Dec 7th 1941

Remember Pearl Harbor? Remember the Alamo? Remember the Maine, Plymouth Rock and the Golden Rule? But how can you remember what you never knew? Americans are tragically ignorant of our past.

How can you know where you are if you don’t know how you got there? Without the past as a guide, the future is fog-shrouded sea marked “Here be monsters” on a map.

According to the Bureau of Veterans Affairs, as of this May, approximately 2 million World War II vets were still with us. But we are losing them at the rate of around 850 a day. In February 2009, their median age was 86. In a few years, it will be over 90. In another decade, the survivors will be counted in the thousands. Their children will follow in 20 or 30 years. Who then will remind us of Pear Harbor, the Bataan Death March, Guadalcanal, Midway, Normandy, the Bulge and the U.S.S. Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay?

The deficit in historical knowledge is at least as ominous as the national debt. Sheep have no memory – individual or collective. They are creatures to be sheared and, ultimately, consumed.

In June, the results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (“the nation’s report card”) were announced. The history portion of the test, administered to a representative sampling of slightly over 30,000 students, revealed that: most 4th. graders couldn’t say why Lincoln was an important figure, very few high school students could identify China as North Korea’s ally during the Korean War, and in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, only 2% of high school seniors knew that when the court said “in the field of public education, separate but equal has no place,” it referred to segregating students by race.

About the same time, Newsweek finally did something useful. It administered the U.S. citizenship test to 1,000 native-born Americans. The results made the kids look like David McCullough – 33% didn’t know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, 65% hadn’t a clue about what happened at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 (By a process of deductive reasoning, you’d think they could have figured out that it involved the U.S. Constitution) and 85% couldn’t name the president during World War I.

Then there was the 2006 survey of 14,000 college students. More than half didn’t know the century in which the Jamestown colony was founded, why NATO was established or – get ready to be really depressed – in which document the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” are found. Hint; it’s not the Magna Carta, the Koran or Napoleon’s farewell address to his troops.

There’s a National Black History Month, a Jewish American Heritage Month, a National Tibetan American Heritage Month, a Gay and Lesbian Pride Month – as well as commemorations for Irish-Americans, Hispanics and Puerto Ricans – but no designated time for Americans to learn about and celebrate their history and heritage. We’re interested only in what divides us, not what should unite us.

In most U.S. schools, assuming it’s taught at all, history is presented as multicultural mlange. Instead of learning of our greatness, we obsess over our failures – at times real, at times imaginary. How can schools teach about the Constitution or the industrial revolution in America when they’re so busy doing penance for the slave trade, Wounded Knee, the Trail of Tears, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and Jim Crow.

Since they don’t learn history in schools, where then do America’s yut (as Joe Pesci would say) turn for instruction on their nation’s past? To Hollywood, of course.

They can learn what peaceful, ecologists the plains Indians were in “Dances with Wolves” (not to mention the brutishness of the U.S. Cavalry – with the exception of Kevin Costner). They can learn to be non-judgmental about the architects of the Japanese sneak attack in “Pearl Harbor,” that the Hollywood 10 were innocent lambs, the victims of ruthless paranoia (in “The Front,” “Guilty By Suspicion” and “The Majestic”), that Americans who served in Vietnam were mostly war criminals and psychos (“Platoon,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “Casualties of War,” etc.), that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA, FBI, Mafia and the redoubtable military-industrial complex (“JFK”), that the 1950s was a decade of hypocrisy, boredom and sexual repression (almost every movie about the ’60s made after 1980, including the odious “Pleasantville”), and that urban America was shaped by warring ethnic tribes which vied with each other for savagery (“Gangs of New York”).

Clint Eastwood’s latest essay in licking the Guccis of the Hollywood elite targets one of the left’s favorite villains of American history, “J Edgar,” or should I say “Gay Edgar,” in which we learn that the man who led the FBI for half a century was a repressed homosexual (pure conjecture based on his friendship with another lifelong bachelor) and a cross-dressing Svengali who talked Woodrow Wilson into launching the post-World War I Palmer Raids and somehow persuaded the loveable Kennedy brothers to wiretap Martin Luther King. (In reality, the Kennedys were concerned about the communist connections of several King associates.)

