Lies My Teacher Told Me- Part Two- Ending

“When history textbooks leave out the Arawaks, they offend Native Americans. When they omit the possibility of African and Phoenician precursors to Columbus, they offend African Americans. When they glamorize explorers such as de Soto just because they were white, our histories offend all people of color. When they leave out Las Casas, they omit an interesting idealist with whom we all might identify. When they glorify Columbus, our textbooks prod us toward identifying with the oppressor. When textbook authors omit the causes and process of European world domination, they offer us a history whose purpose must be to keep us unaware of the important questions. Perhaps worst of all, when textbooks paint simplistic portraits of a pious heroic Columbus, they provide feel-good history that bores everyone”, (P.69). In fact, it seems like all these fabrications, omissions, and misstatements are not caused by negligence or even racism, but a cleverly thought process to maintain the same posture towards the world and continue pillage of resources, while slaving darker colored skins in the East, Africa, and South America. Such policy started in Europe, headed by England. Since the second world war, it has continued to this day with the leadership of the United States, once a subjugated nation itself. Before Westerners discovered Eastern and African nations, those countries had had commercial relationships with each other for centuries. Their relationship was equal, not based on domination that has been practiced by the West.

Americas as a no-man land had been trampled by many Europeans, long before a united nation (without any representative from American natives) was established. Then, we have various races and religions escaping white Christian Europe: “The first non-Native settlers in ‘the country we now know as the United States’ were African slaves left in South Carolina in 1526 by Spaniards who abandoned a settlement attempt. In 1565 the Spanish massacred the French protestants who had settled briefly near present day Jacksonville, Florida, and established their own fort at St. Augustine. Between 1565 and 1568 Spaniards explored the Carolinas, building several forts that were then burned by the Indians. Some later Spanish settlers may have been our first pilgrims, seeking regions new to them to secure religious liberty; these were probably Spanish Jews, who settled in New Mexico in the late 1500s”, (P.71). Visiting Belize and listening to Belizeans speaking English, and studying the history of that nation, is another chapter in European conquest of Americas.

We learn about germ and virus warfare as new and recent epidemics. We learn about Ebola, SARS, MERS, and Corona viruses as recent outbreaks. It seems as if germ warfare, intentional or unintentional, have been destiny-making events in the New World: “Europeans were never able to ‘settle’ China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or much of Africa, because too many people already lived there. The crucial role, played by the plague in the Americas can be inferred from two simple population estimates: William McNeill reckons the population of the Americans at one hundred million in 1492, while William Langer suggests that Europe had only about seventy million people when Columbus set forth. The Europeans’ advantages in military and social technology might have enabled them to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China, India, Indonesia, and Africa, but not to ‘settle’ the hemisphere. For that, the plague was required. Thus, apart from the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence is surely the most important event in the history of America”, (P.78).

One of the most effective tools undertaken successfully by American government is propaganda. Not only Americans, but people of dominated countries have positive notions about American government’s intentions towards the rest of the world. Many billions of dollars have been spent since the beginning of the 19^th century to make every nation of the world believe that American forces entering weaker and more vulnerable nations have been for peace and for the good of the nation overrun. However, the fact seems to be totally opposite: “This notion that ‘we’ advanced peoples provided for the Natives, exactly the converse of the truth, is not benign. It reemerges time and again in our history to complicate race relations. For example, we are told that white plantation owners furnished food and medical care for their slaves, yet every shred of food, shelter, and clothing on the plantations was raised, built, woven, or paid for by black labor. Today, Americans believe as part of our political understanding of the world that we are the most generous nation on earth in terms of foreign aid, overlooking the fact that the net dollar flow from almost every Third World nation runs toward the United States”, (P.90).

What is civilization? An accurate definition of civilization is necessary to understand when it started and where it can be found. If civilization means respecting each other’s feelings and needs and desires, how could one accumulate more wealth than his needs, while another one’s need is concentrated merely on satisfying his daily hunger? If civilization means respecting others’ freedom, how could a powerful country with the largest military and ammunitions attack smaller countries in order to steal its natural resources? How did the eastern part of the globe, where the civilization began according to all historical recordings, suddenly became uncivilized, and the west claimed the title? Was it due to financial and military powers? “Thoughtless use of the terms civilized and civilization blocks any real inquiry into the worldview or the social structure of the ‘uncivilized’ person or society. In 1990 President George H. W. Bush condemned Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with the words, ‘The entire civilized world is against Iraq’- an irony, in that Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates valleys are the earliest known seat of civilization”, (P.101).

Some historians speak of slavery as if it was a narrow-minded system that existed in the past. In the Land of Freedom (the United States), one can easily observe treatment of non-white citizens. Less than 13% of 327 million Americans are of African descent. However, poverty can be observed mostly in African American neighborhoods. In addition, all American encroachments into other lands are not only for stealing minerals, but also for enslaving inhabitants. In the advent of a Corona virus, considering that the virus started in China, Chinese bashing becomes a daily event in the United States, and through the mouth of the president. When the president announces a pandemic state of emergency (which is political and in order to promulgate hate) Americans’ rush to the supermarkets to fill their shelves, while trampling over each other shows what a civilized society we live in:  “African Americans frequently fled to American Indian societies to escape bondage. What did whites find so alluring? According to Benjamin Franklin, ‘All their government is by counsel of the sages. There is no Force; there are no prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment.’ Probably foremost, the lack of hierarchy in the Native societies in the eastern United States attracted the admiration of European observers. Frontiersmen were taken with the extent to which Native Americans enjoyed freedom as individuals. Women were also accorded more status and power in most Native societies than in white societies of the time, which white women noted with envy in captivity narratives. Although leadership was substantially hereditary in some nations, most American Indian societies north of Mexico were much more democratic than Spain, France, or even England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries... Indeed, Native American ideas are partly responsible for our democratic institutions. We have seen how Native ideas of liberty, fraternity, and equality found their way to Europe to influence social philosophers such as Thomas More, Locke, Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Rousseau”, (P.108).

America has had much influence over the rest of the world from the mid-20^th century. American art has had the largest share of this influence, specially music and cinema. Although this influence has been fading in the 21^st century, due to the governments’ open aggression towards Middle-Eastern and Asian and African nations, there is still much of this impact evident all over the world. Therefore, the history that was fabricated by songs and specifically by Hollywood, was adopted in other countries. There is almost no one in any part of the world who was born in the first half of the last century who does not know Beatles or John Wayne: “In the Hollywood West, wagon trains were invariably encircled by savage Indian hordes. Native Americans rode round and round the ‘settlers’, while John Wayne picked them off from behind wagon wheels and boxes. Hollywood borrowed the haplessly circling Indians from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, where they had to ride in a circle, presenting a broadside target, because they were in a circus tent”, (p.116). What an irony!

“Americans seen perpetually startled at slavery. Children are shocked to learn that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Interpreters at Colonial Williamsburg say that many visitors are surprised to learn that slavery existed there- in the heart of plantation Virginia! Very few adults today realize that our society has been slave much longer than it has been free. Even fewer know that slavery was important in the North, too, until after the Revolutionary War. The first colony to legalize slavery was not Virginia but Massachusetts. In 1720, on New York City’s population of seven thousand, sixteen hundred were African Americans, most of them slaves. Wall Street was the marketplace where owners could hire out their slaves by the day or week”, (P.142). Is Wall Street still promoting slavery, in a different fashion?! The reason many people, including much of Americans don’t know that the founding fathers were slave owners themselves, is because of the god-like idles history books have made of them. In addition, to respond to those who claim that slavery was the manner and system of the land and it was something normal, many anti-slavery figures of those days, called abolitionists, such as Benjamin Lay (white), Olaudah Equiano, Anthony Benezet (white), Elizabeth Freeman (Bett), Benjamin Rush (white), and Moses Brown (white) should be reminded.

Recent Trump’s flip-flops during the outbreak of Coronavirus go back to the United States’ early history. When Coronavirus appeared in China, and months after that when it expanded to other countries, Trump denied its spread in the United States while the stock market was hot, in order for he and his cronies to sell their stocks. The same attitude of flip-flops continued many times, especially during both world wars by the leaders of this country, namely rich people: “United States would have been hemmed in by France to its west, Britain to its north, and Spain to its south. But planters in the United States were scared by the Haitian Revolution. They thought it might inspire slave revolts here (which it did). When Haiti won despite our flip-flop, the United States would not even extend its diplomatic recognition, lest its ambassador inflame our slaves ‘by exhibiting in his own person an example of successful revolt,’ in the words of a Georgia senator. Nine of the eighteen textbooks mention how Haitian resistance led France to sell us its claim to Louisiana, but none tells of our flip-flops”, (P.150).

American soldiers attacking smaller and weaker nations in the Middle East and Africa, rendering complete destruction and killing people with darker skin colors, have inherited such brutality from their forefathers: “White mobs killed African Americans across the United States. Some of these events, like the 1910 Chicago riot, are well-known. Others, such as the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than seventy-five people and destroying more than eleven hundred homes, have completely vanished from our history books”, (P.166).

It is the attitude, the system, or the culture in every society these days to treat religions as untouchable topics. As soon as one says anything about God or a religious character, the person is reminded not to attack others’ beliefs. For centuries, when religious philosophies have been massacring those who would not submit to that ideology, we still have to keep quiet and respect the believer: “Yet textbooks, while they may mention religious organizations such as the Shakers of Christian Services, never treat religious ideas in any period seriously. An in-depth portrayal of Mormonism, Christian Science, or the Methodism of the Great Awakening would be controversial. Mentioning atheism or Deism would be even worse. ‘Are you going to tell kids that Thomas Jefferson didn’t believe in Jesus? Not me!’ a textbook editor exclaimed to me. Treating religious ideas neutrally, nonreligiously, simply as factors in society, won’t do, either, for that would likely offend some adherents”, (P.182).

It was mentioned earlier that slavery, sexism, child labor, and other forms of exploitation of a group of people are not merely problems of the past. In many societies, and certainly in the United States, various forms of abuse continues, however in different forms and under different circumstances: “Then came the incongruity of truly beastly behavior by Southern whites toward captured black soldiers, such as the infamous Fort Pillow massacre by troops under Nathan Bedford Forrest, who crucified black prisoners on tent frames and then burned them alive, all in the name of preserving white civilization”, (P.194).

“Antiracism is one of America’s great gifts to the world. Its relevance extends far beyond race relations. Antiracism led to ‘a new birth of freedom’ after the Civil War, and not only for African Americans. Twice, once in each century, the movement for black rights triggered the movement for women’s rights. Twice it reinvigorated our democratic spirit, which had been atrophying. Throughout the world, from South Africa to Northern Ireland, movements of oppressed people continue to use tactics and words borrowed from our abolitionist and civil rights movements. The clandestine early meetings of anticommunists in East Germany were marked by singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Iranians used nonviolent methods borrowed from Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr., to overthrow their hated Shah. On Ho Chi Minh’s desk in Hanoi on the day he died lay a biography of John Brown. Among the heroes whose ideas inspired the students in Tiananmen Square and whose words spilled from their lips was Abraham Lincoln. Yet we in America, whose antiracist idealists are admired around the globe, seem to have lost these men and women as heroes. Our text-books need to present them in such a way that we might again value our own idealism”, (P.203). The author discloses many facts in the history of the United States which are omitted from textbooks. However, he is still under the supposition of American supremacy based on ideology. Every name mentioned in this paragraph, who he calls American hero, was assassinated by another American (considering that the term “assassin” has roots in Persian, just a note!). Their contribution to American society was great at the time they were under surveillance by CIA and hated for what they were prescribing. He is reaching a conclusion that is not based on the evidence. If MLK adopted non-violent methods, he was using Gandhi’s example. The idea was not borne in the United States but in another country far away, where people’s religion and culture were based on non-violence. Iranian revolution was not non-violent. Many were killed by Shah’s army. However, after a short time, when United States government realized that Khomeini would serve American hegemony better than the Shah, and Shah’s usefulness was expired, he was ordered to leave the country, and as a result the struggle was short-lived as a more vicious regime was helped by the United States in Iran. If we would like to gauge American racism against other races, we can simply observe that when Obama is the president, he is tolerated and elected for two terms, and when Trump is elected, racism is back on the political scene. Someone who has moved to the United States from another country can feel racism in every interaction. For White American, anyone with an English accent is intellectually inferior. Europeans are, and they have always been, less racist than Americans, towards blacks and other minorities. Many black thinkers who could afford moved to Europe in previous centuries, in order to flee racism. Women’s liberation was established in Europe, and European and some Asian women were free to vote and to exercise equal opportunity decades before American women. The reason that America has become such a Mecca for people of the world is its wealth, which has been protected and achieved after the Second World War, and has been strengthened, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, by its military might, and nothing else.

“In so doing, they echo the notion our leaders like to present to its citizens: the supremely moral, disinterested peacekeeper, the supremely responsible world citizen. ‘Other countries look to their own interests,’ said President John F. Kennedy in 1961, pridefully invoking what he termed out ‘obligations’ around the globe. ‘only the United States- and we are only six percent of the world’s population- bears this kind of burden’. Today this ‘peacekeeping burden’ has gotten out of hand: the United States now spends more on its armed forces than all other nations combined and has them stationed in 144 countries. But under the international good guy interpretation fostered by Kennedy and our textbook authors, these actions become symbols of our altruism rather than our hegemony,” (P.222). It is absolutely evident from the wars that have been ignited by the United States through religious proxies in the Middle-East and Africa that American military forces are not used for peacekeeping, but for installing a friendly government in order to extract raw materials cheaply and abundantly, achieved by use of terror and hostility. However, this is not something new, and if the historian author goes back to the time this land was confiscated from its inhabitants, through its independence via a bloody war, through its annexation of Haiti and Porto Rico and other independent states, the hegemony has continued non-stop from the first day.

“Business influence on U.S. foreign policy did not start with Woodrow Wilson’s administration. John A. Hobson, in his 1903 book, Imperialism, described ‘a constantly growing tendency’ of the wealthy class ‘to use their political power as citizens of this State to interfere with the political condition of those States where they have an industrial stake,’” (P.226). Voting and election rules and regulations established by the United States government have created a system that votes are not based on the knowledge of the voter, but they are bought in the way of influencing uneducated constituencies.

It was just mentioned in the previous paragraph that uneducated voters could result in electing the candidate who is supported by the most amount of wealth. In this paragraph (and several others followed), the author of this interesting book tells us why the public should be kept uneducated: “Neither our textbooks nor most teachers help students think critically about the Vietnam War and Marshall historical evidence to support their conclusions. Never do they raise questions like ‘Was the war right? Was it ethical?’ Some books appear to raise moral issues but veer away. For example, Challenge of Freedom asks, ‘Why did the United States use so much military power in South Vietnam?’ Attempting to answer this question could get interesting. Because our antagonists weren’t white? Because they couldn’t strike at the United States? Because we had it available? Because the United States has a history of imperialism vis-a-vis ‘primitive’ peoples from our Indian wars through the Philippine-American War of 1899-1913 to Vietnam? Because, like most other nations, we behave not by standards of morality but of realpolitik? The answer that Challenge suggests to teachers, however, shows that the authors don’t really want students to think about why we intervened and certainly not about whether we should have done so, but merely to regurgitate President Johnson’s stated rationale for so much bombing, which the book has previously supplied: ‘To show the Vietcong and their ally, North Vietnam, that they could not win the war.’ This answer is mystifying, since the Vietnam and North Vietnam did win the war; moreover, the authors’ claim to know Johnson’s motivation arrives without evidence. In the rhetorical climate created by this textbook, for a teacher to raise a moral question would come across as a violation of classroom norms,” (P.256).

