Peace, Commerce & Liberty

Social studies. Social science. History. Cowboys and Indians. Story time. One and the same to so many of us who attended public elementary schools.The searing reality finds the modern public primary school and its millions of young, impressionable pupils terribly out of touch with the truths of our nation’s history. The study of America’s past is utterly lost on these youngsters (and their teachers, more and more frequently without proper credentials), and that is a sad and dangerous fact.

This weekend, for some reason, I found myself reflecting on what I remembered from elementary school history lessons - if they can be called lessons. I remember the collective groan when the teacher would announce that before snack time we would have to waste a half hour or so on “social studies.” And I remember how worn our text books were, torn at the binding and spotted on its dull pages with light brown stains that seemed to glue pairs of pages together. With a word from the teacher, the class would reluctantly flip to the pages we were instructed to read, and we would “popcorn” around the room until its entirety was read aloud. The subject matter was hardly varied: Francis Drake, the California missions and Junipero Sera, the pioneers, and a bit about some tea being dumped by some Indians into a lake from the Mayflower (or something like that).

Honestly, I can’t say I learned anything in those boring sessions. Thankfully, I’ve come to relearn most of the history I supposedly learned in my elementary years, and I know now that the tea folks were just dressed up as Indians - or Native Americans, or was it American Indians? My teachers never knew which term was correct, so I grew up using all of them and none of them; it may be silly, and probably offensive, but it’s highly instructive: Political correctness, and historical facts in general, were not communicated to us as youngsters.

First, I’ll explain why I find this very dangerous. I know that I am exceptional in my fascination with history. Of everyone I know, probably fewer than 5% would say that they enjoyed studying history in school. In fact, I’ve been told by so many people that just about every other academic subject was more interesting to them - and I suppose I counted myself among them until high school. But while some children eventually see the light and come to love and respect history, as I have, I don’t think that it’s much of a jump to say that the vast majority of children retain their hatred even after intellectual maturity. This is at the heart of the hazard. What Edmund Burke said on the subject has become somewhat of a cliche: “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” But I have no doubt that it remains as true as ever. As a nation of history-hating children who inherit the reins of our Republic as history-ignorant adults, we have put our future in grave peril. I could write extensively on this subject, and I would write that I believe we are seeing the effects of this even now - but let it suffice here to say that when as citizens we do not recognize the vitality of the lessons learned by our fathers and grandfathers in the past, I believe, we make their same mistakes and repeat their same follies. This is certainly no equation for progress. Worse, it is probably a recipe for eventual regression.

Second, I would like to briefly summarize some of the larger flaws (lies?) I have retrospectively noticed occurring in the history I learned as a boy (organized roughly in order of severity, from most severe to less so).

Flaw 1: American history is composed of one story and one only; our textbooks’ simple narrative was made up of irrefutable facts that one would find no reason to question.

Flaw 2: The United States of America and its people have never done anything wrong.

Flaw 3 (a corollary to Flaw 2): The United States of American and its people have never engaged in any activities at all similar to those of our enemies, i.e. imperial crusades, suspensions of habeas corpus, establishments of concentration camps.

Flaw 4: The Native Americans were overjoyed to meet the “Pilgrims” when they stepped off the Mayflower in the “New World.”

Flaw 5: Westward expansion was just “manifest destiny.”

Flaw 6: History is best studied in terms of war and conflict; nothing extraordinary occurs in peacetime.

Flaw 7: Our American democracy works swimmingly, and each American has an equal voice in directing the course of our nation.

There are obvious problems inherent in each of these, of course. And there are probably a thousand more that I can’t think of at the moment. Nonetheless, I think it’s illustrative of a grand breakdown in our public school system’s dedication to truth. It’s why, I should add, Americans are increasingly wary of monolithic public schooling and are turning ever more to private schools and home schools. I was reading last night a book on the reading habits of the Founders (Books and the Founding Fathers, by George H. Nash, if you want to read it yourself). There were no public schools when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were growing up. They had to rely on private tutors and their own desires for success and intellect to attain the necessary classical knowledge that would secure for them upward social, political, and economic mobility. Even college in eighteenth-century America was heavily individualistic, with students (who were, on average, four to five years younger when they entered college) more often reading books on their own than sitting in classrooms with teachers. It was a different world, to say the very least, and the modes of learning reflected that world.

But just because this was three hundred years ago does not mean that it cannot hold some amount of relevance today. The learned of our Founding were men (and women) who had taken the initiative to explore the world around them, who were not forced to sit in a dusty classroom for six hours a day being forced to read faulty, oversimplified, and outright untruthful text books written by committees of scholars with political agendas. Certainly American children of our era are not nearly as disciplined as little Tommy Jefferson probably was, but discipline comes with responsibility, which is something we are not burdened with until very late in our intellectual development, late in high school or in college.

Is an overhaul needed? Very much so. But it is not simply an overhaul of public schools and textbooks and teachers that’s necessary, but a complete shift in how we see and treat our children. If Jefferson had been pampered and belittled and constantly occupied with useless fun and games as a child, I would hate to consider how terrible the Declaration would have come out.

A group calling itself the Hawaiian Kingdom Government (HKG) contends that the small archipelagic U.S. state ought to be independent and that the native constitutional monarchy, overthrown in the late 19th century, should be reinstated as the one true government there.At first glance, the proposition seems preposterous. Similar movements, albeit with less tumultuous histories, exist in the states of Idaho, Vermont, and California, and everywhere such “revolutionaries” appear they are, by and large, met with a large dose of ridicule and condescension. And rightly so; theirs are typically claims of secession, a principle whose popular acceptance seems to have been buried a century and a half ago with Calhoun (along with the copy of the Constitution and the Bible that were lodged beneath his head in his coffin — a bit ironically).

The ideological foundations of the Hawaiian independence movement are quite different, however. Groups like the HKG argue that the annexation of the Hawaiian “nation” by the United States was unjust and contrary to established international law at the time as well as law since produced on the subject of territorial expansion. To their credit, the history of the end of the Hawaiian monarchy is nothing less than shameful — and the shame is red, white, and blue.

It was the late 1880s, and the power of fruit companies, especially American ones, was nearing its peak. In Latin America and in the Pacific, including the Hawaiian isles, such corporations wielded great political and economic influence in addition to their vast land holdings. The stories of their terrors are well-known and well-documented.

I should note at this juncture that under normal circumstances — that is, in the context of a truly free market — I would not be so at odds with such corporations and their “business” practices. But it is also widely acknowledged that the fruit bosses had considerable logistical aid from governments in carrying out their oppressive regimes that would so often come to subjugate the native populations, to put the vile effects lightly. This kind of interventionist economics and undemocratic politics, so often defended by so-called conservatives as “valiant capitalism” in the discussion of this historical period and its miseries, should, in my opinion, be open to scrutiny and, if judged to be as untenable as I suspect, condemnation.

That being established, it is important to understand in what sort of environment the violent overthrow of Her Majesty Queen Lili’uokalani occurred: It was in an era of imperial aspirations in the U.S. and rampant corporate colonialism in the myriad undeveloped, unindustrialized corners of the globe. The climate seemed right for collaboration by the two main players on the world scene, and the convenient collusion promptly followed. Granted, this is, of course, a terribly simplified view of the events leading up to the 1893 takeover of power by European and American fruit bosses and political agents, but it will have to suffice, for a book could be, and has been, written on the subject.

Thus, with arms taken up, U.S. Marines on the shores, and that less than subtle ethnocentrism that tags along with such escapades, the legitimate Queen was captured, her government disbanded, and the islands put under the control of Sanford Dole, the “banana baron” himself. The interim government was then established until the U.S. Congress could pass a bill of annexation. And thus did Hawaii come to be “ceded” to the Union as a territory, with the Philippines and Guam (products of the Spanish-American War of the same decade) added to our territorial holdings not long afterward.

With our own rich past of treasuring self-determination and independence, it would seem an incoherent position to just discount the validity of the arguments put forth by the HKG. Surely the group’s intentions are much nobler, or at least more respectable, than those of their secessionist peers on the mainland. And surely the issue deserves greater attention, scholarly and political, than it presently receives. But whether independence for Hawaii is practical, if principled, is another matter entirely.

Pax et Defensio Libertatis

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As reported in The Washington Post on Friday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs announced that the Pentagon has begun drawing up plans to attack Iran, citing recent acts of a bombastic nature on the part of the Iranians.This declaration was quickly qualified with a kind of statement we’ve come to expect from the Bush administration: “Diplomacy will precede war.” Of course. Well, does diplomacy work if Iran now knows–if it did not know already–that the Pentagon is war-gaming attack strategies? And who would carry out such diplomatic discussion? The hawkish diplomat-in-chief Condi Rice? Or the war-thirsty commander-in-chief himself?

Either way, war has been inevitable for almost two decades. General Wesley Clark (U.S. Army, ret.) says that plans for attacking and invading Iran were drawn up and considered back in the first Bush administration. If Bush had won in 1992, according to General Clark, the Pentagon–under the watchful hawk eyes of Wolfowitz–was more than ready to initiate war against Iran, being just one in a list of a half dozen target nations in the region.

It would seem that Mr. Bush has taken the path less intelligent. But, after all, he has little political capital with which to wage such a war anyhow–and our nation has little blood and treasure left to sacrifice. Three undeclared, unconstitutional, morally and financially bankrupting wars seem a bit excessive, in my opinion. Yet three useless presidential candidates, two of which would probably be in favor of a war with Iran, are all the hope we have of a better future in the near term. It is with great fear and disgust that I am compelled by the facts to admit (as another anti-war conservative recently did in the pages of The American Conservative) that an Obama administration is probably the only path to peace. What has this world come to?