Because it didn’t fit the plot, Eastwood left out the FBI’s war against the Klan in the 1920s, or the fact that Hoover was so successful at tracking German covert agents that thousands were arrested on America’s entry into World War II and there was no successful act of sabotage during the war. Oh, and J Edgar Fascist opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans (reporting to Roosevelt that FBI investigations produced no evidence of disloyalty on their part), a program supported by those great civil libertarians FDR and then California Governor, later Chief Justice, Earl Warren.

The domestic left has never forgiven Hoover for his fight against communist subversion during the Cold War. He even wrote a book called “Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism In America and How to Fight It.”) The beast!

Because ordinary Americans know so little of their nation’s history, they readily fall for the left’s favorite myths, including:
1. There’s something in the Constitution mandating something called “the separation of church and state” – words which appear nowhere in the Constitution. Among other things, the First Amendment provides, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” – which, in the context of 18th century America, meant no national church, like the Church of England.

2. Revolutions usually produce freedom and respect for human rights. – On the one hand, there’s the American Revolution, on the other – all of the rest, including the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the so-called Arab Spring, a stalking horse for the Muslim Brotherhood.

3. That Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the Great Depression – which is why the unemployment rate was almost as high in 1938, after 5 years of FDR, as it was in 1933 (19% versus 25%). It wasn’t the New Deal but World War II that brought America out of the Depression. Roosevelt’s policies – which warred on the marketplace – prolonged it.

4. That Hiroshima and Nagasaki were American war crimes: – They saved least a million lives (U.S. and Japanese) which would have been lost in an invasion of the home islands. Even after the Hiroshima bombing, a majority of the Japanese war cabinet wanted to fight on (“an honorable death” for the nation). After Nagasaki, Emperor Hirohito persuaded those who ruled in his name to accept the Allies’ Potsdam terms.

5. Israel currently occupies “Palestinian land.”- The Palestinians (so-called) are an invented people who never exercised sovereignty over any part of the territory that comprises the modern state of Israel. Who was the last president or monarch of Palestine? From the destruction of the Second Jewish Commonwealth in the First century CE until the reestablishment of Israel in 1948, no independent state ever existed there.

6. America stole Texas, California and the Southwest from Mexico. – In 1845, Mexico was spoiling for a war with the United States and threatened to launch one if we annexed Texas. (Mexico City’s position was that while Mexico had the right to secede from Spain, Texans did not have the same right.) Hostilities started in April 1846, when Mexican troops ambushed a squad of U.S. dragoons, killing 14. Mexico’s army was led by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, a ruthless tyrant and butcher of the Alamo. Besides, if we didn’t “steal” Texas, California, etc., today these areas would be ruled by a tinhorn drug-ocracy with pervasive poverty and an astronomical murder rate.

7. That communism and socialism worked somewhere, sometime: – From the Jamestown colony to Venezuela, they are history’s most consistent and spectacular failures. Consider the contrast of North and South Korea, East and West Germany, before reunification, or Massachusetts and New Hampshire. China only started to come out of the Dark Ages when it moved away from Marxist economics.

8. American involvement in the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake. – The way Lyndon

Johnson and Richard Nixon fought the war was a tragic mistake. Vietnam was lost not on the battlefield but with Watergate and Democratic congressional victories in 1974. Still, if we’d never fought there, dominoes would have fallen. All of Southeast Asia might be communist today.

The left is conflicted. On the one hand, it believes history is irrelevant, that each generation is born anew, completely unaffected by the past. On the other, it wants to control what snippets of historical knowledge reach the masses. As Churchill is reputed to have said, “History is written by victors.” The left reigns victorious in the public schools, higher education, and the news and entertainment media. Thus have its myths become conventional wisdom.