Lies My Teacher Told Me- Part One

(Due to the length of this article, it will be published in two separate posts)

PART ONE

A history book written by James W. Loewen with a sub-title “Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong”, discloses what is missing from textbooks. In Addition, it discusses historical events that happened differently from narratives of textbooks. The book contains many interesting historical facts, that one may not have even read anywhere, or have not read in a way of achieving the same conclusion. To understand why in such a rich and plentiful country as the United States, where everyone from any part of the world is striving to migrate to, significant historical events are omitted from its history, one should examine American politics. Although it is claimed to be a multi-party democracy, in fact there is only one party that is almost always voted into the office in all elections, a party with two factions on the left (called Democratic) and on the right (called Republican). A minority of well to do people help candidates to be elected in their selected faction, and almost half of the nation do not participate in elections at all. In late 1970s, with the election of Ronald Reagan, many of public benefits were either eliminated or weakened, until the last president of the 20th century, William Clinton, made a sharp right turn, and as a result, policies of the Democratic Party became much closer to those of the Republican Party.  

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections, voter turn-out for the past 47 elections is listed below:

‎1828‎     ‎57.60%‎	1892     74.70%	1960      62.80%
‎1832‎     ‎55.40%‎	1896     79.30%	1964      61.40%
‎1836‎     ‎57.80%‎	1900     73.20%	‎1968‎     ‎60.70%‎
‎1840‎     ‎80.20%‎	1904     65.20%	1972      55.10%
‎1844‎     ‎78.90%‎	1908     65.40%	‎1976‎      ‎53.60%‎
‎1848‎     ‎72.70%‎	‎1912‎     ‎58.80%‎	1980      52.80%
‎1852‎     ‎62.60%‎	1916     61.60%	1984      53.30%
‎1856‎     ‎78.90%‎	1920     49.20%	1988      50.30%
‎1860‎     ‎81.20%‎	1924     48.90%	1992     55.20%
1864     73.80%	1928     56.90%	1996     49.00%
1868     78.10%	1932     52.60%	2000     50.30%
1872     71.30%	1936     56.90%	2004     55.70%
1876     81.80%	1940     58.80%	2008     58.20%
1880     79.40%	1944     56.10%	2012     54.90%
1884     77.50%	1948     51.10%	2016     55.70%
1888     79.30%	1952     61.60%

If some special occasions, such as people’s desire for completion of Vietnam war in 1960s, are taken into account, this table shows that at the beginning of the 20^th century, people became more or less disfranchised with the election system, and participating in presidential elections has been hovering around 50%, at least from the beginning of that century.

Since results of elections are determined by the amount of funds contributed to each candidate, a combination of candidates from each faction is elected to ensure all the efforts are made by the future government officials to secure and increase the benefits of those who had contributed financially to those elections. It continues to the point that the current president can easily reduce the tax for the rich while increasing it for the middle-class through tax laws related to mortgage and other schemes, with no effective opposition. This culminates a rich person, the Amazon owner, to increase his wealth to a fraction of the global wealth; according to Wikipedia’s list of 20 richest people in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_richest_people_in_the_world. In addition and according to this list, 14 of the twenty richest persons are from the United States alone.

It is important to know that every time a politician passes a popular democratic legislation, it is hardly ever the politician’s belief and credence, but because of a majority demand which has been widely publicized. When a legislation passes by the congress or the president that is beneficial to the majority, not the minority rich and powerful, the credit is due to those who sacrifice their lives for the benefit of others. American history is full of those who suffered punishment for defending the poor and needy and objected to the power, and never relinquished from their struggles. According to “Lies My Teacher Told Me”, such people are never mentioned in history books. As an example, this book has devoted many pages to the famous Helen Keller and her progressive ideas: “Near the end of her life, she wrote to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, leader of the American Communist Party, who was then languishing in jail, a victim of the McCarthy era: ‘Loving birthday greetings, dear Elizabeth Flynn! May the sense of serving mankind bring strength and peace into your brave heart!’” (P.15). What we read in history text books in vast detail is the biography of founding fathers, who believed in owning slaves, in women’s values as half of the men, and that a rich person should also have political and social powers, no matter how the riches had been achieved.

