college student today to catalog how gun control preceded and enabled Idi Amin’s genocide of Christians in Uganda, or to explain the Calvinian roots of the covenant theology that led to support for the American revolution among the clergy and their sermons, he would probably be too busy talking on his cell phone to pay attention. And if Google couldn’t answer, he won’t know. If Google can answer, it will be a lie.
On March 31, 2019 at 10:05 pm, The Wretched Dog said:
Best, very readable book explaining American Liberty: M. Stanton Evan’s
“The Theme is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition.”
Published 1994, to explain the American Left’s love-affair with totalitarianism, despite the implosion of communism in the Soviet Union.
Still available.
TWD