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The
Mutability of Past
by G. Stolyarov II
Before our very
eyes, history is being transformed into politically correct
fantasy."
~ Paul Craig
Roberts
What precisely is
this transformation, what are its motives, and what permits it to maintain a
grasp on the minds of citizens? Discovering the answers to these three questions
will permit us to recognize a deadly weapon of Mr. Dewey's educational
paradigm.
We shall first examine a
notorious heap of slander against the men who had shaped the United States and
transformed it into a nation governed (until the emergence of the new elite) by
individual rights and a devotion to advancement. The following bits of
dogma are being bludgeoned into the minds of students as young as the fourth
grade without clarification nor presentation of the doubts possessed by
legitimate historians concerning such matters. Mr. Jefferson's supposed affair
with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings, has become common knowledge despite the
fact that no physical evidence is contained in the assertion, and that its
"warrant" stems from an article commissioned by the third President's political
opponents, the Federalists, to a turncoat reporter, serving at first as Mr.
Jefferson's agent, then seeking to demean him to the greatest extent possible
following a personal quarrel. Mr. Jefferson, a man of the highest moral ideals,
the very author of a Declaration of Independence which served as the base for
American freedoms as well as similar manifestations of liberty in other nations
seeking to follow the United States' example, would have been beyond an
extramarital affair. His chief political rival, Mr. Hamilton (the instigator of
the Sally Hemmings rumor and the first great statist in American
government), on the other hand, had confessed to such a repulsive act in
writing.
American schoolchildren
know not of that. They have been exposed to but the vague mention of the
incident, and they have absorbed it as an incontrovertible revelation from
academic mentors they had been taught to unquestioningly obey. They were
instructed that "the Founding Fathers owned slaves", and not a word was spoken
to them beyond such a statement. They remain to this day unaware that Mr.
Benjamin Franklin had been a staunch abolitionist and had never possessed a
slave in the entirety of his glorious existence, that Mr. John Adams, too, had
no necessity for slave labor, as a favorite pastime of his consisted of
personally plowing his fields at the Quincy Estate, that Mr. George Washington
had manifested a philosophical opposition to slavery and had ordered his wife,
in his will, to release the entirety of their slave population, that the so
frequently denounced Mr. Thomas Jefferson had drafted the Declaration of
Independence with a statement decrying slavery as the antithesis of individual
freedom (the said statement having, of course, been rejected due to its
potential of tearing the Continental Congress into warring factions) and
subsequently himself vowed to never again purchase another slave. The above four
men, along with a majority of their colleagues, had judged the coercion of labor
to be an abhorrent practice and, having crafted the mechanisms of freedom in the
United States, established ideological arms to be wielded by subsequent
generations in forever exterminating such exploitation. Such is a general
outline of the truth on the matter. Are students in their majority aware of it?
Not at all, for the deliberate "dumbing down" of the educational system has
reached such a grave condition in which the statement, "the Founding Fathers
owned slaves" is as massive a chunk of information as the Witch Doctors’ little
propaganda receptors (the term “witchlings” is quite appropriate) are mentally
capable of retaining.
I have mentioned that
the simplification of the facts presented in the classroom into vague, inflated
statements is intentional on the part of the Deweyites. This is a point worthy
of extrapolation. It is not of immense difficulty to cast such assertions as are
spread in many “politically correct” classrooms, but it consumed two paragraphs
of this commentary to disprove them and introduce basic, un-extrapolated
historical facts in order to verify the integrity of our Founding Fathers. The
academic historian, in order to dispel doubt, would craft a dissertation, a
book, a definitive compilation of ten volumes with quotations from a hundred
other dissertations, books, and reports simply to disprove the claim
conclusively. A man of intellect and enthusiasm for the subject would be willing
to pursue the matter instead of merely accepting the statement "on faith". (Of
course, according to pure logic, the expression is arbitrary and can be
dismissed if no concrete evidence is presented on its behalf, but one who
exhibits historical curiosity would nevertheless seek to discover what
had existed in actuality.) He would be willing to become exposed to fact.
He would introduce himself to such concise explanations from both sides as the
one I had provided above at the least and only subsequently, following a bare
minimum of fifteen minutes of analysis, determine which information presented
corresponds with the absolute reality. Yet the Deweyites possess a curriculum.
They comprehend that a presentation of substantial facts (or even fabrications
of facts) to verify their assertions is a drain on the limited time they possess
to utterly reverse absolute values. Also it would institute in their students
the beginnings of a practice Deweyites dread, that of rational evaluation. Thus
they undertake the only scheme which would suit their timeframe as well as their
need to pervert fact, a stream of condensed clichés with little resemblance to
the genuine state of things in the past. They cover immense amounts of ground in
seconds, and their students, too demeaned and discouraged by the collectivist
practices of Dewey's design, do not perceive themselves worthy nor willing to
conduct independent studies of the matter and thus submit blindly to the catch
phrases, store them within their pitiful mockeries of brains, ever prepared to
spew them out through sheer reflex whenever the opportunity arrives, be it to
obtain any percentage above the fifties on an examination or to proclaim
superiority over a more potent intellect than theirs when the latter presents
factual and detailed argumentation for the contrary, which, of course, the
ignorami are unable to grasp even minute portions of.
