Friday, October 22, 2004

THE DECEITS OF AMERICAN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS

An American High School student reports:

We are taught U.S. history out of politically correct textbooks. The books are boring and tedious and, what's worse, extremely misleading. The pages are carefully measured to spend equal time on the accomplishments of men and women, whites and nonwhites. They take care not to offend America's past enemies, but don't seem to worry about offending Americans.

My textbook last year, for example, was the 12th edition of The American Pageant by David Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and the late Thomas Bailey. Its chapter on World War II has more than a page on the relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor and one sentence on the Bataan Death March. (What does one infer from this about the value of an American life?) It spends no time at all on the American GI, but gives a comprehensive discussion of the number of women who served, and where. (It carefully refers to "the 15 million men and women in uniform.") The discussion, in short, is warped, incompetent, anachronistic.

Worst of all are The American Pageant's blatantly biased discussions of modern politics. Compare the chapters on Carter and Reagan. Carter's actions are often described as "courageous." For instance: Carter's "popularity remained exceptionally high during his first few months in office, even when he courted public disfavor by courageously keeping his campaign promise to pardon some ten thousand draft evaders of the Vietnam War era." Or: "Carter courageously risked humiliating failure by inviting President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel to a summit conference at Camp David."

The book dramatically describes how Carter, in the summer of 1979, "like a royal potentate of old, summoning the wise men of the realm for their counsel in a time of crisis," went up to Camp David ("the mountaintop") while his people awaited "the results of these extraordinary deliberations." Then he made a "remarkable television address" in which he "chided his fellow citizens for falling into a 'moral and spiritual crisis' and for being too concerned with 'material goods.'" (Everyone else remembers this event as Carter's pathetic "malaise" speech.) The authors sum Carter up as "an unusually intelligent, articulate, and well-meaning president," but one who was "badly buffeted by events beyond his control, such as the soaring price of oil, runaway inflation, and the galling insult of the continuing hostage crisis in Iran." In other words: He did a great job, and the awful things that happened during his administration weren't his fault.

The Reagan chapter starts by describing Reagan's high hopes and goals, but quickly deteriorates: "At first, 'supply-side' economics seemed to be a beautiful theory mugged by a gang of brutal facts" as the economy went downhill. Then there was a "healthy" recovery. But "for the first time in the twentieth century, income gaps widened between the richest and poorest Americans. The poor got poorer and the very rich grew fabulously richer, while middle-class incomes largely stagnated."

This is how the authors describe the largest peacetime economic boom of the 20th century, a period in which the average income of all quintiles from poorest to richest increased. The book then quickly moves on to discuss the deficit: "The staggering deficits of the Reagan administration constituted a great economic failure. . . . The deficits virtually guaranteed that future generations of Americans would either have to work harder than their parents, lower their standard of living, or both, to pay their foreign creditors when the bills came due."

Reagan's most important achievement, ending the Cold War, is never mentioned in the Reagan section. The authors imply that the credit for ending the Cold War goes to none other than Mikhail Gorbachev. My classmates swallow it all. They believe that Gorbachev suddenly decided one day that it was time for his country to lose the Cold War. My history teacher thought it incredible that I refused to credit Gorbachev with "allowing us to win."

Perhaps needless to add, there are no lessons on the virtue of patriotism. Like the textbooks, my teachers are extremely charitable when discussing American enemies; from the Soviet Union to the Vietnamese Communists, they all get the benefit of the doubt. I would like to believe that this is only a temporary situation, perhaps one that a few well-placed educational reformers could begin to correct. But my fear is that it will take a long time to repair our public schools. Meanwhile, what will become of a country whose youngest citizens have been taught to have so little affection for it?

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POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IN NEW ZEALAND

I recently received documents under the Official Information Act, which outline the "two-world view" ideology underpinning the Housing New Zealand Corporation. The "Housing New Zealand Way" consists of a Maori world-view and a Crown world-view. According to HNZ's Chief Executive, the Two-World View: "is based on an acknowledgement that the two Treaty partners have different ways of looking at the world including beliefs, values and experience. By looking from both of these perspectives we can develop a two-world view for the Corporation, which will underpin the way HNZC operates internally and the way we develop relationships externally."

While I understand that a Two-World View methodology may be rife throughout the public service, the reality is that the vast majority of New Zealanders do not want a divided country. Instead, they want a nation that celebrates differences but unites us as one people working, living and playing together. The sort of racist, politically correct brainwashing being promoted by the Labour Government is the antithesis of that. In the training materials, for example, the view is being promoted that - as a result of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi - Maori: "might reasonably have expected" that "they would remain the majority, with an ongoing trickle of migrants rather than a flood" and that "the bulk of the country would still belong to the tribes...

Under the two-world view, Maori could look forward to: "self-determination for Maori; return of Crown controlled resources unjustly alienated from Maori owners and negotiated compensation to Maori for such resources which are no longer in Crown control (does this mean all private assets?); and compensation for past and present dependency, poverty and discrimination by policies aimed at equity, including affirmative action in training, job appointments etc until there is real equity".

All of this flies in the face of public assurances by the Prime Minister and other Ministers that they are not giving special privilege to Maori. In reality, it means that, for the first time in public service history, we have a government that has introduced recruitment and promotion policies based on racial ideology: unless a staff member buys into the Labour Party's Maori grievance world-view and politically correct agenda, they cannot work for HNZC.

The political correctness indoctrination is so advanced that the training manual has pages of "transformational vocabulary", which states that certain words should not be used but should be replaced by others. For example: 'confused' should be replaced by 'curious', 'afraid' by 'uncomfortable', 'furious' by 'passionate', 'disgusted' by 'surprised', and if someone believes 'it stinks' then instead they must say 'it is aromatic', and if they are 'pissed off' instead they should be 'tinkled'!

Labour's Two-World View is promoting racial discrimination. Not only should it be immediately scrapped, but it would not surprise me to learn of staff members - or potential employees - who are taking claims to the Employment Court, because they had their reasonable career expectations curtailed through their failure to subscribe to the outrageous racial discrimination and re-writing of history being promoted by this government agency.

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