Tim Kaine: historical ignoramus

Senator Tim Kaine apparently believes that slavery didn’t exist before white American colonists invented it:

Democratic Senator Tim Kaine claimed Tuesday during a speech on the Senate floor that the United States “created” slavery and insisted we didn’t “inherit” it from anyone.

“The United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody,” Kaine said. “We created it.”

“We created it and maintained it over centuries,” Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vice presidential pick said.

Kaine must be a product of public school, where 24-year old teachers gush over the revisionist history texts of Howard Zinn, the notorious left-wing activist and textbook author who taught an entire generation to hate America. The Claremont Review characterizes Zinn thus:

A tireless left-wing activist with a Ph.D. in history, Zinn (1922–2010) urged fellow historians, as Grabar relates, to eschew “disinterested scholarship” in order to bring about “a revolution in the academy.” Not all radical academics agreed with his anti-capitalist take on history. Eugene Genovese declined to review Zinn’s opus, which he privately described as “incoherent left-wing sloganizing.” Michael Kammen called it “a scissors-and-paste-pot job” that devoted too much attention to “historians, historiography, and historical polemic” and hence provided “little space for the substance of history.” Kammen acknowledged the need for “a people’s history; but not single-minded, simpleminded history, too often of fools, knaves and Robin Hoods.”

Zinn’s text has sold over 2.6 million copies. And it has had exactly the effect that Zinn would have wanted: students that are fed this drivel hate their country. Antifa loves Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” too. Antifa “martyr” Willem Van Spronsen, who died in a shootout with police after trying to bomb an ICE detention center, praised the book in his manifesto:

Four days later, the Washington Post published part of the story in a watered-down article titled “ICE detention-center attacker killed by police was an avowed anarchist, authorities say.” In the interim, tributes from Antifa Facebook, Black Lives Matter leader Shaun King, and other likeminded sources came out describing Spronsen as a heroic “martyr.”

It’s apparent from his manifesto that Van Spronsen believed he was liberating a “concentration camp,” as U.S. immigration facilities have been described by Democrats including the socialist lightning rod Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. After rambling on about “the forces of evil,” “concentration camps for folks deemed lesser,” and the ineffectiveness of “the centrist” reformer, the manifesto told readers, “see howard zinn, ‘a people’s history of the united states.’” The book would provide, he alleged, support for Van Spronsen’s assertion that “we are living in visible fascism ascendant.”

(We have previously noted that the word “fascism,” as commonly used, is a largely meaningless term that serves as a slur for “something or someone I don’t like,” or equivalently, “evil.")

Howard Zinn died in 2010 and so, thankfully, won’t be writing any more books. But the organization he left behind works tirelessly to promote his work. When Arkansas legislators tried to ban the book from their public schools – presumably reflecting the preference of their electorate – the “Zinn Education Project” promised to help circumvent the purchasing ban, by sending books directly to teachers and students that requested them, free of charge:

The Zinn Education Project website says, ”In solidarity with Arkansas educators and students, we will send a book by Howard Zinn and A People’s History for the Classroom to any Arkansas teacher who requests them. This offer is made possible by donations from individuals and publishers …

All education is propaganda

We should acknowledge that all education is propaganda, just as all news is propaganda. Any content or curriculum created by a human being necessarily has a perspective. The first influence of that perspective takes place at the curation level, or editorial level: which subjects to teach? Which stories to report, or emphasize? Which to ignore or suppress? Even hard “science” is tainted by these editorial-level decisions: which climate studies will receive grants?

And once we have decided to teach “American history,” the next level of influence comes in: what values to attach to historical events? Whose perspective to report, or emphasize? Which facts to report, and which to ignore?

Once the dogmatic nature of all education is acknowledged, we must ask the question: whose purposes does it serve, for white American students to hate their country and their (cultural and biological) ancestors?

We have had no reports that students in Mongolia (or even Tibet) are being taught to hate Genghis Kahn, who butchered half of Eurasia, leaving millions dead. No evidence, either, that black Bantu-speaking South African students are being taught to despise their ancestors, who murdered and enslaved their way across Africa, finally overrunning Dutch-settled Cape Town. We doubt that Chinese students even know the truth about Mao’s cultural revolution, including his brutal campaign against Confucians, which killed over a million and a half people, or his “Great Leap Forward” economic program, which put 45 million people in graves over a four-year period.

The point isn’t to “disappear” history, for instance by pulling down statues of past heroes. The point is that, compared with much of human history, America’s supposed “evils” are really nothing to gripe about. And what other context is appropriate, for judging any history, except all of human history?

Philadelphia UArts Professor and social critic Camille Paglia has lamented the ignorance of Zinn-educated students when they arrive in her university classroom:

What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history of any kind. No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on, and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization, etc. So they now are being taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!

Especially ignorant are the “Marxists” who have never read Marx and cannot describe “historical materialism”; the “communists” who refuse to read the Soviet dissidents, like Solzhenitsyn and Shafarevich; the “anarchists” who don’t know who Bob Black is, and can’t start a fire without a can of diesel fuel; the Libertarians who have never studied economics but want to dismantle the Federal Reserve; and any leftist at all that hasn’t read Ted Kaczynski and wondered whether they fit his psychological profile of an “oversocialized” person whose social activism is really just frustration about his own powerlessness, rather than any notion of “justice”:

We argue that a very important and influential segment of the modern left is oversocialized and that their oversocialization is of great importance in determining the direction of modern leftism. Leftists of the oversocialized type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper-middle class. Notice that university intellectuals constitute the most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most left-wing segment.

The leftist seeks to satisfy his need for power through identification with a social movement and he tries to go through the power process by helping to pursue and attain the goals of the movement… But no matter how far the movement has gone in attaining its goals the leftist is never satisfied, because his activism is a surrogate activity… That is, the leftist’s real motive is not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a social goal. Consequently the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he has already attained; his need for the power process leads him always to pursue some new goal.

In other words, the problem is that an awful lot of people don’t read books, don’t know themselves, and don’t know history.

What to do about this, when even U.S. Senators can proclaim such nonsense as “America invented slavery” with a straight face?

Perhaps there is a larger, more general and more insidious cultural problem at work. Ironically, even though God is dead and no one is capable of religious belief any longer, perhaps the West is becoming increasingly superstitious and irrational:

In 1995, the cosmologist Carl Sagan expressed concern about the trend toward a society in which, “clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline…we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.” More recently, British polymath Dick Taverne warned that, “in the practice of medicine, popular approaches to farming and food, policies to reduce hunger and disease, and many other practical issues, there is an undercurrent of irrationality that threatens science-dependent progress, and even the civilized basis of our democracy.”

Indeed. At a time when the country is racked by demonstrations and riots based solely on a belief (“systemic racism”) unjustified by any data or evidence, we are inclined to agree 100% with this diagnosis.