The simplified
"mutations of the past" encompass nearly every major field of historical study.
"Columbus did not discover America; there were people who had lived there for
thousands of years prior," the students hear, and mechanically dismiss the great
explorer's contributions to the spread of European technology, commerce, and
culture. They neglect to comprehend that the discovery was that of a land to be
tamed and claimed, for its resources and territory, and that the Native
Americans who had existed there "for thousands of years prior" had remained
(with the exception of the Aztecs, whose perversion, as we shall briefly examine
in the future, was far more gruesome) unwilling to transform it into habitable
territory and elevate their living patterns to a level beyond mere subsistence.
America, prior to the arrival of Columbus, remained as stale and stagnant as it
had been without human beings altogether. The influence of a European culture
and outlook on life, however, had resulted in a profound discovery, of thousands
of square kilometers of wilderness yet to be ameliorated by progress (which is
no insult to individuals today who have descended from Native Americans. Their
ancestors, too, had been discovered and elevated to a life worthy of Homo
sapiens. The author possesses but admiration for the journey they had
successfully ventured into. Despite grievous errors on both sides during this
journey, it is as self-evident as one’s sensory perceptions that Native
Americans today enjoy a far superior standard of living than in Pre-Columbian
times.) The cliché, of course, bears a fault in the definition of "discovery",
but its significance is the underscoring of Signor Columbus's astounding
contribution to the ascent of man within the eyes of the students. They perceive
him, as a result, not as a hero, but as a crude interventionist "disrupting an
age-old pattern of life." Or, to replace that accusation with Christopher
Columbus's genuine "fault", disrupting an age-old pattern of death!
Explorers, colonists,
and cultivators are the third most frequently slandered group by the collective
tongue of the educational establishment, preceded only by soldiers and
industrialists. Insulted above the rest is Hernan Cortes. The cliché employed by
the Witch Doctors against this man is that "he committed cultural genocide and
killed millions of people." They neglect to mention the fact that the Aztecs
whom he had reformed had in a single day sacrificed 20,000 innocents as well as
prisoners of war, a greater number than the casualties inflicted by a puny
Spanish contingent of 600 men throughout the entirety of the armed conflict!
They are silent, also, in regard to the fact that the Aztecs had been merely one
tribe among hundreds in Mesoamerica, yet one tribe that had terrorized all the
rest for little less than two hundred years, leaving behind them rivers of blood
flowing from millions of sources, provoking a massive outrage among the Natives
that needed but another pebble to release the avalanche. That pebble had come in
the form of Cortes and his expeditionary contingent, to whose side hundreds of
thousands warriors flocked to swiftly terminate the conflict. One of Cortes's
first edicts upon entering Tenochtitlan was for the abolition of human sacrifice
and barbaric flesh-eating rituals performed afterward. The relieved Aztec people
embraced him as a god, and only a power-hungry clique of priests displaced by
the occupants (and much reminiscent in disposition of the Party Witch Doctors as
well as the Deweyite elite), had instigated an uprising which resulted in minor
fighting. The art and architecture of the Aztecs had not vanished, and neither
had that of the Maya (many of whom had embraced the arrival of the Spaniards).
Both remain notable elements of Mexican culture today, for they had been judged
as harmless (though not appealing to my personal tastes) while the genuinely
inhuman practices of the Natives had been abolished by Cortes and his fellow
conquistadors. The act in question was not cultural genocide, but rather
cultural amelioration. Students prior to "the dumbing down" would have been
aware of the above facts and more, yet the new oligarchy, with lack of time as
their chief excuse, again warp children into witchlings through mention of their
primitive claims antithetical to fact, the refutation of which is child's play
to anyone even vaguely versed in history, but unfathomable to anyone
indoctrinated since infancy into an ethic in which, instead of intellect, the
apex of virtue is thought to be a state of bumbling confusion.
The motivations behind
the "dumbing down" and the relativism already understood, there remains still a
fundamental common element of the oligarchy's attacks. To discover it one needs
only examine the men targeted by it, Columbus, Cortes, and the Founding Fathers
among them. Columbus had rendered available an immense amount of territory for
development, Cortes had liberated hundreds of societies from tribal bondage,
carnage, dogma, and obsequy, bringing to them commendable (by the standards of
its time) education, technical skills, and the benefits of the economic
structure and resources of Renaissance Europe. The Founding Fathers had for the
first time developed a political system in which both extremes, the tyranny of
one (autocracy) and the tyranny of fifty-one percent (direct democracy) had been
rejected in favor of a system of rights with the life of the individual as its
fundamental principle. What had all those men brought into the lives of men?
