I wish I could summon up some outrage over this “comic book” that is being distributed to San Francisco high school kids but every time I look at some of the panels and try to think of something serious to write, I break out laughing.
The introduction by the author, Joel Andreas, reveals a member of the paranoid left in good standing:
The September 11 attacks provided an opportunity for George W. Bush to declare a “War on Terrorism,” which in practice turned out to be an endless binge of war-making. The second edition was published in early 2002, following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The Bush Administration then turned to preparing for a new war against Iraq. A thin rhetorical veneer about combating terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction hardly concealed its underlying aim: to impose a new U.S. client regime in the Middle East and assure control over a country that has the world’s second largest known oil reserves. As the present edition goes to press, the U.S. is occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. In an effort to quell armed resistance, the U.S. military is taking harsh punitive measures against the civilian populations of both countries, feeding a spiral of violence that has repercussions around the world and is placing us all in greater danger.
Holy Smokes! It’s like trying to fisk Chomsky! So many exaggerations, misinformed non sequiturs, and out and out falsehoods that all a sane person can do is throw up their hands and laugh at the utter stupidity on display.
As for the comic book itself, the reference notes explain much: Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Peter Wyden, William Blum, Robert Fisk, Charles Bergquist – an honor roll of leftist historians whose writings are colored to this day by a discredited Marxist worldview involving economic determinism (although Marxists reject the idea of determinism ever being a Marxist concept – now that it’s an abject failure), reductionism and other tried and true hyper liberal historical/sociological concepts that survive only in the dusty offices and even dustier heads of leftist academics.
This worldview enjoyed much popularity for more than 100 years because it purported to explain human behavior by looking at class and macro-economic factors. The problem, of course, is that determinism doesn’t do a good job of describing human motivations at all. It has never done a good job of doing so and never will. In fact, if the collapse of Communism proved anything, it showed that leftist scholars who adhere to this worldview have been more wrong in interpreting and commenting on historical events than any similar group of scholars since perhaps the Greeks who ascribed divine intervention to historical occurrences.
But don’t tell leftist academics this. Their heads might explode.
But beyond the author of this comic book and his sources, there is the weird, almost casual disregard for context that makes the book – which is supposed to be used as a supplemental text – little more than the kind of rant you might hear from brainless, uneducated goofs like Cindy Sheehan or Dennis Kucinich. Case in point: Chapter Two “The Cold War:”
Aside from the gross exaggerations and lack of context given regarding those 200 military “interventions” – the overwhelming majority of which were to protect American citizens and property in times of revolution or civil unrest in countries that could not guarantee such protections – I would call your attention to the panel in the upper left of the screen where the young boy is reading what the leftists see as sanitized American history that promotes militarism while keeping our young people ignorant of “the truth.”
Leftists believe that American history is locked in a closet guarded by CIA agents 24 hours a day. If a history textbook somehow fails to show how truly evil the United States is, the obvious reason is that we are suppressing the “true” history of slavery, or depredations carried out against Indians, or oppression of women, or some such arbitrary yardstick of historical accuracy that textbooks deliberately leave out to promote a mindless, patriotic agenda.
I will be the first to take American history textbooks to task for being incomplete, simplistic, and these days, full of politically correct narratives that reflects the desire of textbook companies to sell more books rather than any genuine effort to tell America’s story. But in the end, the kind of “history” promoted by the left is, in fact, anti-history. The schizophrenic nature of our national story – a nation that loves liberty above all else but kept millions in bondage for the first 80 years of its existence among other dichotomies – cannot be illustrated in any single textbook or even series of textbooks and certainly not in a comic book where context is deliberately excluded in order to promote an agenda. In short, the comic book becomes a parody of itself. That panel in the upper left above could show the young man reading the comic book in which his picture appears.
What kind of high school would purchase comic books in the first place, especially when trying to facilitate discussion on such an extraordinarily complex subject? It is apparent that either San Francisco is full of ignorant high school kids who can only learn by being exposed to reading material the level that a kindergartner wouldn’t find challenging or that school authorities themselves have precious little confidence in the cognitive abilities of students under their care.
My guess is the latter. This country is full of clueless school officials who not only fail to challenge students in developing curricula that would give them a fully rounded education, but also seek to promote their own agendas and foist their own ideas upon students with little thought to developing their critical thinking skills – the ability of the student to think and reason for themselves. This includes liberals in San Francisco and conservatives in Kansas.
Stupidity among school boards knows no ideological limits.
5:49 pm
Calling it “anti-history” is perfect. Zinn himself said that history shouldn’t be the disinterested study of past events, but an activist narrative to promote an agenda. And Chomsky…well, he and reality have never been good friends.
