Flogging Slavery at Fort Sumter & The Warning of Thomas Sowell
While the U.S. Park Service grossly overstresses slavery in their presentation of our national history at Fort Sumter, S.C., Thomas Sowell issues a dire warning about the progressive effort to balkanize America and rule over the ruins.
Several weeks ago, I wrote a long post about the 1619 Project and the laudable Prof. Sean Wilentz. In it, I discussed how far left academia and progressives in the media have teamed to falsely rewrite our national history. Their goals are to delegitimize our constitution and the foundations of our nation. According to these modern race hustlers, we are a nation whose defining characteristic was, at our founding, and continues to be, incurable racism. That, they insist, is the only salient fact about our nation. And we are, according to them, a nation whose unpardonable original sin is slavery.
That post very much came to mind when I toured Fort Sumter the other day and listened to an official presentation of the history of that site from a Park Ranger. I am sure the Ranger was only repeating an approved script, but it was a horrid script that dwelt only on slavery, With ringing outrage in her voice, she dwelt on how slaves built Fort Sumter, then discussed the evils of slavery, and finally, finished with a discussion of how each of the 4,000,000 bricks used in the construction of the site was made by slaves and how each brick represented a freed slave when freedom somehow magically came in 1865. Ms. BWR, who heard the same presentation, described it as:
[T]he only takeaway lesson was that America enslaved people and abused them. [The Park Ranger] managed to reduce the grand panoply of American history, and the drama of the Civil War, to a one-note issue.
What that Park Ranger articulated was a history wholly written by the same race hustlers of the same ilk that gave us the 1619 Project. Nothing matters to our national history but slavery — though the number of people, and in particular white men, who died ending slavery both in America and as an accepted practice in the world never makes it into the script. Nor does the fate of Charleston and the South in the years after the Civil War, etc.
Enter the venerable Thomas Sowell, now age 91, who has taken time from his retirement to pen an article in the Jewish World Revue. In it, Sowell opines on the existential stakes of the progressive left’s racial attack on America — one that in the long run will be more destructive to blacks than any other group. Sowell does so in the context of the Virginia Governor’s race soon to be decided:
This is one battle in a much bigger war, and the stakes are far higher than the governorship of Virginia or the Democrats and Republicans. The stakes are the future of this nation.
When school propaganda teaches black kids to hate white people, that is a danger to all Americans of every race. Anyone at all familiar with the history of group-identity politics in other countries knows that it has often ended up producing sickening atrocities that have torn whole societies apart.
If you have a strong stomach, read about the 1915 atrocities against the Armenians in Turkey, “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans, or the reciprocal atrocities between the Sinhalese and Tamils during their civil war in Sri Lanka.
Do not kid yourself that this cannot happen in America. The relations between the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka were once held up to the world as a model of intergroup harmony.
They got along better than blacks and whites have ever gotten along in the U.S. But then a talented demagogue polarized the country with group-identity politics, to get himself elected prime minister.
Once he was elected, he was ready to moderate his position. But you cannot just turn group hatred on and off, like a light bulb. He was assassinated and the hatred continued on.
There is a point of no return in America as well. And we may be nearing it, or perhaps past it.
Low-income minority students, especially, cannot afford the luxury of having their time wasted on ideological propaganda in the schools, when they are not getting a decent education in mathematics or the English language.
When they graduate, and go on to higher education that could prepare them for professional careers, hating white people is not likely to do them nearly as much good as knowing math and English.
This may be a new issue to some people, but such irresponsible indoctrination has been going on for decades. Back in 1993, my book “Inside American Education” had a long chapter titled “Classroom Brainwashing.”
Anyone who reads the school propagandists’ own words quoted there can find that a sickening experience as well.
Parents who protest the arrogant abuse of a captive audience of children are performing an important public service. They deserve something better than having the Biden administration’s Attorney General threatening them.
But this whole issue is far older and far bigger than the Biden administration. It will be a cancerous threat to this country, long after the current administration is over.
Poisonous indoctrination will not stop unless it gets stopped.
Do read the entire article. Would that this man were 51, not 91.
