The New-Old Fascist History (Carolyn Baker)

[Tace]

Sept. 5, 2010 (CarolynBaker.net) -- In 2006 I published U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You.

The book's introduction informs the reader that it is not a textbook, but rather a supplement written to expand and illumine material included in institutionally approved college history textbooks. I was motivated to offer the supplement because as a professor of history, I was appalled at the amount of history omitted in mainstream U.S. history college textbooks, not only due to the desire of publishers to produce less costly books, but as a result of a massive dumbing down of American culture in recent years.

Or as one former history student of mine put it: "I used to be bored when I would watch the news with my dad because it was actually news, but today when I watch the news, it's fun because it's about things that really interest me like celebrity gossip, hip hop music, and funny commercials."

U.S. History Uncensored provides well-documented resources beyond traditional textbook material to which the reader can refer to glean additional information about historical events and read for him/herself the primary and secondary sources that are so frequently ignored in college history textbooks.

I'm not Howard Zinn, even though my book has sometimes been referred to as "Zinn on steroids." Dear Howard left us just before the Texas history textbook controversy erupted, and I have no doubt that he's spinning in his grave in response to it.

So is this article a commercial for my book? In a sense yes, but more importantly, it is an urgent appeal to the reader to connect the dots of the rabid agenda perpetuated those who are currently obsessed with revising U.S. history. Why does this matter? Because if you want to conquer a people -- any people -- one of the first strategies for doing so is to eliminate or distort their history. While the neo-fascist revisionist "historians" would disagree, the fact is that 19th-century public education in the United States devised a specific agenda for removing Native American culture from Native children in this country who were forced (often kidnapped and then forced) to attend non-Native schools. Likewise, it was not until the 1960s that African American culture was taught in white schools in America because from the white perspective, the only history worth knowing was white history.

Excise a human being's culture and history from him/her, and you have a human being which you can fashion in any manner you desire.

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[zeemike]

1. Orwell said it in a simple way.

He who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future.
So it is all about control of information and who has the power to send the truth down the memory hole.

[starroute]

2. This goes beyond just textbooks

A few years back, when there was a lot of interest at DU in rooting out Bush family history, I sent a fair amount of time trying to find out about various events and controversies of the 1930's and 40's. I encountered a lot of frustration in the process and finally realized it was because the available accounts of that period are largely presented from a right-wing slant.

Events of great importance to the right -- like Roosevelt's attempt to pack the Supreme Court -- are extensively covered, while events of equal importance to the left are barely represented. And controversial episodes are presented in a way favorable to the right.

For example, the America First Committee is presented as a bipartisan movement opposed to the US getting involved in World War II, rather that as an overwhelmingly right-wing operation that managed to attract a few left-wing pacifists. And the Roosevelt administration's attempt to prosecute a number of fascist sympathizers during the war is presented as an unconscionable attack on civil liberties and free speech -- which would be an arguable position, except that those accounts invariably soft-pedal exactly why these individuals were seen as a real danger to national security.

And for the late 40's and early 50's, you can find a great deal on people like William Buckley and other right-wing intellectuals but almost nothing on the progressive and left-wing movements of the period that I know about only because my parents were involved in them or told me about them when I was little.

(I mean, how many of you know who Norman Thomas was and why he was important?)

There are two reasons for this imbalance, I think. One is that the left was so eager in the 50's and 60's to distance itself from anything that bore the slightest taint of communism that it buried most of its own pre-1950 history. And the other is that there are well-funded right-wing organizations with an interest in telling their own story online, but nothing comparable on the left.

There are some notable exceptions. Much of the history of the labor unions in the 30's is available. You can find material on the socialists, anarchists, and Wobblies of the 1880's to 1920's. And there is stuff on Smedley Butler and the 1934 plot against Roosevelt. But beyond that, it gets awfully thin.

And it isn't just the people and events of the left that have been dropped out of history. The entire meta-story since 1940 has been framed as the fight for freedom from tyranny -- which is the story of the right, with the Tea Baggers as its inevitable conclusion. The fight for social justice has been either written out of the record, demonized, or presented as something of interest only to blacks and other minorities but not to the society as a whole.

Baker's book may be an attempt to restore the historical balance -- and I certainly want to find out more about it. But even if it does, the issue goes way, way beyond the relatively limited audience for college textbooks. Glenn Beck's attempt to rewrite the history of the American Revolution, for example, is possible only because the history of the 20th century has already been rewritten. It's a spreading contagion that will continue to perpetuate backwards in time unless it is cut off at the root.

[rhett o rick]

3. But I cant handle the truth. nm