The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

A liberal black stands up for racist anti-patriotic education


Mr. Pitts proposes to retain some rather steamy anti-patriotic propaganda along with the usual patriotic stuff comprising parts of what our schools teach about US history.

He begins,

This is a tale of two countries.

The first country was built on a radical new promise of human equality and a guarantee of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That country made it possible for even those born in the humblest and most meager circumstances to climb to the pinnacle of prosperity and achievement.

It helped save the world in a great global conflagration, fed and rebuilt the devastated nations of Europe, planted the first footprints on another world.

The second country was built on the uncompensated labor of human beings owned from birth till death by other human beings.

That country committed genocide against its indigenous people, fabricated a war in order to snatch territory belonging to its neighbor, put its own citizens in concentration camps.

And it practiced the “science” of eugenics with such enthusiasm that it inspired advocates of mandatory sterilization and racial purity all over the world. One was an obscure German politician named Adolf Hitler.

Obviously, the first of those countries is America. But the second is, too.

But neither country is America.

The description of the first is patriotic bilge, from the promise that did not exist to the fiction of saving the world.

The purpose of patriotic bilge is to make proud and well-disciplined citizens and willing soldiers.

The second is liberal anti-patriotic propaganda and its purposes are more complex, including undermining the pride and discipline of citizens and the willingness of soldiers and beating up whites, using the power of the state to pummel them on behalf of non-whites even in the public schools.

The purpose, in other words, is much the same as that of “sensitivity training,” which again is much the same as that of the re-education camps run by communist thought police in various unfortunate countries.

The only surprise, I suppose, if it is one, is that Mr. Pitts left out any charges of theocracy, homophobia, or phallocracy, while emphasizing in his second description messages of racial grievance directed at white folks.

Of course it is true that black African slaves captured and sold by black Africans in Africa were owned by Americans, and of course used for labor in parts of the country for some purposes.

But their labor was very far from achieving anything so grand as building the county.

(Did no one else do anything, then?)

The Spanish conquerors did otherwise in Cuba, but white American settlers did not wipe out the Indians or even, so far as I know, any individual tribe, though some Indian tribes were in fact wiped out, quite deliberately, by other Indian tribes, at various times both before and after the whites began to arrive in the New World.

As for the fabricated war, I suppose that would be the Mexican War.

The “fabrication” was the casus belli; you could look it up.

Angry about that war, is he? Ashamed? He should probably get over it and move on.

(Indians fought wars among themselves for plunder, slaves, conquest, and territory all the time, by the way.)

As for the internment of the Nisei, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and many others including such heroes of the left as Mao did much worse to far more of their own citizens, though the salient feature of the Nisei in this litany of blame is not really their citizenship but their race.

All the same, a little perspective, please.

And, finally, as for the argumentum ad Hitlerum of the last sentence, I think there is no need to say anything about that.

Consider Pitts’ article pendant to Kagan's, discussed below.

As for the role of truth in the propaganda of blame, see these.


Guilt-trip politics

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