fearlesshistory

So my wife found this posting:

http://www.topix.com/forum/source/el-paso-times/TVJ1A01MP6E1NVSJS

Which equates Obama with - ready for it? - Hitler. Yeah, let’s go ahead an trot out that old one-trick pony of the uber-right. I felt it incumbent upon me, as a historian, to set the record straight (which you can read here: http://www.topix.com/forum/source/el-paso-times/TVJ1A01MP6E1NVSJS#lastPost ) and point out the erroneous nature of the original poster’s logic and historical interpretation.

But it occurred to me that such education serves no purpose when directed at a person who receives their education from pundits and talking heads instead of having the intestinal fortitude to actually open a book by a recognized scholar. I say recognized scholar not because they are left-leaning and I’m saying that lefties are better than those on the right; in fact George Will is a very educated, thoughtful and right-wing author I happen to enjoy and who - brace yourself - bases his thoughts and assertions on established facts. But here’s the deal; George Will is in the minority with right-wing thought-killing pundits.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure many of them are intelligent (God knows, Karl Rove is no dumb-ass) but those who are intelligent somehow feel the need to let those who are ill-informed to mislead the American populace. For instance, there is a YouTube video where somewhat conservative Lou Dobbs takes a right-winger to task for repeating the official line, “Appeasement,”but actually doesn’t know what the word means nor does he understand what Neville Chamberlein did to “appease” Hitler. So, the ignorant are led by the ignorant while the educated use this misinformation in order to consolidate power. Let me give another example; in the 2000 primary, George W. Bush’s campaign let a rumor leak that Sen. John McCain’s daughter was actually a secret love child he had fathered with an un-named African American mistress while Cindy McCain was out of commission because she was a drug addict. The people who started the rumor knew it was patently untrue when they “leaked”it to right-wing talk show hosts and media outlets. Those people were ignorant to the truth (McCain’s daughter is adopted and from Bangladesh; his wife was addicted to pain meds, but had stopped long before the campaign) but repeated the line anyway. Why? Well partly out of party loyalty and partly because they love juicy, nasty, wicked rumors that get people all riled up and foaming at the mouth; people who are emotionally upset tend not to listen to reason and are easily manipulated. The people who listen to the radio talk show host accepted this information because they were ignorant and the radio host was in a position of authority (why else would he be on the radio?). So, intelligent people start intentionally false and misleading rumors in order to get the ignorant to do their dirty work for them.

So where does history come in? Well, actually it never does. The majority of college-level majors offer only a passing flirt with history, literary analysis, logic, ethics, and other non-technical subjects. This is in response to the American discomfort with intellectual pursuits; the idea that people should get in, get the training they need to be good technicians at their jobs, and get out. Community colleges are even worse and below that are the huge amount of certificate programs which only require a year’s technical training. The result is a populace that is highly-trained, moderately intelligent, and largely ignorant.

Sorry, America, yes you are largely ignorant. I don’t mean this in an insulting way, just in a diagnostic way. Americans don’t really read anything anymore; newspapers are on the decline and having to close up shop, books are outsold by movie ticket sales, even the bible isn’t really read anymore. When Martin Luther broke with the Catholic church, his main bone of contention was that priests were telling the populace what to think in regards to their relationship with Christ. In the intervening five hundred years, the American populace relies on the interpretations of the televagelist or their preacher, rather than looking at the Bibles as a collective whole and interpreting them for themselves.

This loss of the capacity to critically think is extremely unfortunate; in the ancient world knowledge and rhetoric were revered by the Romans, Greeks, and Chinese. Native American astronomers plotted the stars and accurately predicted the movement of heavenly bodies without calculators. In the Middle Ages, the ownership of books and dissemination of knowledge was considered a precious gift from God in Europe, the Middle East, and China. In the Renaissance, philosophy, medicine, history, and rhetoric were reborn and flowered giving birth to the works of Dante Allegheri, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Michelangelo. In the Enlightenment period, John Locke’s treatises on the nature of freedom and his meditations on the rights of human beings inspired Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and the Founding Fathers to break from the tyrany of Great Britain and form a “more perfect union” of people and ideals. Until the end of World War 2, students entering into a University learned Latin, Greek, history, mathematics, philosophy, poetry, and ethics from esteemed masters of the field.

Since then, however, Americans have become increasingly uncomfortable with the intelligentsia: they’re “elitists”who think they are “better” than “regular” Americans. And so the backlash against education began; over the decades since the 1960’s, colleges and universities stopped offering Liberal Arts degrees and instead focused on making a Baccalaureate degree an advanced technical degree; more emphasis on maintaining a machine or a system or a person and less emphasis on becoming a citizen of the United States and the world. A truly tragic turn of events. The American Empire is crumbling and precariously-balanced on the knife’s edge; we are threatened not by invading barbarian hordes as were the Greeks, Romans, Chinese, or Muslim empires before us. No, we have met the barbarians and we are them.

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