In Which I Praise A Professor at West Point For Telling The Truth

One of the most damaging things that the current cult of scientism and the hegemony that the "STEM" topics hold over the education system is the rise in historical superstition.  As we went through when the "Cosmos" remake lied about history and historical people, we were told that it didn't matter because that was "just history".  And so it is a widening superstition that lying about the past is OK because, you know, it's not science.   Which is an important problem because Faulkner was right, the past isn't isn't dead and it isn't even past.  The current events around the gun lynchings, by police and by civilians of black people is only lynching by other weapons.

And that brings up the fact that the concerted effort by the entertainment and other media in the past forty or so years to falsify history is, actually, a more powerful force in spreading lies as history and fact.  Most of the lies people learn as the truth don't come from schools and textbooks, they come from what they fill their hours and minds with, entertainment and infotainment.  "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With The Wind",  "Inherit the Wind", myriads of TV mini-dramas and movies are probably the greatest force for the falsification of history for all time.  And it has real consequences, a good part of the resurgent racism we have today is brought to us by the media, TV, the movies, radio and, to an extent, the internet.   Hate talk radio and cabloid TV are especially potent spreaders of hate and fear and paranoia.  And it's not all FOX and the Murdoch empire of right wing lies and the heroizing of torturers and racists, CNN, presenting such people as Lou Dobbs, spouted anti-Latino propaganda most nights for years.

This video by Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, is the best and simplest refutation of the often repeated lie that the reason the Confederate States tried to leave the United States and the reason they fought a civil war against the United States was not to maintain slavery.    I thank him for making the video, it's a cup of pure water as compared to the ocean of sewage the media puts out.  That it would take a professor of history at West Point to tell a truth that tens of thousands of other professors and teachers and scholars could tell but would either be entirely ignored or who would be harassed for saying it as strongly and as publicly shows something more about the consequences of having a media freed to lie since the 1960s.

That's only gotten worse with the rise of the cabloids and the 24/7/365 diet of  alleged news pioneered by Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch.   I recall Turner was thickly involved with producing a massively expensive piece of romantic crap about the Civil War that was criticized as neo-Confederate propaganda and massively false.   I also remember reading he was nuts about the racist piece of crap, Gone With The Wind, its myth and everything involved with it.  And there are those who think CNN went downhill when he left it.

History as we are living it is giving us the lesson that the Gospels were right,  though they should have put it as a conditional statement,  IF YOU KNOW THE TRUTH THE TRUTH WILL MAKE YOU FREE, IF YOU BUY THE LIE THE LIE WILL ENSLAVE YOU.   And there has been no means of selling lies as efficacious as electronic media, I won't hesitate to say that it would not be unreasonable to view that role of  the American media as satanic as was slavery.  Political and social freedom will, contrary to 18th century faith, depend on abolishing the lies sold to people through the press, but more so through the camera lens, the microphone and high speed cables.