@campusreform Sounds a lot like ISIS. Destroy all culture from history that does not fit their way to see the world
— JOB (@Jon_Brenelli) June 16, 2015
Dan Henninger excerpt - RE: the new AP exams in history:
At one point the curriculum’s authors say: “Debate and disagreement are central to the discipline of history, and thus to AP U.S. History as well.” This statement is phenomenally disingenuous. From Key Concept 1.3: “Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.” Pity the high-school or college student who puts up a hand to contest that anymore. They don’t. They know the Orwellian option now is to stay down.Bonus tidbit - Jerry Seinfeld bemoaning the political correctness enforcers:
OK, I'm puzzled now. What part of the statement -
ReplyDelete“Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.”
- are you disagreeing with? Are you denying that many Europeans believed in white superiority? This strikes me as being in the same league as claiming that Thomas Edison had no particular interest in electricity. Of course a lot of them believed in white superiority, practically everything I've ever read from before about 1945 positively drips with it.
Do you disagree that they used belief in their superiority to justify taking over huge swatches of the planet? Again, how is this even a subject for argument? Everybody clearly stated this as one of their motivations right up-front. Kipling's "White Man's Burden" springs immediately to mind.
The only thing I can see where there is anything to argue about regarding that statement, is whether or not they were *justified* in believing themselves to be superior to the people they were conquering. And you may note that the quoted statement doesn't say a thing about that. Granted, whoever wrote it was probably thinking that they weren't justified, but they didn't say so outright. So what more do you want from them?
"Many" is a good weasel word and gets them technically off the hook. As for white superiority, any particular individual may or may not have believed in it, but it was hardly the animating factor in the settlement of the New World. The education industry in 2015 USA is positively obsessed with it, but that was not the case for the Europeans who came here. They came for economic opportunities and to escape oppression or poverty, not to oppress people of other races.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter's school made race the overwhelming centerpiece of their history lessons just like this paragraph excerpted from the AP test. It's like saying NFL games are all about the individual chain links on the ref's 1st down measurement flags. Yes, they play a role, but really, the game isn't about that at all.
This is why I prefer to read history books pre-1950 and particularly by those people who made the history such as Lewis and Clark or Henry Morton Stanley. They told you quite directly why they were doing things. Volk theory, so beloved of our modern education industry, doesn't show up much at all.
ReplyDeleteTim, now that you've eliminated all possible argument by decree and personal revelation, you must be right! Your facts are impuckable [sic].
Isn't it odd that it's a "sin" -- in a worldview that denies the reality of sin -- if whites believed their race (*) was superior to others, but it's emphatically not a "sin" to teach non-whites that they are superior to whites ... by virtue of being non-white?
ReplyDeleteI am, in part, descended from North American aborigines (Cherokee on my father's side, and possibly Miami on my mother's). Now, when the Cherokee began having contacts with the English settlers, the general attitude amongst them was that the English/whites were ugly ... and in all ways inferior to themselves. Which, oddly enough, doesn't earn *them* condemnation as "racists" and "bigots".
Some of my cousins are Oriental (specifically, Korean and Japanese/Okinawan). When Europeans begain making contact with the Orient, the general attitude amongst the Orientals was that the Europeans/whites were ugly ... and in all ways inferior to themselves. Hell, until the day before yesterday, many of them called us "western devils", and said that white women were ugly because they had "dog eyes". Which, oddly enough, doesn't earn *them* condemnation as "racists" and "bigots".
Now, as it turns out in fact, the Western (i.e. "white European Christian") civilization, and the national cultures which comprise it, *is* superior to all other civilizations and cultures. Civilizations and cultures are not biological entities. And accusing this plain statement of the fact of the superiority of our civilization "racist" doesn't make it so.
(*) and, of course, we must never notice how we are using the term 'race' equivocally, and including in a sense that didn't exist in 1492 or 1620/1630. For the truth is, the Europeans generally considered their nation -- their people -- to be superior to other peoples.
Another amusing coincidence of The Narrative is that it is, and always has been, the "racist" whites who were and are, of all races and peoples on Earth, the most interested in learning about other cultures and civilizations.
ReplyDeleteTo continue what Ilion said, the autobiography of Geronimo was entirely an American thing. We were afraid that the Apache were dying off and wanted them to have some kind of lasting legacy, if only an oral history transcribed. The Apache under Geronimo had no such interest. Instead, they just wanted to kill all the Mexicans they could find.
ReplyDelete"The Apache under Geronimo had no such interest [in understanding other peoples and cultures]. Instead, they just wanted to kill all the Mexicans they could find."
ReplyDeleteTo the Apache, as to most primative savages, people outside their people-group were not recognized as even being human. So, murdering an entire family of Mexicans just to take a pot was no big deal. This attitude can persist for many generations after a people begin to learn some of the ways of civilization and to live in organized States, as witness the Mongols.
And really, it is only when a people's culture is transformed by Biblical religion that one finds within the culture a real appreciation for other persons and peoples as being fully as human as one's own self and people. Thus, Christianized cultures tend to be interested in trying to understand other cultures, whereas pre-Christianized cultures tend not.
Another amusement about the multi-culti mindset is that is that the persons afflicted with it and/or contagious for it are of all persons *least* likely to seek to understand other cultures.
ReplyDeleteI pointed out before that primitive savages generally considered only their own tribe/people-group to real human beings (this is why most ethnonyms translate to "The People" or "The Human Beings"). Turns out, persons afflicted with the multi-culti mindset *also* don't consider tribes other than their own to be real human beings.