Changing the Past

Another Pew poll, this one testing basic political acumen -- and I do mean basic. Any readers of ApathyCurve who fail to ace this one should hang their heads in shame.

Of particular interest to me are the results from the formal poll conducted by Pew researchers, specifically the question concerning the political affiliation of Abraham Lincoln. Roughly half the people in the country (more than half of those with a high school education or less) believe that Lincoln was a Democrat.

Think about the implications of that for a minute.

The modern Democrat Party are past masters at the art of altering history to reflect well upon themselves -- which is probably why they admire communist states so much. They've already got most of the country believing the Civil War was about slavery rather than the real reason it was fought. (It was systematic political monopolization of cotton supplies and gross violations of the Constitutional commerce clause by northern industrialist states, in case you're of the younger generation of readers). Now these same people are in the process of convincing the public that they, the Democrats, wanted to liberate the slaves... which is the exact opposite of the truth.

My father, a retired history and government teacher, informs me that nearly two thirds of states no longer require American history as core curriculum in high school. I can only think of one reason a government would wish to keep its people ignorant of their own history.

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience." - George Santayana, The Life of Reason