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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