During CPAC 2022, I was interviewed by Steven Airey and Dylan Liles for
Defenders LIVE Episode 824: LIVE at CPAC Day 2, between minutes 1:02:44 and 1:27:44.
But by all means, check out the other interviewees, before and after…
We ran the gamut of subjects, from Ukraine to January 6; one of the main issues we touched upon, however, was education in America.
As I wrote in one of my most important posts on the 1619 Project two and a half years ago, Americans don't realize enough (American conservatives and American liberals alike, blacks and whites alike) to what extent the United States has imported the European curriculum (the Frankfurt School must certainly be among the originators of this), a great part of which concerns, overtly or not, the demonization if not of America, then certainly of the government-free/free market model…
Do not think that Europe's role in this is secondary or passive. Au contraire: Europe's influence in these teachings is paramount and must not be minimized.
From the Europeans' school benches in the 19th century to the establishment in the United States of the Frankfurt School — certainly the European élites' most successful gambit has been to take over at least parts of American education over the course of the 20th century — with the more or less willing aid of the Democrat Party.
I am the son of diplomats who, every three years, would be posted in the embassy of a different national capital — among the places I lived in through my childhood were Denmark, the United States, France, and Belgium:
In Scandinavia I learned about slavery in America along with the treatment of the Indians.
In France I learned about slavery in America along with the treatment of the Indians.
In Belgium I learned about slavery in America along with the treatment of the Indians.
In Scandinavia we did not learn much about the Sámi people — a people, and a word, even most Scandinavians would barely recognize (they are better known as Lapps or Laplanders, but with no Swedish blood-letting attached to their names, only romantic folklore).
In France we did not learn much about Napoleon's conquest of Haiti and the horrors perpetrated on the blacks of that island, along with the reenslavement (!) of the former slaves liberated during the French Revolution.
In Belgium we did not learn much about the kingdom's Congo colony — where, 20 to 40 years after Appomattox, indeed all the way into the early 20th century, blacks were not only the equivalents of slaves, but the terror and brutality meted upon them dwarfed any punishment seen on a Southern plantation, the most terrifying being the most horrific instances of maiming (having hands and/or feet chopped off) if they did not meet their masters' expectations. Marco Margaritoff:
Through the enslavement of locals who worked or starved to death, Belgium made a fortune. Hundreds of thousands of Congolese fled, while tens of thousands were killed or had their arms cut off for rebelling. Between 1880 and 1920, the population plummeted from 20 million to 10 million.
Nor, needless to say, does any American schoolchild learn much, if anything, about the Sami, Haiti, or King Leopold's Congo Free State.
When King Leopold's Ghost (A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa) was translated into French and Dutch, writes Adam Hochschild,
The Belgian prime minister clearly wanted the row to end. "The colonial past is completely past," he told the [Guardian]. "There is really no strong emotional link any more. . . . It's history."That's it. The only country where the "past" — if and when leaning towards the negative — is never "completely past" is the United States. The only sins, real or alleged, that there is a strong emotional link to is America's.
As Walt Whitman wrote in the midst of civil war, around 1863 or 1864,
The Democratic Republic has paid her to-day the terrible and resplendent compliment of the united wish of all the nations of the world that her Union should be broken, her future cut off, and that she should be compell’d to descend to the level of kingdoms and empires ordinarily great! There is certainly not one government in Europe but is now watching the war in this country, with the ardent prayer that the united States may be effectually split, crippled, and dismember’d by it. There is not one but would help toward that dismemberment, if it dared. I say such is the ardent wish to-day of England and of France, as governments, and of all the nations of Europe, as governments. I think indeed it is to-day the real, heart-felt wish of all the nations of the world …
… We need this hot lesson of general hatred, and henceforth must never forget it. Never again will we trust the moral sense nor abstract friendliness of a single government of the world.The reason is very simple: the hatred for America started in the 1780s, when George Washington …
Do read the whole thing™…
Had I money, I'd go to Europe, have some older generation guys dug up and shipped home, and leave in their places placards reading, "Next time your vaunted innaleckchools have a brilliant idea on the perfectability of either Aryan or Proletarian man, O Europe, you're on your own."
ReplyDeleteThis is said by someone who has seen a lot of things European that he loves and respects.
Frankly, the "humane" vision of Europe's Intellectual classes have unleashed generations of horrors on the world. A young Cambodian named Saloth Sar (Pol Pot) learned his Marx not from the "Orthodoxy-haunted" Russians nor the "primitive Asiatics" in Beijing, but in Paris, the City of Light. In my youth, I was told ad nauseam that the reason Marxism-Leninism failed was because it was first tried on the "backwards" Russians and Chinese. So, while calling the rest of racists, the Left blames the Slavic Uentermensch and Primitive Asiatic (being a Chinese language speaker, I do not share this assessment of part of my family's heritage). Never mind that Marxists made poor countries out of a swathe of territory inhabited by German Protestants and what was once the Danubian Monarchy's industrial heartland (back of the hand to Weber as well).
Finally, I was raised being told how much more "enlightened" France was about racial matters. Well, as a university lecturer and ESOL teacher, I have been told by unrelated dark French youth that they were very impressed with the "relaxed" racial relations in the USA--and in places that were one stomping grounds of the KKK.
As for the "independent Marxists" of the Frankfurt School, they're exhibit A in the case that some people just never, never learn.