Re-right-ing

If your friend lied to you once, would you take everything they said afterwards with a grain of salt? Would you think for a moment (or more) about the things they had said in the past, rehashing how those had worked out, if they had turned out to be true or false, if there were consequences that you could have avoided if you’d know they were lying? Someone who blatantly lies puts a pall over everything they claim after that, and their entire person becomes suspect, at least to a discerning, honest individual.

Unfortunately, these days, lying is commonplace and holding people accountable has become tantamount to racism, the first accusation (there are others) a liar often resorts to when confronted.

But a lie is a lie is a lie, and, “the truth is a very narrow path,” as Goethe assures us. Which is why it is all the more disconcerting when it is an educational institution that is caught in the lie, and their excuse is that it simply isn’t the only lie they are telling. Or are they insisting that two wrongs, do, indeed, make a right?

In Denton, TX, they are using a US History book that incorrectly summarizes the second amendment this way:

The people have the right to keep and bear arms in a state militia.

From: United States History: Preparing for the Advanced Placement Examination

The proper quote reads this way”

Amendment II. A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

This egregious misstatement alone is serious enough to warrant expulsion of the book from their roster. There are good textbooks that teach the truth.

. . . the Denton Independent School District maintains it only uses the book as “supplemental” material and is “disseminating the correct information on the Second Amendment” from other texts.

Oh, well, then, keep the LIE! Muddy the water! Confuse the poor students, so they won’t be able to tell the difference between truth and fiction! Please forgive my aggression on this subject, but this cuts to the very core (pun intended) of what’s wrong with our educational system: political correctness, or the inability to discern.

The school’s protestation that the book is supplemental is embarrassingly stupid and disingenuous. Why the insistence on giving students two versions of a TRUTH? One is the truth and one is a lie, meaning it has  no value. Throw it out!

And why does the book specifically misquote the second amendment? I don’t believe it’s enough to say it was an accident. Writers can be lazy, but mis-copying from an historical document is purposeful. However, if you can get enough people to believe the lie, well, then, what happens to the truth? (I. e. WMD in Iraq, which were documented, but never found, and thus incorrectly determined to be nonexistent. And that lie was repeated so frequently it is now masquerading as truth to those who lack discernment – i. e. probably those who wrote this textbook.)

Upon further review of the book, authored by Dr. John Newman and Dr. John Schmalbach, TheBlaze also discovered a potentially controversial passage on the American Revolution. The text asks the question: “THE REVOLUTION—RADICAL OR CONSERVATIVE?”

The authors call those who fought in the Revolutionary War “revolutionary mobs” and “American mobs.”

“In comparing the three revolutions, a few historians have concentrated on the actions of revolutionary mobs, such as the American Sons of Liberty. Again there are two divergent interpretations: (1) the mobs in all three countries engaged in the same radical activities, and (2) the American mobs had a much easier time of it than the French and Russian mobs, who encountered ruthless repression by military authorities,” the text reads.

Yeah, uhm, the American revolutionaries had a really easy time of it, going up against the greatest military force in the world. It sounds like those “divergent interpretations” originate with those same authors, frankly, and significantly, how are these “interpretations,” which are less divergent than just independent, at all relevant? The real question might be how these revolutions differed in their origins and outcomes – which is, of course, what made America unique and, in a word, great. Those are not questions whose answers interest the educators who espouse this text.

In summary, what we have here is an attempt to equate the American revolutionaries, who fought for freedom from tyranny and freedom for a government of the people, by the people and for the people, with any mercenary or mob radical element that wants to topple it’s own government. They are terribly mistaken, and clearly should not be writing text books, or any books. The American revolution was exceptional – the proof is in the pudding, as they used to say, because America then became, in very short order, the world’s superpower, and a beacon on a hill. The revolutions and mob actions the book wants its readers to view similarly can make no such claims.

We fight a battle for truth and against those who would mutate the truth into lies to serve their own perverse political agendas. It is as simple as freedom versus slavery, democracy versus communism, right versus wrong. The irony here is that to win, the authors and their supporters must also lose in this ages-old battle. If all sacrifice is noble, if our founding fathers were not exceptional, if our country should not stand as a shining city on the hill, for freedom in the storms of dictatorships and tyranny, then there exists no moral superiority, no right, no wrong, and no truth. If the second amendment does not specifically protect the individual from its government, but simply recommends the state militia have arms, we all become slaves to the government, as the government continues to grow itself at the expense of it’s citizenry. That is the lesson of history that our founders sought, and succeeded, for a time, to change.

George Orwell said, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

The lesson that our educators should already know is this: Stop rewriting history, or you’ll destine us all to repeat it.