Comfort, freedom, progress, markings of Western Culture that followed it
throughout the ages during its revolutionary expansions. Those were realizations
within the minds of the great men themselves, who comprehended their true
identities as keys to the Absolute Virtue. Yet the Deweyite system preaches
"multiculturalism", a perception of all beliefs and practices as equivalent in
value, which condemns the actions of Western expansionists as "cultural
genocide" instead of the upbringing of individuals suffering under stale
regimes. Why? Philosopher Michael Miller offers an insight into the
matter.
"This idea of
virtue creates progress. It implies that virtues are not a stagnant deposit of
custom handed down from time immemorial. Methods can be refined and improved—and
entirely new methods devised—as we learn more. We can get better at living than
our ancestors were. And we have! The proof is written in history: success.
This is what multicultists hate. They feel that success is unfair to those who
fail, although the same virtues would work as well for anyone." (Michael
Miller, Engineer, Objectivist philosopher, founder of Quackgrass Press.
"Cultures.")
They resent success, in
other words, because failure is the condition designated by their search, their
search for human suffering, for the most desolate of cultures, the most
restraining of customs, i.e. the very systems elevated from the primitive bog by
the explorers and reformers. Yet they, in their dogma, reject not merely the
virtue but the possibility of elevation as such. Mr. Miller exposes the
ludicrous and dismaying nature of this belief.
"All cultures are
created equal. Thus saith the establishment. A culture may be notable mainly for
centuries of poverty-stricken stagnation. It may be successful only in producing
a long line of brutal, tyrannical governments. It may never have produced a
government at all. It may be mired in the superstitions of past millennia. It
may be a mere Stone Age relic, as mountain glaciers are relics of the Ice Ages.
Nevertheless, we are told to respect all cultures equally. What is the
proof that you don't respect them? It's very simple. If you dare say anything
good about your own culture, about the culture of Canada and the US, then you
are damned as a bigoted racist, and are shown no mercy... There is no point
trying to follow the twists and turns of multi-cult dogma. The obvious fact,
written glaringly across the whole sorry mess, is hatred. Specifically, hatred
of the one culture which may not be celebrated and praised—our own."
(Michael Miller, Engineer, Objectivist philosopher, founder of Quackgrass Press.
"Cultures.")
All the factual
perversions and simplifications descend from such an attitudinal paradigm, which
exists for the reason of quelling success, of mutilating the human face with the
metaphorical boot described by Mr. Orwell, which can only step upon it once the
proud glance of a visionary is turned from the stars to the bog, once the head,
from acceptance of that taboo against gazing upward, from perception of its own
worthlessness, and from the consequent dizzy feebleness, is forced into the
quagmire, fragile, immobile, ignorant, and depressed, where the collective can
absorb it into the amorphous blob that is the Party. Such is the reason for the
academic left's corruption of our historical texts and our classrooms; such is
the purpose behind their defamations, which spread to industrial leaders as
well. (The majority of studies of the Industrial Age mention horrifying living
conditions which had in reality not existed or been mere transition stages for
newly employed immigrants who would in mere months ascend to a decent, self-made
lifestyle, a trend prevalent until "compassionate" reforms of the left
rigidified the economic hierarchy of American society. This subject is more
fitting as a critique of the new elite's undermining of our economy, and may be
an interesting treatise on its own merits.) There is another aspect of Mr. Roberts's quote that has
but to be connected to our chain of fundamental revelations concerning the
practices and purposes of the new "mutability of the past". The author of the
aforementioned quote has referred to the left's "variations" on history as
"politically correct." This word of the real Newspeak is used to identify the
assertion that "all cultures are equal and deserve equal treatment." It defines
the shielding doctrine concocted by the Deweyites, mandating people to offend
none. Yet this, by utterly refusing to pinpoint flaws in cultures, sacrifices
progress and results in the contrary tendency, lowering all to the primitive
level through their acceptance of degrading acts committed to them by their
condoned regimes. It rejects only the so-called "bigots and racists" (obvious
misnomers) who seek to render supreme the will of the individual and bring to
all persons absolute control over their lives. In essence, "political
correctness", by seeking to criticize none (excepting those who criticize),
profoundly offends all persons by robbing them of their human dignity. Of
course, the mutaters of the past will state that man had never possessed any
dignity in the first place. It is the Newspeak connotation of righteousness
attached to this term that renders it appealing and acceptable to the masses
incapable of such brief anatomy as we had
performed.
—(05/01/05)
Mr. Stolyarov is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right and SoloHQ, writer for Objective Medicine, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the Western principles of reason, rights, and progress [http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/masterindex.html].
Mr. Stolyarov is also the recipient of the February 2004 Editor's Choice Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, presented by poetry.com and the International Library of Poets.
He can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.
You can learn about Mr. Stolyarov’s newest science fiction novel, Eden against the Colossus, at http://www.geocities.com/rational_argumentator/eac.html."
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