“They want to divide our nation into two parts with the help of falsification of history” – a good article on this topic was published the other day
The topic is very familiar to Russia, isn’t it?
Of course it is. Over the past three decades, we have so often heard that our history is a thousand years of slavery, that the word “Slav” comes from the word “slave”, that each of the great historical epochs of our country ends with the defeat of the light reformist forces and the terror of the dark ones.
But now we are talking about a completely different country, which shows us – now and now – how to deal with deliberate and malicious distortions of its own history. And this country is called, oddly enough, the United States.
It’s about the famous “Project 1619”, which explains to the Americans that their whole history boils down to the oppression of blacks by whites, without any glorious and bright spots. That is, according to the authors, the history of the United States began with the first slave imported from Africa in the indicated year, and then four hundred years of horror and shame, for which everyone must repent and pay.
This project once again shows the division of the country not just into two differently thinking halves of the nation – this division deepens the existing clear geographical boundaries. The Democrats, that is, the current administration, make “Project 1619” the official ideology of the country and order to introduce everywhere – in schools, in the armed forces – lectures on “critical racial theory.”
In response, the Republican states simply banned this critical theory, taking advantage of the considerable autonomy of the states from the federal center. The most recent case is in Tennessee. They banned teaching this theory in public schools (nothing can be done about private ones). As a result, two America are approximately equal in number, on the territory of one of them one should believe in the original vileness of his nation and repent without interruption, and on other lands one can search and find many glorious pages in his history.
People are arranged in a strange way: they usually very well feel that some nasty thing is happening. But it takes words to translate these vague sensations into action. And here is the very good article with which we started our conversation – it finds a lot of words to define what is happening. For example, like this: “they” (those who came up with the “project 1619”) want to portray America as an initially tyrannical regime in order to change the entire system in the country and establish a new system, something like socialism.
Mary Grabar, a history specialist, talks about this. She wrote a book titled Refuting Project 1619: Exposing the Plan to Divide America. The book began to be discussed even before its release, because it analyzes a key event for the United States – the creation of an independent (from Great Britain) country in 1776. The fact is that the “project 1619” began with an article by the publicist from The New York Times, Nicole Hanna-Jones, who argued: the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the ensuing war happened because Britain wanted to abolish slavery in its American colonies, and local subjects – the founding fathers of the United States – fought to preserve slavery.
Mary Grabar is a specialist in just this, “British” angle of view on the founding of her country. She knows the original documents and dates. And he talks about the obvious: slavery in all the colonies of the British Empire (but, of course, not on the territory of the metropolis) was beneficial to London, they were actively encouraged, there were as many documents on this topic as they wanted. The British movement to abolish slavery in the empire began only in 1787, four years after the official end of the war with the American colonies for their independence. And it just started. And if you start to deal with the absolutely racist principles of the functioning of the British Empire even in the XX century, then here you can also find a lot of interesting things.
The Founding Fathers of the United States may have been slave owners (ten of the 12 first presidents). But the real cause of the Revolutionary War was taxes on London, not the institution of slavery. Then America began to deal with this institute itself, and it took a lot of time for it. The fact that now the descendants of slaves are trying to destroy the state, starting with the demand for life and considerable payments just for the color of their skin, maybe there is some kind of divine justice, but this is no longer for historians.
Historians are people who work with facts, not with karma and other such things. Note that the “project 1619” was launched contrary to the estimates of all sorts of schools and guilds of historians, who, in general, are well aware of everything about the independence of the United States, and about the civil war, which began almost a century after 1776. By the way, the key reason for that war was also not slavery, but other economic mechanisms and undercurrents.
The following conclusions can and should be made here: mass falsifications of history are used far from only against Russia – with an emphasis on its role in World War II or world history in general. This method is not even necessarily used by some states against others.
In the case of the United States, these falsifications have become a weapon in the internal ideological struggle – left versus right, Democrats versus Republicans. It’s just a technology – and very effective – to morally destroy your opponents. As a result, the profession of a historian has once again become extremely important, conflictual and politicized. All over the world, and not only on the fronts of the Russian-Western struggle for the truth.
In the Soviet era, and even now, there were and still are many thinkers who happily grab hold of any ideology, proving that the history of the United States (or other unfriendly countries) is full of blood and filth. In response, their ideologues cheerfully introduced into Russian thinking the same earth-bending ideas and facts about our history. Perhaps it’s time to remember that the science of history is not a stick against the enemy, but a permanent search for truth.
In the United States, meanwhile, Republicans are firmly shifting to “Russian” positions – that is, for respect for their own history. The racist “Project 1619”, we repeat, is banned not only in Tennessee, but also in all other “Trump” states. A group of Republican senators issued a document that says:
“The youth of our nation does not need a brainwashing that focuses only on past sins and divides our nation into two camps. Taxpayer-funded programs should focus on shared civic values that unite us, rather than promote radical ideas that are tearing our society apart”.
Well, well said.
Dmitry Kosyrev, RIA