“Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.”
                                    - Schopenhauer

“It is the essence of the poor that they do not appear in history.”
                                    - Anonymous

“The world is too dangerous to live in - not because of the people who do evil but because of the people who sit and let it happen.”
                                    - Albert Einstein

“Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth?”
                                    -Cicero

      It is necessary here to begin with a note on the teaching of social studies in our schools.  I’m doing this because I teach history.  History is memory.  Whose memory?  Everyone’s memory.  Henry Kissinger said that “history is the memory of states.”  His statement is anathema to what history is.  Worse, his statement is dangerous.  If history is the memory of states—the ruling—where does that leave the rest of us:  the machinist, the teachers, the medical transcriptionist, the computer technician, the school administrator, the doctor, the plumber?  However disturbing and erroneous Kissinger’s statement is, it should not surprise us.  Of course he and his political colleagues would parrot something like that because they believe they not only make but control history.  To a certain extent, the latter is true.

      Evidence for the control of history by the state can be found in public education.  One needs look no further than a high school history text book.  Upon examination you will discover some disturbing things.  High school texts teach the same nationalistic tripe that they have for years.  I don’t mean to downplay the contributions of great personages in American history, but there are notable discrepancies in texts.

I’m not going to tell you what you’ve heard in history classes before.  The agenda-based legislature and career politicians have already force-fed you that.  What I will do is share with you some things you probably didn’t learn, and which were purposefully omitted from your classes.

      Let’s start in 1492, where many texts pick up after a butchery of prehistory.  News flash:  Columbus did not discover America.  America was already inhabited by hundreds of societies with astounding cultural achievements.  Columbus, in fact, was not even number two, or number three, of the Old World explorers.  The Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Celts, the Chinese, African Muslims, and more visited North and South American centuries before Columbus—some before the birth of Christ.  Columbus did exploit the natives of San Salvador, Hispaniola, and the Caribbean.  He did chop the limbs off of natives who did not bring the gold he wanted.  He and his men did rape, murder, and pillage in the name of God and country.  This butcher we hail as the discoverer of America.  We hurl laurel after laurel on him, and even celebrate Columbus Day on October 12.

      The American Revolution was fought for the creation of an aristocracy, not your freedom.  55 wealthy land-owners out of millions, decided the fate of a nation in the late 1700s.  The middling, as the middle class of workers, sailors, mechanics, and others was called in the colonial period, was used as a buffer between the wealthy and the disenfranchised and poor.  Nationalistic fervor was touted to get the middle and lower classes involved in the revolution against England.  The goal of people like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, was to defeat and push out the British aristocracy from the American colonies, and take over their holdings—thereby becoming American aristocracy.  Hamilton called democracy “impudent” and wanted to appoint a president and senators for life terms.  Most of our “founding fathers” had no choice but to create a federal government to support their elite merchant class.  They effectively destroyed what little freedom Americans had under the Articles of Confederation in 1787, with the creation of a federalist and elitist Constitution.  So much for the land of the free.

      Slavery was not the primary issue of the Civil War.  The issue was state sovereignty versus federal sovereignty.  Slaves were certainly involved and a chief issue, but they were not the chief issue.  I’m not justifying slavery, but simply stating a historical fact which is not portrayed correctly by most texts.  Many Southerners, in one sense or another, are vilified to this day because of this misconception.  It needs to be stated that Abraham Lincoln had no more love for a black man that the average slave driver in the south.  He once contended that it was better for the black man to be in the position he was in at that time.  Emancipation was a political maneuver.  The Civil War was an economic war involving other countries as well.  Britain and France, who made use of Southern cotton in their textile mills, sided with the Confederacy.  British troops were waiting on the Canadian border of the U.S. to attack the Union.  The reason they didn’t is because the Russian navy was anchored on the Atlantic coast, having been sent there after a deal between Lincoln and the Tsar.

      The period between 1870 and 1910 galvanized American industry.  It also ensured that the American aristocracy would control domestic and, to a large extent foreign, politics from then to the present.  It was the age of Rockefellers, Morgans, and Carnegies.  Robber barons, Wall Street witches, steel titans, and oilmen.  It made the rich richer and the poor poorer.  Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age, written in 1873, captured the reality of America at the time.  On the surface, America appeared to be prospering with an economy fueled by industry.  What fell to the wayside were the millions of poor—whites, immigrants, and blacks, who suffered in abject poverty at the expense of big business and industry.  This history is treated in passing in most texts.

      The Spanish-American War began the imperialist expansion of the U.S.  We became involved to have a holding in Cuba.  We also acquired the Philippines through brute force.  America dubs herself the police of the Western Hemisphere and protector of Latin America.  That roughly translated to “we will come in and take your resources and you can’t do a damn thing about it.”

      Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an irresponsible president.  He cheated on his wife.  Out of one side of his mouth Roosevelt said he wouldn’t get our boys involved in a war, while secretly he was orchestrating an involvement that would guarantee American economic recovery from the Depression.  Furthermore, he ignored a warning from the Russians in 1941 about an impending Japanese attack on a Pacific base.  We all know how that ended on December 7, 1941. 

