Posted on 10/28/2016 4:42:07 AM PDT by Kaslin
When sizable portions of a people forget their history, they risk losing contact with their nation’s essence, what its best qualities are, and where it ought to be headed. They may soon cease to inhabit an independent political entity.
There’s evidence that a loss of historical memory is a growing problem in America. Furthermore, political developments suggest there will be even more problems involving the loss of knowledge about essential American history in the future.
One indication that we already face problems with loss of historical memory comes from a YouGov poll, commissioned by the recently established The Victims of Communism Foundation. The foundation publishes an “Annual Report on U.S. Attitudes towards Socialism.” The first such report appeared on Monday, October 16, 2016.
Jamie Gregora wrote about that report in the October 17 issue of The Daily Signal. Most of that report deals the youngest birth cohort in the American electorate, i.e., the Millennials, or those aged 34 and younger.
Perhaps the most surprising example, but not the only one, of Millennials’ lack of historical memory is the finding that 32% of them believe that George W. Bush killed more people than Josef Stalin. (If one believes “Bush = Hitler,” perhaps that’s not too surprising.)
Three more examples of Millennials’ historical ignorance will suffice. According to the report, 42% of Millennials “were unfamiliar with” Mao Zedong, 40% claimed not to know who Che Guevara was, and 33% drew a blank when asked about Vladimir Lenin.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Thank you so much for this very important post.
From Bill Ivey
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599
“...And as I’ve mentioned, we’ve all
been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire
to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains
strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands
some serious, serious thinking - and not just poll driven,
demographically-inspired messaging...”
Restatement of a quote, widely attributed to George Santayana.
In its original form it read, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
It’s certainly true of the American Left, who are absolutely adamant in ignoring the lessons of the former Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba, Vietnam, and, most recently, Venezuela, among many others.
Marxism, in any other form, such as Utopian Socialism, communism, and now the so-called Globalism, will bring in its wake, as sunset brings night, poverty, desperation, absolutism, large-scale imprisonment, and revolutionary violence on a horrendous scale.
But it’s clear the kids will have to re-learn this for themselves, and hillary will be a willing teacher.
An excellent article, thank you.
Well to be blunt, what connection, if any, do the children of all the newcomers (or newcomers themselves) feel to American history to begin with? “Millennials” are often described as “diverse,” but it’s more realistic to say “ethnically-fractured.”
Any assessment of the nation, its characteristics, and its future characteristics which ignores demographics is just plain useless.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it
Santayana
It's not that they IGNORE so much...
Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.
|
....... The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further. The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify. In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building. As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames. What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence. |
I'd think it kinda depends on what they learn in school.
It seems as if libtards aren’t so much interested in forgetting the past. They think they can deny it and in so doing deny the future. Mental Disorder is the only explanation.
American History, as currently taught in mainline public schools, is unrecognizable to you and me.
After teaching undergraduates for years and raising 4 kids in our “American public school system”, I no longer think our kids have the logical/mental capacity to make determinations between two conflicting sets of data. Three sets will floor them.
This disgusting situation began when classes became enormous in size, when kids weren’t separated according to ability (yes, there is a reason for that and it is NOT racial), when parents were not encouraged to interact with the teacher/school as they tried to assist their kids, when entitlement was the norm, and most importantly when deductive reasoning was no longer taught. We are back to witches, fairies, goblins and external loci of control coupled with inductive logic.
We, one and all, have been sucked into the vortex of the sound bites, television, internet of games.
American history 101: White people bad. Slaves built everything, the Noble American Indian was rooked and that’s all you need to know. Oh and Columbus committed genocide.
What is even more disturbing is not when they forget, but when a history is created out of thin air for them to accept to suit a political agenda, and they do so.
Willingly.
I have always found 1984 frightening to read, because it tracks so closely with current events.
Another simple truth is that affluence promotes laziness and a loss of survival skills.
You're seeing both of these influences at work here in the United States today. I give us 20 years (at most) before the whole thing collapses -- which will be a good thing because the U.S. lost its moral claim to any right to exist decades ago.
The only question will be: What comes next?
I will point out that prior generations learned of the glory of this country in SCHOOL, where HISTORY teachers stood before us and related the story of this country’s founding and growth.
Today, what passes(!) for school does nothing of the kind. Children all the whay to college age know NOTHING whatever of the stories, the struggles, the internal fighting and compromises that created what we have today.
What is written here regarding the millenials lack of knowledge what learned by us by the EIGHTH grade. My entire senior year concentrated on AMERICAN history.
the key to modern ignorance lies with the SCHOOLS alone.
In my youth I used to prowl old used book stores for US history books. One I got ended about 1900, and another ended in 1917. Both were very different on the Civil War.
When in High School, (1963) our History teacher disliked the school’s choice for a History book as she felt it was written for Northern schools and was unfair to the Southern reasons for the Civil War.
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