Opinion

Historical Ignorance Is Used to Enslave People

Liberals love memory holes. The less people know about the past the easier it is to control their future.

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth in the Records Department, where his job is to rewrite history. They have to rewrite anything that makes The Party or Big Brother look bad, such as when Big Brother makes a prediction that turns out to be wrong, or to remove any mention of people who have become “unpersons” etc. This is similar to the Soviet Union’s history of rewriting history textbooks to remove pictures and information about politicians who were no longer supported by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union made sure to rewrite past events to make Stalin and his government look better. This is the role of the Ministry of Truth in 1984. (Owlcation)

Such shenanigans happen every day in the United States. Leftists hate the past. In fact, they hate the present. That’s why so many media outlets don’t cover certain stories. A narrative has been determined, and the news for the day must reflect and support the narrative.

“Ignorance Is Strength,” as Orwell put it, is for those controlling the narrative. One journalist has blown the lid off the establishment media:

Lara Logan, who was a foreign correspondent for CBS News until leaving last year, was interviewed for a podcast by author and former Navy SEAL Mike Ritland.

“And the media everywhere is mostly liberal,” Logan said. “But in this country, 85 percent of journalists are registered Democrats. So that’s just a fact, right?”

“There’s one Fox,” Logan added. “And there’s many, many, many more organizations on the left. But the problem is that the weight of all of these organizations on one side of the political spectrum. When you turn your computer or you walk past the TV… if they are all saying the same thing, the weight of that convinces you that it’s true. You don’t question it because everyone is saying it.”

“I didn’t even notice that there was a bias in the media,” Logan said. “You read one story after another or hear it and it’s all based on one anonymous administration official, former administration official, right? I mean, that not, that’s not journalism. That’s horse—-.” (Fox News)

One more thing. It seems that some colleges no longer offer a history major:

Over the last 10 years, the number of university students majoring in the discipline has dropped 30 percent—a smaller share of bachelor’s degrees than at any time since 1950, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. This could be because the trend is overwhelmingly in favor of STEM courses and social sciences. That’s where the money is, or so we’re told. (World)

It also may be where the control is. Cut a generation off from the past and they have no idea why World War II was fought, what the Holocaust was, and that a prominent Democrat Senator let a young woman drown in the back seat of his car and became the “Lion of the Senate.” The goal is to keep people ignorant of the past and dependent on the present.

If you want to create a link to and gain a perspective through the study of the past, you’ll need to do it on your own. Don’t expect any help from the enemies of Western Civilization.

The following is a guest article written by Dr. Jerry Newcombe.

________________________

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the darling of the new socialist Democrats in this country, recently referred to the three branches of government. She said, they are the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. John Roberts, call your office.

Ocasio-Cortez is not alone in a great misunderstanding of our history. Many Americans have an abysmal knowledge of our history and some of the basics of American civics.

The results of a recently-released survey are not encouraging. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation reports that, “in the highest-performing state, only 53 percent of the people were able to earn a passing grade for U.S. history. People in every other state failed; in the lowest-performing state, only 27 percent were able to pass.” [Emphasis theirs.]

The states that did the best were Vermont, Wyoming, and South Dakota. The states that did the worst were Louisiana, Kentucky, and Arkansas. When I first read that, I thought, “Then, what are those Vermonters doing, voting for Senator Bernie Sanders again and again?” As the saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Some examples of the common ignorance of Americans uncovered by the survey:

  • 57% did not know that Woodrow Wilson was the Commander in Chief during World War I.
  • 85% could not identify the correct year the Constitution was written (1787).
  • 75% could not identify how many amendments have been added to the document (27).
  • 25% did not know that freedom of speech was guaranteed under the First Amendment.

The Foundation concluded: “[A] waning knowledge of American history may be one of the greatest educational challenges facing the U.S.”

This survey is consistent with other findings throughout the years. We have dumbed down our schools.

Our loss of the knowledge of basic history and civics is a tragedy. We suffer from what I call, American Amnesia. I even wrote a whole book about it. God is the source of our freedom, but we forget this to our peril. As John F. Kennedy put it, “[T]he rights of man come not from the generosity of the State, but from the hand of God.”

I once interviewed the late Mel and Norma Gabler of Longview, Texas, who reviewed textbooks, from a Christian and conservative perspective. They told me of a textbook which dedicated seven pages to Marilyn Monroe, but only a paragraph to George Washington — and in that paragraph, it mentioned that he had false teeth.

Our young people today know more about the trivia of today’s celebrities than they do the men and women who sacrificed everything to bequeath our freedoms to us.

Karl Marx once said, “Take away a people’s roots, and they can easily be moved.” Dr. Peter Lillback, with whom I had the privilege to write a book on the faith of George Washington, said in his book on church/state relations, Wall of Misconception, “One of our great national dangers is ignorance of America’s profound legacy of freedom. I firmly believe that ignorance is a threat to freedom.”

Lillback compiled the following quotes on the link between education and freedom:

  • Thomas Jefferson said, “A nation has never been ignorant and free; that has never been and will never be.”
  • James Madison observed, “The diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty….It is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.”
  • Samuel Adams pointed out the importance “of inculcating in the minds of the youth the fear and love of the Deity and universal philanthropy, and, in subordination to these great principles, the love of their country.” God and charity first, said the Lightning Rod of the American Revolution, country second.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, says the Bible, which was in the first 200 years of America the chief textbook in one way or another. That includes the small but powerful New England Primer, which trained whole generations in Christian theology (in the Calvinist tradition), while teaching them even the basics of reading and writing.

Even their ABC’s were based on Biblical truths. Says the New England Primer: “A, In Adam’s Fall, We Sinned All. B, Heaven to find, the Bible Mind. C, Christ Crucif’ed, D, The Deluge Drown’d, The Earth Around,” and so on.

Image result for Christ Crucified "new england primer"

Back then, with a Bible-based education, literacy was so high that John Adams said that to find an illiterate man in New England was as rare as a comet. It is too bad that as a society we continue to forget God, and we continue to reap the consequences, including the loss of our history and heritage of liberty.

Why does this matter? George Orwell, a former British Marxist, told us why in his classic novel, 1984: “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

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Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is an on-air host/senior producer for D. James Kennedy Ministries. He has written/co-written 31 books, e.g., The Unstoppable Jesus Christ, American Amnesia: Is American Paying the Price for Forgetting God?, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (w/ D. James Kennedy) & the bestseller, George Washington’s Sacred Fire (w/ Peter Lillback)

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Twitter: @newcombejerry

Website:  www.JerryNewcombe.com

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