Isegoria

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

— Winston Churchill

David Foster laments that the many are forgetting the few:

The British publication News of the World recently sponsored a reunion of Battle of Britain pilots. Searching for links on this story, I ran across a September 2000 item in The Independent:

An ICM poll to mark the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Britain found that some were not even sure that Britain was fighting the Germans, saying instead that they thought the enemy was the Romans or Normans — while 10 per cent thought the French were the foe. Some people were also confused as to whether their wartime leader was Winston Churchill or King Alfred.

For the survey, 1,000 people were asked four questions about the Battle of Britain — but fewer than half of those aged between 18 and 24 knew it was an air battle.

I doubt if the general level of knowledge has improved much in the last 10 years.

C.S. Lewis observed (I’m quoting very loosely here) that if you want to destroy an infantry unit, you cut it off from its adjacent units, and if you want to destroy a generation, you cut it off from previous generations. Such cutting-off seems to be proceeding, on both sides of the Atlantic, at a rapid pace.

Commenter Marty summons Orwell:

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

…and…

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”

Shannon Love sees an intentional skewing of history education by leftists:

I’ve seen the results here in the states as well wherein high school graduates know next to nothing about WWII except Japanese internment.

Leftists are in the business of selling untested and unproven fantasies to people. In order to get people to buy into their latest idea, they have to make people believe that the current systems are not only not working but are so irredeemable evil that any change whatsoever must be better than the status quo.

Destroying history is key to this idea. Every accomplishment that leads up to the status quo must be either minimized or dragged through the mud in order to create a visceral feeling of disgust for the status quo.

In the case of the Battle of Britain, the last thing a modern leftists wants is to have the population looking back on traditional British institutions as powerful weapons against a deep and dark evil. They certainly don’t want a story told in which articulate intellectuals played only a minor role.

Leftists only like stories in which talkers are the heros. Those who act and those who make, can only ever be villains. This is what our children are taught every single day of their government education.

Mala Lex adds his own experience citing previous generations of thinkers:

The other day I was defending the Tea Party, in the process noting its intellectual roots — Aquinas, Locke, Jefferson. The response was that Locke invested in slaves, Jefferson owned them. Aquinas wasn’t smeared, but I guess he was a Catholic priest, and we all know about them nowadays.

Now, with that attitude, one can wipe every contribution of anyone up to, say, 1850 at a single stroke. Then, of course, between anti-semitism, homophobia and, say, anti-female suffrage, we can do away with everything up to, say, 1960.

Perhaps this is the pointy end of Lewis’s process:

Step 1: Discredit anybody already dead.
Step 2: Ostracize anybody alive who disagrees with the consensus.

Presto! Unity.

Posted in Education, Policy, War | 2 Comments »