Thursday, September 4, 2014

Repeating history...


I’ve been thinking a lot about history lately. Perhaps it’s because this past weekend, Old Fort Niagara hosted its annual War of 1812 re-enactment and I live close by. Maybe it’s because events in the Middle East and the Ukraine have resurrected thoughts about “ethnic cleansing,” and the Holocaust. Or it could just be that events at home in places like Ferguson, MO put me in mind of the paramilitary “policemen” who were responsible for the deaths/disappearances of hundreds of thousands in places like El Salvador, Argentina, or Chile in the 1970s and ‘80s. Maybe it's just that we're entering another election cycle. Whatever the cause, I find such thoughts fill me with anxiety.


As Americans, we seem to either turn a blind eye to comparisons or to willfully rewrite history in such a way as to gloss over the ugliest and blackest parts of our traditional story. Some states have gone so far as to rewrite history textbooks so there is virtually no mention of slavery, the Pinkertons and the struggle for workers’ rights or women’s rights. The Civil Rights Act gets a couple of lines, the Voting Rights act none at all in some texts (leaving the door wide open for the Court to cut the legs out from underneath it just in time for another election cycle). What is glorified in EVERY American textbook is the heroic “entrepreneur.” Robber barons are no longer the bad guys who amassed their wealth using exploitative practices and enriching themselves at the expense of underpaid workers slaving away in horrendous conditions. Now they are the models for today’s corporate giants – the Koch brothers and others like them whose philanthropy involves only the manipulation of the electoral process and contributions to political parties, or the endowment of chairs in law schools for ultra-conservative professors who craft law review articles endorsing the corporate position or the conservative position on everything from health care to gun control. Such corporations have no national loyalties, moving both jobs and earnings offshore to increase profits and decrease tax liability - taxes that pay for everything from education and defense to health care and roads and bridges.


In 2010, the far right wing of the Republican Party, supported generously by the Koch Brothers, successfully lobbied and politically engineered the death of a progressive community organization known as ACORN. From the noises made on the right, you’d have thought ACORN had billions of dollars, millions of members and an agenda designed to undercut democratic voting in America. The organization, which never consisted of more than 200,000 low to moderate income families, was a community group which worked together for social justice in 75 cities campaigning for better schools, health care and job conditions as well as actively working to get out the vote for progressive candidates. The two “filmmakers” who conducted the “sting” on ACORN were conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe who targeted the organization purposely because of its huge voter registration efforts. Groups like ACORN can receive federal funding because of their efforts to increase voting and the highly edited films released by FOX news resulted in the loss of funding to ACORN pending investigation, its eventual bankruptcy and ultimate disbanding in 2010. Later investigations at the state and federal levels cleared ACORN of any impropriety or misuse of funds and ACORN won its lawsuit against the filmmakers for creating a misleading impression of voter fraud.  The victory came too late. Conservatives paid no attention to that fact and have used ACORN’s alleged activities and the misleading films as the excuse for limiting voting rights for minorities, requiring stringent voter ID policies, reducing voting hours and the number of booths in certain minority precincts and other means of limiting the Democratic or Independent vote. Then corporations and their superPACS won the biggest victory of all in 2010 – the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people with an unlimited right to free speech – AND they declared that money in the form of political contributions is a form of free speech. The floodgates were opened for big money to buy our freedoms.


Most Americans think that the Tea Party movement was a grassroots uprising against more taxation, big government and threats to the Bill of Rights from liberals. It wasn’t – the talking points, the catch phrases, the sloganeering, even the baseless attacks on the President – were carefully orchestrated and fostered by ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) – more about that in a minute - Americans for Prosperity (the Koch Brothers political arm and super PAC) American Crossroads (Karl Rove’s superPAC) and hundreds of corporate sponsors from AT&T, Exxon-Mobil, Koch Industries to WalMart. According to SourceWatch.org, “ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations.” At regular ALEC meetings, state legislative candidates, Republican governors, Republican Congressmen and Senators are given “mock” bills to introduce at both the state and federal levels. All the bills advance corporate interests at the expense of the environment, workers’ rights, decent wages, women’s rights, jobs, education and health. Often the bills are introduced exactly as written by ALEC executives. The flags are waved, the propaganda dispersed, the slogans authorized and the contribution checks written out to those campaigns most in line with ALEC’s agenda. Then the word drifts out to the “little people” – the grassroots folks – and rallies are organized to turn talking points into slogans – “they’re coming for our guns,” “Obama is a socialist” or “a fascist tyrant” or “the Bill of Rights is in jeopardy.”  Wrap all that up in a “God-fearing Christian” blanket and get it repeated by a major news outlet 100 times a day and you have a propaganda machine that is historically unparalleled with virtually limitless funding and access…until you look back at Nazi Germany in the 1930s...only in our case it is corporate interests rather than the state per se who controls the machine.   


The problem is too few Americans CAN look back at the events of the 1930s in Germany…at least not from what they learn in school. In my own experience both as a teacher and as a Mom, American history focuses on the Revolutionary War, the Civil War (to a greater or lesser degree depending on whether you live in the North or the South of the country), Reconstruction with an emphasis on the failure of former slaves to understand democracy properly, the great Industrial Age and the success of entrepreneurs like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Mellon, J.P. Morgan, Gould, Vanderbilt and yes, even then, the Koch family. With luck, students might get to the Great Depression with all the emphasis on events here at home and almost no mention of what was going on in the rest of the world. High school history usually ends with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the ultimate American victory. What was going on in Germany is not the focus of study of the 1930s. In some texts, the rise of the fascist states and the Holocaust are barely mentioned.

Surveys of adult Americans prove time and again that we do not understand the distinctions between fascism, communism and socialism and therefore people on both sides of the political aisle throw around labels without having an idea of what they are accusing the other side of being. Critical thinking is not only NOT taught in most high schools, in some states, like Texas, it’s actually banned.  The 2012 Texas Republican Party platform included the following – “Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.” Unfortunately, as Texas goes (textbook wise at least) so goes the rest of the south who have little choice but to buy the same texts from the same publishers. That same platform endorsed the repeal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a ban on reauthorizing it.

Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale

At the very beginning of our American saga, Thomas Jefferson (the great hero of the right but only with regard to the 2nd Amendment), recognized how critically important it was for the American people to be well-informed and knowledgeable. Introducing a bill called, “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” in 1778, Jefferson said, “…experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large,...” Such illumination is nowhere apparent in the United States today and that, I fear, may doom us to a repeat of a history – the rise of an oligarchical dictatorship under the guise of the “people’s will” in a “democratic” election that is nothing but a farce bought and paid for by powerful corporate interests. “Those entrusted with power” are too often merely puppets dancing to the manipulations of moneyed interests and we are already seeing what kind of perversion that can create. If we love this country the way most of us claim to, it behooves us to be informed, to seek the truth, to expose the lies for what they are and to take back our country from those whose interests are antithetical to democracy. 

Old Fort Niagara

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