Reading through the pages of history from the time United States and Canada were established, one will learn why American government does not get involved much in Canadian politics. In fact, politics of both countries are more or less the same, with Canada accepting to be America’s underdog. However, countries to the south of the United States have different stories. They all have struggled many times to be free of American influence, but neighboring such vicious superpower makes it extremely hard. Every nation in the south and south-east of the United States (puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica) went through democratic periods, which were shortened by the United States’ collusion. In addition, any country in the world who had the desire to accept socialism as its government policy, no matter if it was Cuba’s or Chile’s brand of socialism, United States government used any means to destroy it, even if they had to apply chemicals on Castro’s face to lose his beard! “Under Wilson, the United States intervened in Latin America more often than at any other time in our history. We landed troops in Mexico in 1914, Haiti in 1915, the Dominican Republic in 1916, Mexico again in 1916 (and nine more times before the end of Wilson’s presidency), Cuba in 1917, and Panama in 1918. Throughout his administration Wilson maintained forces in Nicaragua, using them to determine Nicaragua’s president and to force passage of a treaty preferential to the United States. In 1917 Woodrow Wilson took on a major power when he started sending secret monetary aid to the ‘White’ side of the Russian civil war. In the summer of 1918 he authorized a naval blockade of the Soviet Union and sent expeditionary forces to Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok to help overthrow the Russian Revolution. With the blessing of Britain and France, and in a joint command with Japanese soldiers, American forces penetrated westward from Vladivostok to Lake Baikal, supporting Czech and Withe Russian forces that had declared an anticommunist government headquartered at Omsk. After briefly maintaining front lines as far west as the Volga, the White Russian forces disintegrated by the end of 1919, and our troops finally left Vladivostok on April 1, 1920”, (P.16).

Studying American government’s policy towards other governments, one can easily conclude that establishing puppet governments all over the world, in order to extract natural resources and forbid technological growth, has been successfully implemented throughout history. American media has been very effective in brainwashing American public towards accepting and approving government’s rhetoric and policies. If the public does not believe or oppose government's actions, sending police to disperse demonstrations and opposition and disbanding the public becomes necessary. This was not the case two centuries ago, as the government would punish anyone opposing its policies point blank: “To oppose America’s participation in World War I, or even to be pessimistic about it, was dangerous. The Creel Committee asked all Americans to ‘report the man who... cries for peace, or belittles our efforts to win the war.’ Send their names to the Justice Department in Washington, it exhorted. After World War I, the Wilson administration’s attacks on civil liberties increased, now with anticommunism as the excuse”, (P.23).

History is told by the victor. If the Third-Reich won the Second World-War, history of the world would have been written very differently. In that case, Germany would have been the largest economy with imperialistic tendencies, in the place of the United States. Just imagine if Hitler was not anti-Semitic, and as a result, Nazis had access to atomic bomb. It may have been good news for the Japanese who lost two cities and endured continued chemical problems after they were bombed by American planes carrying nuclear warheads. Due to American supremacy, that war has become known in the West to have been won by the United States. In fact, the country that was able to destroy Nazism with a significant human cost was Soviet Union. For the same reason, if it was not for the atrocities that American governments have been inflicting on countries on its south border, socialism may not have been conceived in some of these countries: “Our nation’s thirteen separate forays into Nicaragua, for instance, is surely worth knowing about as we attempt to understand why that country embraced a communist government in the 1980s. Textbooks should show history as contingent, affected by the power of ideas and individuals. Instead, they present history as a ‘done deal’”, (P.29).

There is a lingering question of who discovered Americas. If a person arrives to a land for the first time, which is already inhabited by other people, should we call that person’s travel a discovery or a visit? There are many historical and archeological evidences of pre-Columbian travelers to Americas. One of these travels dates back to 700 CE by Polynesian travelers. Norse trans-oceanic contact of the 10^th century is another documented event. Siberian-Alaskan contact of 8000 BC is the oldest one recorded. Many others, such as Chinese, Japanese, African, Indian, and Middle Eastern travels to Americas are claimed as well: “The textbooks’ first mistake is to underplay previous explorers. People from other continents had reached the America many times before 1492. Even if Columbus had never sailed, other Europeans would have soon reached the Americas. Indeed, Europeans may already have been fishing off Newfoundland in the 1480s. In a sense, Columbus’s voyage was not the first but the last ‘discovery’ of the Americas. It was epoch-making because of the way in which Europe responded. Columbus’s importance is therefore primarily attributable to changing conditions in Europe, not to his having reached a ‘new’ continent”, (P.33).

Anthropology and sociology of a nation determines the future road that nation is taking. Chinese people invented firecrackers and chemicals of the same nature in order to create light and noise in their celebrations. When Marco Polo travelled to China, in addition to noodles that became an Italian culinary staple, and many other innovations that he brought back to the primitive and backward Europe (China provided 75% of global output at the time), he introduced firecrackers. It was obvious that this substance had some precarious capabilities. They created guns to destroy, what peaceful Chinese people never intended to: “We live with this arms race still. But the West’s advantage in military technology over the rest of the world, jealously maintained from the 1400s on, remains very much contested. Just as the thirteen British colonies tried to outlaw the sale of guns to Native Americans, the United States now tries to outlaw the sale of nuclear technology to Third World countries. A key point of George W. Bush’s foreign policy has been to deny nuclear weapons and other ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea and keep them out of the hands of terrorists like al-Qaeda. Since money is to be made in the arms trade, however, and since all nations need military allies, the arms trade with non-Western nations persists. The Western advantage in military technology is still a burning issue. Nonetheless, not a single textbook mentions arms as cause of European world domination”, (P.35).

