Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

History is very important. Not just to me, but to the world in general, showing us where we’ve been, how we got there, and who took us there. It shows our struggles, our victories, and our failures. It shows us at what point our ancestors looked at the shape of things around them and declared, “No more!” It is important. Which is why what’s being shown to contemporary students makes me so angry.

First of all, our children are shown that those that came before were all monsters, unworthy, unless they fall into something that modern liberal thinking can shape into a creature that sycophants can rally behind. Forget the great and awe-inspiring deeds that the founding fathers and their revolutionary contemporaries pulled off, against all odds, against an enemy that by all rights should have shrugged them off like irritating gnats. Why should we remember Washington, Jefferson, or any of their lot as anything other than miserable slave owners? Why see them as the mammoth figures and symbols that they rightly were for two solid centuries? Why look up to some ideal like they embodied when we can look down to the ever more idealized Lenin or Stalin, who were just looking out for the little guy, anyway? Wait, Stalin did what to people? Che Guevara was responsible for what? Can’t be, they were left-leaning heroes, enemies of the hated west. Plus, if we had to see them as evil, we’d lose half the faces on our T-shirts.

The history being taught in schools today is a sad wash of what has gone before, showing things that matter as little as possible, while emphasizing the failings of great people to the point that they are demonized more than humanized. Early European settlements are shown as nothing more than rapists of the American Indians, thieves and butchers. The heroes of the Revolution are all slave-holding racists (even the ones that weren’t). The south fought and killed and died for the sole purpose of holding onto those same slaves. When all was said and done, the only nation more evil than the United States was Nazi Germany; Japan and Italy were just misunderstood, and don’t even bring up the Russians and what they were doing before, during, and after the war.

Make no mistake: this is what is being taught to our kids. The shame that comes from being a citizen of the greatest country in the world. Why? Because if you’re ashamed of those that came before you, of what they were and what they stood for, then you won’t stand against when the evil that they pushed back comes knocking at your door.

So, just in case there’s anyone reading this who can’t quite grasp which side I come down on, let me be absolutely clear. Communism, Naziism, socialism, group/gang mentality, and the idea that someone owes you something of what they’ve earned, are Evil ideas (notice the capital “E”), and those that propose them to you are Evil people. It isn’t that all those failed attempts at true Communism were wrong because they weren’t pure enough. It was wrong, and failed, because Communism is wrong. The same goes for socialism. Likewise the gang mentality, and the idea that someone else owes you part of what they earned.

This all being the case, I do hereby state my intent to teach those that follow me not the sanitized, politically corrected hate-speech that passed for history in contemporary America. I will not tell my children that “It was all about slavery” when they ask me why the Civil War was fought. I will not emphasize the failings of our greatest leaders when asked who they were. I will not promote the idea that soviet Russia, or Cuba, or any of the world’s other dictatorial societies are not wrong, but misunderstood, or misguided. Because these things are important.

It is important that those that follow us know what the founders stood for. That the Confederates were not just racists. That the Allies were not the bad guys. They need to understand that there are areas of history that are black and white, that there were good guys and bad guys, and that America wasn’t always the aggressor. They need to know that the heroification of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, LBJ, Barry Obama and the lot is so much bunk. They need to understand that JFK did not walk on water, and that it was not a right wing extremist that assassinated him, but one of the left. They need a firmer grasp of history than I had until I was an adult, because if they don’t know what happened, how can they know what to fight for?