“Besides being crippled by their ‘international good guy’ assumption, textbook authors operate at a second disadvantage. Our wars with Iraq have a history. Chapter 8 pointed out how textbooks have done a woeful job of discussing the history of U.S. interventions in the Middle East. The United States helped Saddam Hussein seize power in the first place. In 1963, Iraq’s Shi’ite prime minister, Gen. Abdul Karim Qassem, ‘began to threat the U.S. and British influence,’ in the words of journalists Anthony Lappe and Stephen Marshall. The CIA masterminded Qassem’s overthrow; in return, Hussein and his Ba’ath Party welcomed Western oil companies at first. A few years later, however, Hussein nationalized the Iraqi oil industry. Nevertheless, since an old principle of war and diplomacy holds ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ the United States supported Hussein when he invaded Iran in 1980. In 1982, President Reagan removed Iraq from the list of known terrorist countries so we could supply Hussein with military equipment and other aid for his war with Iran. During the rest of the 1980s, the United States sold Iraq military helicopters, computers, scientific instruments, chemicals, and other goods for Iraq’s missile, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs, according to reporter John King. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency supplied Iraq with information to help its forces use chemical weapons on Iranian troops. Although such weapons have long been outlawed, the United States then blocked UN Security Council resolutions condemning Iraq’s use of them. Even after the war with Iran ended and we knew Hussein was using these weapons on his own people, we continued to send weapons-grade anthrax, cyanide, and other chemical and biological weapons to Iraq. No textbook acknowledges our linkages with Hussein in the past,” (P.269). Now, should we believe our political stooges such as Trump and Obama and Bush, and their classification as to who is a good or a bad guy? Poor wretched people are those who ask the United States to help them overthrow the regime governing their country, the political system the United States erected in the first place, in countries such as in Iran.

“Thus the idea of American exceptionalism – the United States as the best country in the world- which starts in our textbooks with the Pilgrims, gets projected into the future... This belief has been particularly useful to the upper class, because Americans could be persuaded to ignore the injustice of social class if they thought the economic pie kept getting bigger for all. The idea of progress also fits in with social Darwinism, which implies that the lower class is lower owing to its own fault. Progress as an ideology has been intrinsically antirevolutionary: because things are getting better all the time, everyone should believe in the system. Portraying America so optimistically also helps textbooks withstand attacks by ultrapatriotic critics in Texas and other textbook adoption states... internationally, referring to have-not countries as ‘developing nations’ has helped the ‘developed nations’ avoid facing the injustice of worldwide stratification. In reality ‘development’ has been making Third World nations poorer, compared to the First World. Per capita income in the First World was five times that in the Third World in 1850, ten times in 1960, and fourteen times by 1970. It’s tricky to measure these ratios, partly because a dollar buys more in the Third World than in the First, but per capita income in the First World is now twenty to sixty times that in the Third World,” (P.184). The statistics are there to view and ponder. Before attacking Iraq, George Bush announced that America was exceptional, indispensable and extraordinary. This has been uttered from the lips of other American leaders when attacking other countries in different ways and fashions. For years, during the time of the Soviet Union, it was American’s duty to combat communism around the world. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, as everyone was erroneously taught that Soviet Union and China and Cuba were communist states, this phrase was not useful any longer and it was replaced by American indispensability and exceptionality.

“The average sperm count in healthy human males around the world has dropped by nearly 50 percent over the past fifty years. If environmentally caused, this is no laughing matter, for sperm have only to decline in a straight line for another fifty years and we will have wiped out humankind without even knowing how we did it. We were similarly unaware for years that killing mosquitoes with DDT was wiping out birds of prey around the globe. Our increasing power makes it increasingly possible that humankind will make the planet uninhabitable by accident. Indeed, we almost have, on several occasions. In the early 1990s, for example, nations around the planet agreed to stop production of many CFGs (chlorofluorocarbons) that damaged the ozone in the upper atmosphere. In 2006 Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach noted, ‘Scientists are haunted by the realization that if CFCs had been made with a slightly different type of chemistry, they’d have destroyed much of the ozone layer over the entire planet.’ We were simply lucky,” (P.289). Lucky is one way to put it and ignorance is another. Climate change is now a scientific fact. Unless you are the owner of a large oil monopoly or the Republican president of the United States, it is impossible to deny that just continuing our present system and not adding any more harm to the environment, will lead to human extinction only in a couple of more generations. Since 1970s, the impact of global warming and environmental degradation as a result of using fossil fuel has been known. For example, the first act of President Reagan when he was installed into power in 1980 was to remove solar panels that his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had installed. Was Coronavirus made by American scientists and delivered to Wuhan a couple of weeks before its outbreak by American military, as claimed by Chinese newspaper articles, is something that may be dismissed or proven in the future? But regardless of that, human ability to create germ warfare is frightening, and it is threatening our survival as a specie.

The author makes an interesting argument about and against perceived progress. In a dictatorship, the dictator establishes ways of life, and whatever is considered to be personal in nature. It however seems that in what they call democracy, dictatorship is not exercised by the government, but by corporations: “In that year [1870], to take a small but symbolic example, A.T. Morgan, a white state senator from Hinds Country, Mississippi, married Carrie Highgate, a black woman from New York, and was reelected. Today this probably could not happen, not in Hinds County Mississippi, or in many counties throughout the United States. Nonetheless, the archetype of progress prompts many white Americans to conclude that black Americans have not legitimate claim on our attention today because the problem of race relations has surely been ameliorated. A.T. Morgan’s marriage is hard for us to make sense of, because Americans have so internalized the cultural archetype of progress that by now we have a built-in tendency to assume that we are more tolerant, more sophisticated, more, well, progressive than we were in the past. Even a trivial illustration- Abraham Lincoln’s beard- can teach us otherwise. In 1860 a clean-shaven Lincoln won presidency; in 1864, with a beard, he was reelected. Could that happen nowadays? Today many institutions, from investment banking firms to Brigham Young University, are closed to white males with facial hair. No white presidential candidate or successful Supreme Court nominee has ventured even a mustache since Tom Dewey in 1948. Beards may not in themselves be signs of progress, although mine has subtly improved my thinking, but we have reached an arresting state of intolerance when the huge Disney corporation, founded by a man with a mustache, will not allow any employee to wear one. On a more profound note, consider that Lincoln was also the last American president who was not a member of a Christian denomination when taking office. Americans may not be becoming more tolerant; we may only think we are. Thus, the ideology of progress amounts to a chronological form of ethnocentrism,” (P.295).

History is written by the rich and the powerful, and as it will be repeated below “who controls the present controls the past”: “Perhaps an upper-class conspiracy is to blame. Perhaps we are all dupes, manipulated by elite white male capitalists who orchestrate how history is written as part of their scheme to perpetuate their own power and privilege at the expense of the rest of us. Certainly high school history textbooks are so similar they look as if they might all have been produced by the same executive committee of the bourgeoisie. In 1984, George Orwell was clear about who determines the way history is written: ‘Who controls the present controls the past,’” (P.304).

The power dictates it all. When the power is in the hands of a few who select members of the government, people are taught to participate in social events, only when it benefits the few: “Publishers would undoubtedly think twice before including a hard-hitting account of Columbus, for example. In Chapter 2, I used genocide to refer to the destruction of the Arawaks in the Caribbean. When scholars used the same term in applying for a grant for a television series on Columbus from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the endowment rejected them. Lynne Cheney said that the word was a problem. ‘It’s okay to talk about the barbarism of the Indians, but not about the barbarism of the Europeans,’ complained the series producer,” (P.314).