I also thought I’d get angry when I first heard about this – but my reaction ended up being the same as yours. It’s just a riot – you couldn’t make up a better parody of far-Leftist thinking.
7:45 pm
“The U.S. was always much stronger then it’s Soviet adversary,” is misleading at best and, depending on what the author it actually referring to could be considered just false.
The Soviets held a huge advantage in conventional forces which is one reason many in Europe were against the reduction of nuclear arms and the INF treaty (Thatcher for one).
But you can’t quite tell what he means. Of course you could just say we were stronger morally – but I am sure he didn’t mean that.
Oh, and in another chapter he discusses total military spending vs. the cost of everything in the U.S. but fails to mention that without our stong military we most likely wouldn’t have all of the things mentioned.
DKK
10:58 pm
The introduction is indeed entertaining. I am sorry to say that my teenage son, in an AP U.S. History class this year, was required to buy and use Zinn’s book. I wanted to puke. I feel so unclean sending any money to his bank account.
6:15 am
Al Franken announces Senate Run: a Transcript
Hi, I’m Al Franken. I’m running for the United States Senate here in Minnesota…
11:21 am
Oh, so this blog is a condemnation of the Kansas conservatives too?
Funny, this is only about the liberal school boards, and what a shock… you’ve never written anything critical of Kansas schoolboards.
Propaganda is so much more effective when the writer is a “true believer.”
You don’t get points for credibility or balance when you spend 99% of your argument attacking one side, then toss in a “this goes for X too.”
Ideologues make for sloppy, uninformed, and laughable debaters.
2:35 pm
TV:
The problem with being an idiot is that it is so easy to make you look stupid:
http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2005/11/09/small-victory-for-sanity/
http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2005/08/02/dear-mr-president-shut-your-yap/
http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2005/08/03/the-absolutely-positively-very-very-last-thing-i-have-to-say-about-id-and-evolution/
http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2005/05/06/attack-of-the-killer-potato-heads/
Next time, before making a fool of yourself, I suggest you use Google. That way, you’ll be able to mask your towering ignorance.
Ideologues may make for “sloppy, uninformed debaters” – and you should know. You proved your own point in spades.
4:49 pm
Although, I hear you when you say the comic book made you laugh. That’s great, but unfortunately, the high school readers of this trash are vunerable. Most high school students accept as absolue truth much that authority (teachers) say to them, right or wrong. Their young minds are very pliable and ripe to obsorb this propaganda as truth. Given the leftist liberal agenda of the teaching profession today Probably, debate, if any will be “YOu’ll understand it my way”
5:46 pm
“Funny, this is only about the liberal school boards, and what a shock… you’ve never written anything critical of Kansas schoolboards.”
PLEASE do not call the people who think this comic book is a good teaching tool (or shows accurate history) “liberals”. True liberals would find this attempt at brainwashing disgusting. The kind of history fools like Zinn and Chomsky is equivalent to jingoistic propaganda – it has no basis in historical fact and it’s just there to score political points.
You also used the tu quoque logical fallacy (don’t worry, I’ve seen it many times in the comments) – that if Rick condemns San Fran he must condemn Kansas (he did do both, but that’s beside the point of your fallacious argument”.
3:34 pm
Rick—
I enjoyed your rant, but of course, I do have one bone to pick, when you say:
“The schizophrenic nature of our national story – a nation that loves liberty above all else but kept millions in bondage for the first 80 years of its existence among other dichotomies – cannot be illustrated in any single textbook…”
I think it can be shown why this happened. If the non-slave owning states had not gone along with The Compromise, there would have been no United States of America. The fact that they did it in secret was shameful, though.
Did they leave the problem to fester for later generations? Of course. Was that worse than what they did? I’m not sure.
It’s hard to come up with a moral solution after the fact. This evil existed since the beginning of the colonies, long before the idea of a separate nation was ever in the air…
Everyone from the Original founders to Alexis de Tocqueville knew there would be a break, and probably a war, eventually. It was a Gordian knot that none had the wisdom nor moral courage to cut.
Not to defend the South’s “peculiar institution,” the North benefitted from it while condemning it. The South, on the other hand, blindly refused to see that a society without a true middle class was doomed to failure eventually. The fact that it has yet to recover from that blindness doesn’t compensate for the evil it caused.
Nonetheless, the factors involved could indeed be outlined, described, and accounted for in one book. In fact, a good fat chapter in one book dealing with our first two centuries would suffice. Hindsight is a wonderful tool when placed in skilled hands.