      Little or nothing is told about Hitler the man when World War II is discussed. You don’t learn that automobile mogul Henry Ford donated money to the Nazis.  You will find no links between Hitler and the occult in the textbooks of American high schools.  Hitler’s obsession with the occult, in particular Germanic rites and Theosophy, were central to the manner in which he though and conducted himself.  Make no mistake, the Nazis were an occult organization.

       The fact that Nazi scientists were hired by the U.S. government after World War II is conveniently omitted from high school history texts.  The fact that eugenics and weapons manufacturing continued under their direction is not recounted.  The Roswell Incident is not even mentioned in many history books.  This event would eventually contribute to a widening credibility gap between the American people and the government.

      In the late 1940s the Cold War began.  During the Cold War, Americans were taught to fear communism.  Communism and socialism were words associated with supposed droves of godless automatons in the Soviet Union.  Americans were taught that only America’s way is right and that the government has their best interest at heart. 

      In 1963, a young American president tried to make America a true democracy.  For one, he tried to expose the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission for their elitist agenda:  control of the world economy.  John F. Kennedy was assassinated for trying to make America a people’s state.  History books pass the buck off to communists.

      The history that is taught in schools is a history of conquerors.  It is a history told primarily from the view of whites and the wealthy elite.  It is a history that does not treat with any consistency or volume the deeds of slaves, Native Americans, poor farmers, the working class, or your next door neighbor who was drafted because he wasn’t in college.

      The nationalistic tenor of our day promotes peace on the surface, but secretly, it is supportive of war.  Why?  Because war makes money.  And most wars are about money.  They are enterprises for merchants to make more money, drenched in blood.  Our curriculum promotes and glorifies war and oppression in an atmosphere that is supposed to promote tolerance and peace. 

The TAKS test requires that students in the 11^th grade be familiar with the significance of a number of dates and timeframes in American history.  They are 1607, 1776, 1787, 1803, 1861-65, 1898, 1914-18, 1929, 1941-45, and 1957.  Let’s take a closer look at the significance that TAKS assigns to each of these dates.  1607 marks the establishment of the first permanent British colony at Jamestown, Virginia.  Yes, it is very important to the founding of our country, but the story downplayed in history texts is the story of oppression; oppression, discrimination, and butchery of the Native Americans.  Most people will instantly associate 1776 with American Independence, or rather the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  It certainly marks the declaration of a few wealthy elite American colonists from a few wealthy elite British aristocrats living in the colonies.  The date also represents the exploitation of masses of American colonists.  These persons were enlisted to fight a war so that the American elite could begin their own aristocracy, which I have discussed at the beginning of this chapter.  1787 marks the Constitutional Convention, the supplanting of the Articles of Confederation, and the first ratification of the document that would ensure a Federal system would be in place to maintain the elite class at the expense of the rest of the citizens.  In 1803 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out on an expedition to explore the vast Louisiana Purchase, recently bought from France.  This date has valid cultural significance, but Lewis and Clark unwittingly paved the way for further exploitation and butchery of Native Americans.  The Civil War, from 1861-65, as I have stated is misrepresented in most history texts.  It too, was a money-making venture, as the Rothschilds funded both the Union and Confederacy.  But you won’t find that in most books either.

The second half of American history also has some dates that TAKS insists children know.  1898 was the Spanish-American War, which of course, was the beginning of an American empire.  1914-18 is of course, World War I.  The Stock Market crash of 1929 occurred because greedy business leaders oversaturated markets with their products.  1941-45 is obviously World War II.  This conflict, as mentioned earlier, had its share of betrayal of the American people.  1957 is the curious last date.  This is the year that the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik into orbit, and thereby successfully began the Space Race, a cover name for a nuclear and technological race between the Soviets and the Americans during the Cold War.

So, the TAKS wants our children to remember that conquest, oppression, exploitation, elitism, unequal distribution of wealth, warmongering, discrimination, imperialism, and lying are the important lessons that American history teaches.  Even if the TAKS were not in place, the TEKS, the Texas state curriculum, also teaches the importance of the aforementioned dates.

At the beginning of each school year, my students begin their first assignment on the first day of class.  They are required to write a one page essay answering the question “what is history?”  In the discussion that precedes the assignment, we talk about what history is.  It’s not just the recounting of the deeds of kings and queens and generals, but it is history and herstory, the story of families, the story of individuals, and the story of both those that make it into the history books and those that don’t.  It is transmitted orally, visually, and in written form.  History is not just the memory of states, as Kissinger contended.  History is the memory of societies, and its individual constituents, regardless of socio-economic class.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyer, Paul S., Clifford E. Clark, Jr., Sandra McNair Hawley, Joseph F. Kett, Neal Salisbury, Harvard Sitkoff, and Nancy Woloch.  The Enduring Vision:  A History of the American People.

Marrs, Jim.  Rule By Secrecy.

Zinn, Howard.  A People’s History of the United States.