American government always needs an enemy. It is a mob mentality that is clearly portrayed in the movie “The Irishman”, when the government and the mob had hand in hand. Although the mob’s influence in the government has faded out recently and it is replaced by a gang of a few with wealth, the same mentality still exists. Long time American foe, Soviet Union and the Eastern Block, is replaced by a few separate countries such as China, Russia, and South Korea, in addition to the long-time foe; Iran. Animosity against Cuba is not present in the media any longer, as it was a part of the old system: “Consider the sabotage of Pan American Airline flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. In 1989, 1992, and 1995, Boorstin and Kelley had sound company when they wrote ‘there were many indications that the Iranians had ordered the bombing.’ For their book to make this claim in its 2005 edition implies that the authors were not convinced by the conviction of a Libyan in 2001, missed Libya’s payment of more than two billion dollars to victims of the disaster in 2002, and did not credit Libya’s admission of guilt in 2003. Of course, the anonymous authors and updaters, being anonymous, do not risk their reputations by such errors,” (P.321).

What is taught to children at each age level is important. However, before teaching children, adults should learn the truth. It is obvious that many American adults are oblivious of the facts, as they have not learned in history books of what happened, but author-selected narratives. Again, Corona virus of recent days has taught American communities so much about lack of sympathy in this society as ever, when supermarkets are mobbed by the people who looked so ordinary the day before. It clearly shows that US government’s efforts, trying to isolate and individualize citizens for the past century has been very successful: “Violence aside, what about social studies classes teach young children from other untoward realities of our society? How should social studies classes teach young people about the police, for instance? Should the approach be Officer Friendly? Or should children receive a Marxist interpretation of how the power structure uses the police as its first line of control in urban ghettoes? Does the approach we choose depend on whether we teach in the suburbs or the inner city? If a more complex analysis of the police is more useful than Officer Friendly for inner-city children, does that mean we should teach about slavery in a different way in the suburbs than we would in the inner city? In 1992, Los Angeles exploded in a violent race riot, triggered by a white suburban jury’s acquittal of four police officers who had been videotaped beating a black traffic offender, Rodney King. Almost every child in America saw the most famous of all home videotapes. Therefore, almost every child in America learned that Officer Friendly is not the whole story. We do not protect children from controversy by offering only an Officer Friendly analysis in school. All we do is make school irrelevant to the major issues of the day. Rock songs downloaded by thirteen-year-olds deal with AIDS, nuclear war, and global warming. Rap songs discuss racism, sexism, drug use- and American history. We can be sure that our children already know about and think about these and other issues, whether we like it or not. Indeed, attempts by parents to preserve some nonexistent childhood innocence through avoidance are likely to heighten rather than reduce anxiety. Lying and omission are not the right ways. There is a way to teach truth to a child at any age level,” (P.336).

History is not only a narrative of facts, but also how this fact is narrated, what is omitted and what is not mentioned in its rightful place. A person, who is inspired by a historical fact, should check into its accuracy, in addition to its surrounding circumstances. For example, George Washington, the founding father of this nation, had 124 slaves out of the 317 slaves on Mount Vernon. There are many history books that claim that he wished in his will for the slaves to be freed after his wife’s death, which did not happen. However, the point is that during the time he lived, he owned slaves for over half a century. In order for one to tell the accuracy of a historical event, in addition to several versions of an event, its surrounding circumstances, its time, and other events of the period should be studied. A historical narrative does not mean narrating the whole fact, which would be almost impossible to do in many cases, but telling the story in so many words which would reveal the goal of the event and its outcome. We can talk about Washington’s wishes to free his slaves after his wife’s death, but having slaves was an act to consider. The reason many people had slaves was to exploit, what West is currently doing to the East and South. Exploitation was, and is, for economic reasons, and Washington like many others benefited as a result of that. Slavery was common at the time, but there were people, mentioned earlier, who found it inhumane, and those are our heroes, not the slave holders. Lies of the history are abundant, which cannot be blamed on the history, but the one who records or reports it.