“America was discovered by Columbus” is becoming an old cliché. The savagery that Columbus inflicted on the natives continues today, the last episode was Standing Rock. No one can discover an inhabited territory, as it is already discovered. The well-known fact is that, at the time, Columbus and his crew were sent to the places unknown to Europeans for pillage and slavery. The first colonies into the new world were for those who were escaping Europe’s brutal and bloody religious wars. Later on, convicts were sent to the land we know as the United States as exiles and outcasts: “On the first voyage, Columbus kidnapped some ten to twenty-five American Indians and took them back with him to Spain. Only seven or eight arrived alive, but along with the parrots, gold trinkets, and other exotica, they caused quite a stir in Seville. Ferdinand and Isabella provided Columbus with seventeen ships, twelve hundred to fifteen hundred men, cannons, crossbows, guns, cavalry, and attack dogs for a second voyage”, (P.54). Next page of the book continues with a summary of barbarity of Europeans against the natives. It is interesting to note that the author of the book, in which this book is quoting from, thanks god that all natives were savagely slaughtered. It shows the role of god and religions in endorsement of murder and war, which is a different discussion. However, it is important to note that those who arrived in the new world were called pilgrims: “Naturally, the Spanish won. According to Kirkpatrick Sale, who quotes Ferdinand Columbus’s biography of his father: ‘The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and with God’s aid soon gained a complete victory, killing many Indians and capturing others who were also killed”, (P.55).

Christopher Columbus thought he had arrived in India, when he put his first step into the new land. Natives of this land has been called Indians since then. If we called the land America, after the person who corrected Columbus’ error, Amerigo Vespucci, why don’t we call the original settlers Americans? The reason is that such idea would confuse national origin and races, as these two have always been important factors in the United States, as it is today. There was a time when anyone with Anglo-Saxon roots was considered American. People who lived in an Anglo-Saxon family were the “American family”, even if they had moved to the United States the day before. A family who had migrated from Germany would be referred to as the “German family”. The same was for “Dutch family”, “Italian family”, “Irish family”, and so on. If a family was not Christian, their religion would be important to note, rather than their national origin, such as “the Jews”. But nothing has ever separated people more than race, in the case of Jews again, in addition to blacks, and yellow, and so on: “Pedro de Cordoba wrote in a letter to King Ferdinand in 1517, ‘As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth... Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery’”, (P.57).

No ideology has shed as much blood in world as religious ideologies, even those which are supposed to spread peace, such as Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, or any other eastern religions. The foundation of religions, God, is the major reason that religions do not make sense, and as a result, they have to force themselves on people through violence. Putting it simply, and not creating a major discussion out of it since the subject has been repeatedly addressed, God creates the world for human being, whom he creates as well, but it does not take long when human being discovers other worlds in addition to earth! As science progresses, religion fades. However, during the time the new world was introduced to Europe, Catholic church was controlling Europe for thousand of years. This new found land in fact changed Christianity forever: “Columbus’s voyages caused almost as much change in Europe as in the Americas. Crops, animals, ideas, and diseases began to cross the oceans regularly. Perhaps the most far-reaching impact of Columbus’s findings was on European Christianity. In 1492 all of Europe was in the grip of the Catholic Church. As the Encyclopedia Larousse puts it, before America, ‘Europe was virtually incapable of self-criticism. After America, Europe’s religious uniformity was ruptured. For how were these new people to be explained? They were not mentioned in the Bible. American Indians simply did not fit within orthodox Christianity’s explanation of the moral universe.' Moreover, unlike the Muslims, who might be written off as ‘damned infidel,’ American Indians had not rejected Christianity, they had just never encountered it. Were they doomed to hell? Even the animals of America posed a religious challenge. According to the Bible, at the dawn of creation all animals lived in the Garden of Eden. Later, two of each species entered Noah’s ark and ended up on Mt. Ararat. Since Eden and Mt. Ararat were both in the Middle East, where could these new American species entered Noah’s ark and ended up on Mt. Ararat. Such questions shook orthodox Catholicism and contributed to the Protestant Reformation, which began in 1517”, (P.61).

When you visit Rocky Mountain for the first time, you discover it. It is your discovery not anyone else’s, although many have discovered it before you. When Europeans discovered the new world, any part of their discovery was “a” discovery each made, not “The” discovery of the place or the monument. They shared their discovery with others. However, they made others think that they were “the” discoverer of the new thing. If fact, they were guided by many natives who had been living near those discoveries for generations: “William Erasmus, a Canadian Indian, pointed out, ‘Explorers you call great men were helpless. They were like lost children, and it was our people who took care of them.’ Native Americans cured Cartier’s men of scurvy near Montreal in 1535. They repaired Francis Drake’s Golden Hind in California so he could complete his round-the-world voyage in 1579. Lewis and Clark’s expedition to the Pacific Northwest was made possible by tribe after tribe of American Indians, with help from two Shoshone guides, Sacagawea and Toby, who served as interpreters. When Admiral Peary discovered the North Pole, the first person there was probably neither the European American Peary nor the African American Mathew Henson, his assistant, but their four Inuit guides, men and women on whom the entire expedition relied. Our historians fail to mention such assistance. They portray proud Western conquerors bestriding the world like the Colossus at Rhodes”, (P. 66).