Obliterate History, Obliterate America
By Claudia Henneberry
April 2024
Part Two
Part One
History Matters
Some of my American History students would ask, why do we need to learn about the past? Other students would sarcastically answer, “Because we need to pass this class to graduate, silly!” But my answer went something like this: We study American history to learn the lessons of the past – what works, what doesn’t. Most importantly, you must understand the uniqueness of America and how she was forged out of a desire for individual rights, hard work, and freedom. Like your own family, we are an American family and you must know the values and principles that unite us. You also have the obligation to pass along these inspirational ideals.
Others have similar answers.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “History by apprising [the people] of the past will enable them to judge of the future.”
The Gipper, President Ronald Reagan contended, “we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important,” like the country’s founding and our national achievements. “If we forget what we did,” Reagan said, “we won’t know who we are.”
In his book, Erasing America: Losing Our Future By Destroying Our Past, James S. Robbins succinctly answers the same question: “History is the source of all life’s lessons, the good and the bad. We turn to history to see what to embrace and what to avoid.”
Disturbingly, we are witnessing in real time the dismantling of the history of the United States of America. School curricula and teaching materials are being rewritten to reflect a leftist viewpoint and facts are being omitted. Statues and monuments that likewise tell our stories are being ripped down. Museums are colonizing culture with leftist propaganda. Why are the powers-that-be trying to erase our rich and valuable history?
The answer in a word - power.
The History of Erasing History
Radical Communist Karl Marx famously wrote: “In bourgeois society, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.” The Communists in China and Russia religiously abided by that rule. The Nazis also purged more than history.
Examples are many, but here are a few:
Communist China
Communist Russia
Nazi Germany
George Orwell's words in 1984 eerily describe China's Cultural Revolution: "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
Erasing history is nothing new.
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Editor’s Note - In America today, as stated in the Robbins’ book description, “This toxic movement has already brainwashed an entire generation and is rapidly dissolving the cultural, historical, and spiritual bonds of our nation.” The purpose, as the author of this article states, is power:
By Claudia Henneberry
April 2024
Part Two
Part One
History Matters
Some of my American History students would ask, why do we need to learn about the past? Other students would sarcastically answer, “Because we need to pass this class to graduate, silly!” But my answer went something like this: We study American history to learn the lessons of the past – what works, what doesn’t. Most importantly, you must understand the uniqueness of America and how she was forged out of a desire for individual rights, hard work, and freedom. Like your own family, we are an American family and you must know the values and principles that unite us. You also have the obligation to pass along these inspirational ideals.
Others have similar answers.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “History by apprising [the people] of the past will enable them to judge of the future.”
The Gipper, President Ronald Reagan contended, “we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important,” like the country’s founding and our national achievements. “If we forget what we did,” Reagan said, “we won’t know who we are.”
In his book, Erasing America: Losing Our Future By Destroying Our Past, James S. Robbins succinctly answers the same question: “History is the source of all life’s lessons, the good and the bad. We turn to history to see what to embrace and what to avoid.”
Disturbingly, we are witnessing in real time the dismantling of the history of the United States of America. School curricula and teaching materials are being rewritten to reflect a leftist viewpoint and facts are being omitted. Statues and monuments that likewise tell our stories are being ripped down. Museums are colonizing culture with leftist propaganda. Why are the powers-that-be trying to erase our rich and valuable history?
The answer in a word - power.
The History of Erasing History
Radical Communist Karl Marx famously wrote: “In bourgeois society, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.” The Communists in China and Russia religiously abided by that rule. The Nazis also purged more than history.
Examples are many, but here are a few:
Communist China
- Mao Zedong took a wrecking ball to China’s pre-revolutionary past to create a society where safety and survival only came by swearing allegiance to him, the CCP, and the Revolution.
- The Chinese population (during the Cultural Revolution - 1960s-1970s) was urged to rid itself of the “Four Olds”: Old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas.
- Today, Chairman Xi has assigned teachers to compile a burn list of Chinese history books.
- Confucius Institutes are infiltrating American Universities with Mandarin language and cultural history classes that whitewash any mention of Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tiananmen Square or even the Cultural Revolution itself.
Communist Russia
- Lenin and Stalin did not allow independent historical inquiry and wrote their own version of events
- Stalin ordered people to be erased from photographs
- Numbers of enforced famine victims, assassinations, brutal imprisonments, and mass killings were drastically underreported
- Today, under Putin, most labor camps and mass graves from Stalin’s Russia have not been commemorated in museums. They are gradually being destroyed or removed
Nazi Germany
- German Student Union burned books contrary to Nazism
- The Nazis tried to hide the Holocaust by destroying documents and dismantling buildings
George Orwell's words in 1984 eerily describe China's Cultural Revolution: "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
Erasing history is nothing new.
---
Editor’s Note - In America today, as stated in the Robbins’ book description, “This toxic movement has already brainwashed an entire generation and is rapidly dissolving the cultural, historical, and spiritual bonds of our nation.” The purpose, as the author of this article states, is power:
