It’s not coincidental that Karl Popper titled the first volume of his The Open Society and Its Enemies, “The Spell of Plato”. While indisputably one of the greatest of Western philosophers, Plato’s politics left a lot to be desired. Not least his loathing of democracy and urging of an “ideal state” where a tiny elite of “Guardians” rule over the cattle-like mass of the hoi polloi. Plato’s elitism has exercised enormous appeal over the political left for centuries (it’s hardly coincidental that The Guardian is so named).
Plato urged his “Guardians” to promote a “noble lie”: a mythical account of the state’s origins, designed to keep the elite in power. The “Noble Lie” idea is one today’s elites have taken to heart: hence the “history wars”. Having long won over academia, the left are now taking their history wars to the earliest years of schooling. In Australia, the draft history curriculum washes away and denigrates the achievements of white Australians and focuses almost solely on Aboriginal history.
American educators have long promoted the bogus history of Howard Zinn, criticised by historians as a “stick-figure pageant”. Others call it “a black-and-white story of elite villains and oppressed victims […] nothing but an empty text simplified to the level of propaganda”.
But if A People’s History of the United States was garbage, the 1619 Project is scraping the propaganda sewer to the metal.
The 1619 Project attempts to cast the Atlantic slave trade as the dominant factor in the founding of America, rather than ideals such as individual liberty and natural rights. The initiative has been widely panned by historians and political scientists, with some critics calling it a bid to rewrite U.S. history through a left-wing lens.
The 1619 Project starts from the false premise that the arrival of the first African slaves was the foundational moment of American history – and builds the lies from that base of falsehood.
[Mary Grabar] criticize[s] the project for inaccuracies such as the American Revolution having been fought to preserve the institution of slavery rather than for seeking independence from Britain.
Not unsurprisingly, the 1619 Project is brought to us by the New York Times, the paper that has been lying to Americans since at least the mid-19th century, when, historians allege, the Times was bought off by corrupt officials to cover up the scandal of lead poisoning in New York’s water supply. The 1619 Project may have won a Pulitzer Prize – but then, so did the Times’s propagation of Walter Duranty’s lies about mass starvation and murder in Stalinist Russia.
The 1619 Project was inaugurated by an essay by New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, who essentially made the argument that what drove America’s founders to seek independence from Britain was a desire to continue owning slaves.
“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” Hannah-Jones wrote, arguing further that the profits from slave labor empowered America’s founders to push for independence.
To call that wildly inaccurate is like calling Duranty’s pro-Stalin propaganda “a bit biased”.
Grabar said in the interview that this interpretation is inaccurate.
“It’s the opposite of what Hannah-Jones … is saying,” Grabar said, adding that it wasn’t until 1787 that the abolitionist movement started in England, around four years after the 1783 Treaty of Paris was signed, which officially ended the American Revolutionary War[…]
Thomas Mackaman, a history professor at King’s College[said that…] the American Revolution didn’t establish a “slavocracy,” as Hannah-Jones suggests, but it instead “brought slavery in for questioning in a way that had never been done before” by “raising universal human equality as a fundamental principle”[…]
So why are the left so determined to lie about American history?
“A lot of the narratives being pushed right now are also these ideas that the whole history of America was basically some type of tyranny,” Grabar said, rather than the fact that the “American system was trying to fight against tyranny of different kinds”[…]
She argued that the broader context for such distortions of history is to cast America as fundamentally tyrannical, facilitating the replacement of its free-market capitalist system with a socialistic regime.
But socialism “hasn’t worked anywhere,” Grabar said. “It’s just produced a lot of misery and death and subjugation.”
The Epoch Times
Not that students are likely to be taught such inconvenient facts. Teaching is a profession overwhelmingly occupied by the left. Naturally, they’d rather die than admit to socialism’s unalloyed record of failure.
They’re certainly not about to start telling the truth about American history.
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