Peter Pomerantsev wrote in The New York Times: “’Everything is P.R.,’ my Moscow peers would tell me. This cynicism is useful to the state: When people stopped trusting any institutions or having any values, they could easily be spun into a conspiratorial vision of the world. Thus the paradox: the gullible cynic.” This is a problem everywhere, but Putin has taken it to a new level.
Russia’s Ideology: There Is No Truth – NYTimes.com.
“The awareness of Barton’s systematic distortion of the nation’s founding is well known at the highest levels of the Christian political right and yet many such groups continue to promote Barton as an exemplary historian. Because the Christian right is aware of the problems but continues to feature Barton as an historian, the ‘great confrontation of 2012’ has turned into the ‘great cover-up of the present.’”
From the Chicago Tribune: “President Park is trying to reinstate her father historically,” Lee Jun-sik, a professor at the Yonsei University Institute for Korean Studies in Seoul, said by phone. “A government textbook would tout the achievements of conservative governments and boost views that conservatives need to extend their power as long as possible.”
S. Korea opens new front in E. Asian textbook wars – Chicago Tribune.
Here we go again! Conservatives in Texas are once again trying to hijack public education to further their ideological goals.
Textbooks proposed for Texas schools open can of worms | Dallas Morning News.
History is the tool of nationalists everywhere. They believe that greatness is perfection. Therefore, they must whitewash the past. The result is the creation of a mythic past that must be protected at all costs. As a result, they lash out at anyone who would taint their beautiful picture. Those who dare to do so are seen as enemies of the nation and deserve only contempt and hatred. Unfortunately, nationalism has been on the rise recently. Pride in one’s nation is only natural but when it turns to arrogance it becomes a divisive force that can turn violent if it is not checked.
The Japanese (as well as others) have never really confronted their past but they had been heading in a more honest direction until the recent rise in nationalism. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has recently requested that the Education Ministry approve only patriotic textbooks (i.e. books that deny the crimes committed by the Japanese during WWII). (see The New York Times) The fact that “several members of Abe’s cabinet are gearing up for a demand that the [Kono] statement [that admits responsibility for the comfort women used by the Japanese soldiers during WWII] be withdrawn next year, the 70thanniversary of the end of World War II” (see article) is only the latest indication of a troubling trend. Unfortunately, this trend is not limited to Japan.
I believe that nationalists have it backwards. Whitewashing the past is not the path to greatness; confronting the past is. The real heroes in this story are those like Matsumoto Masayoshi (see video at link below) who are willing to speak out in order to bear witness to the atrocities that they witnessed. Japan can only be respected if it is willing to admit their mistakes. The nationalists are wrong to believe that erasing the past will restore honor to Japan.
In Thomas Jefferson: Roots of Religious Freedom, John Harding Peach claims that Thomas Jefferson was a Protestant Christian whose vision of religious liberty was grounded in his passionate desire to protect religion. Peach can perhaps defend this misleading portrayal of Jefferson under the guise that it is “a biographical novel,” but given that he also insists that “all historical events and places were provided as they factually occurred” (xii) this excuse is not credible. He may wish Jefferson was the person that he presents in his “novel” but he cannot honestly claim that Jefferson was that person. Unfortunately, his followers, who, no doubt, also want to believe that Jefferson was the Christian in Peach’s narrative, will uncritically accept his version of events. These distortions of history are not innocent ventures; they are part of a larger movement intent on re-writing history to support their claim that the United States is a Christian nation.
The wannabe historian David Barton has been at the forefront of this movement. His book (The Jefferson Lies) is the latest in a series of books dedicated to the goal of making this a Christian nation. But Jefferson’s well-known “infidelism” doesn’t fit this narrative, so rather than ignore the writer of the Declaration of Independence Barton and others have decided to remake Jefferson into a devout Christian. This is not an easy task and the only way to achieve it is through deception, dishonesty, and willful ignorance. In fact, Barton’s book is so egregiously dishonest that it was discontinued by his publisher after a group of conservative historians exposed it as misleading and “unsupportable.”1 Unlike Barton, Peach may not have gone as far as Barton, but it is still a dishonest and misleading portrayal of Jefferson. In his desire to see Jefferson as an upstanding Christian, Peach has cherry-picked, distorted, and misinterpreted the evidence.
Peach’s “novel” begins with Jefferson’s education with his childhood teacher the Rev. James Maury, who Peach claims “lit his fire,” (1) and ends with Jefferson’s death in 1826. The book highlights events in Jefferson’s life, large and small, which serve to present Jefferson as “practice[ing] his core conviction of basic Protestantism.” (xiii) This book review will challenge Peach’s portrayal of Jefferson. This post will be dedicated to Jefferson’s religious beliefs in general before turning to the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson’s views on religious liberty in future posts.
History News Network | The Instrumentalisation of History.
Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David
Students in Colorado protested against the conservative school board’s attempt to impose an ideologically driven U.S. history on students. One of the conservative school board members, Julie Williams, complained that the current Advanced Placement curriculum emphasized “race, gender, class, ethnicity, grievance and American-bashing.” In a History New Network article, Peter Dreier, the chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department, at Occidental College, is calling on “The American Historical Association (AHA) and the Organization of American Historians (OAH) should honor these students for standing up to their school board’s effort to distort U.S. history around a blatantly political agenda.”
History News Network | Historians Should Honor Protesting Colorado Students.
see also this Associated Press article on the Colorado student protest.
The battle over Texas textbooks heats up once again!
History Chick in AZ 