They could easily put a significant barrier on all of the book burning aka monument crashing that is currently going on.
They could set the record straight about Communism, about a lot of ills in our society.
Instead, they do nothing. At best they do nothing and at worst, they pick sides. Both sides are wrong here and there's no honor in either one. Fascism is evil, communism is evil.
If you're sitting there watching the news and disapproving of what you see, don't blame the journalist. That's not to say that they aren't guilty, but the real problem is most likely a historian.
If you want real solutions to real problems, step one is diagnosing the actual problem. Chasing symptoms of problems just does not work.
Ping.....
As a trained historian, I loathe modern academic “history”. The 100 year philosophy is what I learned - “if it’s not 100 years old it’s not history”. But everybody had to get on the publishing train and write something, anything, even yesterday’s news as history. And when that train got full everybody had to get on the “Where’s Waldo” train and started writing history about “minority groups” in places where what the minority group did was not exciting in reality so the historians made stuff up.
I love the history of our Great Nation, and it is exceedingly frustrating to live at a time of so much deliberate ignorance.
” citizen historians so as to hold “the experts” accountable.”
One of the things that Bat-Sh*t crazy Glenn Beck was aware of, before he went off the rails.
He was obsessed with accumulating ORIGINAL documents, un-adulterated texts and books. Knowing full well the tyranny of revisionist history.
The article referred to “faux-historian” Mark Bray. I hope that this article will not lead Freepers into lumping historians like myself who have spent their lives as historians and who does my best to make sure that actual and not fake history is taught/spread.
Most recently I had to explain, to inquiring MSM ‘minds,’ that General Pershing did not originate the burying of executed Moro rebels with pig carcasses, because that began with the US Army commander in the Philippines, General Bell, before Pershing took command. I also explained that General Pershing did NOT end the practice.
Also that the many US Army forts named after Confederate generals were done so in the spirit of reconciliation and referred to the service of those generals while they served in the US Army before they resigned their commissions and joined the Confederate Army.
Ping to a conservative pro in the space.
I read the other day that there is a declining interest in history among young people. Part of that might be because the way history is taught in school. Part of it might be because there is little historical content in almost anything in the popular culture. When I was growing up, we had TV shows and movies about World War 2, the West, Daniel Boone and the frontier, even “The Untouchables.” While none of these were necessarily historical in the strictest sense (some of them took severe liberties) they at least made kids aware that something was going on in the world before they were born. Young people have little of that today, and some of them wouldn’t want it anyway because of their own narcissism.
Faux historians are particularly dangerous in an environment colored by that kind of ignorance.
In June 2016, Trump stated: "Yet today, 240 years after the Revolution, we have turned things completely upside-down." - Donald Trump
And it's not just about jobs and economic opportunity. It's about freedom, exercise of "Creator-endowed rights and liberties," and opportunity for each citizen, not just self-appointed elitists who fancy themselves as entitled to make decisions for all.
Thomas Jefferson, only days before his death on July 4, 1826, explaining his inability to attend a gathering to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Declaration, wrote to Roger Weightman:
" I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. may it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. the general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view. the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. These are grounds of hope for others. for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them."(Jefferson, June 24, 1826, to Roger Weightman, End of Jefferson quotation)Some time ago, I posted the following:
"Perhaps the so-called "progressive" enemies of freedom understand better than those who fancy themselves as "conservatives" that in order to reverse the Founders' ideas of "People over government," and institute "government over People," they must first marginalize and destroy the ideas from which liberty is derived.
The writings of America's Founders are replete with references which rebuke would-be tyrants and cite a Higher Source for life, liberty and rights. Early histories confirm those facts.
As so-called "progressives" have led a movement in forsaking the Founders' "reliance on Divine Providence," and belief that individuals are "endowed by their Creator," they also have forsaken the principles underlying America's Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and are systematically dismantling the greatest protections for liberty ever established for a people.
"Ideas have consequences"(Weaver).
The ideas of 1776 came out of a set of ideas consistent with liberty.
We tend to forget, or have never considered, that other world views existed then, as now.
Unless today's citizens rediscover the ideas of liberty existing in what Jefferson called "the American mind" of 1776, we risk going back to the "Old World" ideas which preceded the "Miracle of America."
There are those who call themselves "progressives," when, in fact, their ideas are regressive and enslaving, and as old as the history of civilization.
Would suggest to any who wish an authentic history of the ideas underlying American's founding a visit to this web site, at which Richard Frothingham's outstanding 1872 "History of the Rise of the Republic of the United States" can be read on line.
This 600+-page history traces the ideas which gave birth to the American founding. Throughout, Richard Frothingham, the historian, develops the idea that it is "the Christian idea of man" which allowed the philosophy underlying the Declaration of Independence and Constitution to become a reality--an idea which recognizes the individual and the Source of his/her "Creator"-endowed life, liberty and law.
Is there any wonder that the enemies of freedom, the so-called "progressives," do not promote such authentic histories of America? Their philosophy puts something called "the state," or "global interests" as being superior to individuals and requires a political elitist group to decide what role individuals are to play.
In other words, they must turn the Founders' ideas upside-down in order to achieve a common mediocrity for individuals and power for themselves.
Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under 'communism' and 'fascism'. As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939,'the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.What is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as 'the general welfare'. There will be no real agreement as to the ends to be attained, and the effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all. ____________— F A Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (May, 1945 Readers Digest Condensed Version)
Enemies Domestic.
Define "historians."