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 that 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.
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