— by Polydamas
On this 241st anniversary of our nation’s declaration of independence from Great Britain, there is no better time or greater need to examine what our Founding Fathers believed was tyranny that justified an armed uprising. The deplorable state of the public educational system and ignorance of American history and the Revolutionary War are responsible for the mental fog that afflicts the citizenry.
First, let us consider the precise reasons for the American people’s cloud of ignorance. In 1958, former Federal Bureau of Investigations special agent, attorney, Brigham Young University professor, and Salt Lake City police chief, W. Cleon Skousen, wrote a remarkable book titled The Naked Communist. In his book, Skousen explained the origins of communism and its naked objectives to subvert America’s free society. Influenced by Skousen’s book and by anti-communist publisher Patricia Nordman, Congressman Albert S. Herlong, Jr. (D-FL) read into the Congressional Record of January 10, 1963 (http://bit.ly/2tGeA6L) the following warning:
CURRENT COMMUNIST GOALS
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture–education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use [“]united force[“] to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction] over nations and individuals alike.
In the ensuing more than half a century since Skousen’s book and Congressman Herlong’s warning, any rational thinker would be hard pressed to deny that the vast majority of the 45 objectives listed above were achieved by leftists in America. The left accomplished them through its blitzkrieg conquest of America’s educational and academic institutions, culture, and mass media, and proceeded to systematically deconstruct American history, including its philosophical, political, and governmental legacy bequeathed by our Founding Fathers. The left’s strategy of infesting America’s foundations with ideological termites to cause a collapse is best explained by the prescient George Orwell who observed that “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
During the one or two weeks that high school history classes typically devote to the history of colonial America under British King George III and to the Founding Fathers, hundreds of millions of high school students are misled by their leftist teachers that the American Revolution is best explained by class warfare. Although Karl Marx, the originator of communism, may or may not be mentioned by name in the textbooks, his theories on class warfare permeate and are at the foundation of nearly every history book and textbook, just as identified above.
According to leftist schoolbooks, the American colonists who fought, bled, sacrificed, and died in the Revolutionary War supposedly belonged to the disenfranchised proletariat class. They were the working class free men who lacked freehold real property to vote in the new nation, peasants, debtors, indentured servants, African slaves, Native Americans, and women. They were supposedly subjugated by the wealthy bourgeoisie and the moneyed interests, who benefited economically from the overthrow of the previous order and the erection of a new order. These included the wealthy farmers, southern slave plantation owners, capitalist manufacturers, bankers and moneylenders including holders of private securities and public debts, shippers, western land speculators, and smaller farmers. This thesis can be seen throughout Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States and similar books.
A similar outlook can be seen in the books of self-admitted Marxist Howard Zinn, who wrote in A People’s History of The United States: 1492 – Present:
“Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.
“When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.”
Although many of the history textbooks pay some lip service to the Founding Fathers and describe them as otherwise extraordinary people, high school and college students are taught to view them as essentially rapacious profiteers and opportunists who parlayed their wealth and white privilege into power. Students learn that America’s history and institutions are nothing special, no different from the many nations across the world and throughout history in which the poor proletariat workers sacrifice while the wealthy bourgeoisie prosper. As Zinn states, “The [Revolutionary] war had brought glory for the generals, death to the privates, wealth for the merchants, unemployment for the poor”.
The leftist notion that the Founding Fathers were avaricious fat cats, who were solely or primarily motivated by their economic interests and were all too happy to risk the lives and livelihoods of the riffraff below them, cannot be reconciled with actual history. Each one of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence explicitly pledged his life, honor, and personal fortune to the cause of independence. They knew that. if they were captured by the British, they could be hanged for treason, arrested, or had their properties seized. In fact, Declaration signer Richard Stockton of New Jersey was captured and imprisoned for signing the Declaration. His New Jersey estate was occupied by British General Charles Cornwallis and all his crops, livestock, and household belongings were expropriated by the British while his extensive library was burned to the ground. South Carolina Declaration signers George Walton, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Arthur Middleton, and Edward Rutledge were also imprisoned by the British. The houses of New Jersey Declaration signer John Hart and of New York signers Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris, and Philip Livingston were looted and destroyed by the British. Virginia Declaration signer Carter Braxton lent the revolutionaries £10,000 sterling and lost almost his entire wealth in support of the revolution. The fiction that these men fought to remove the yoke of aristocratic Britain to profiteer for themselves is propaganda intended to fit into a Marxist world view.
Another Founding Father, Thomas Paine, published in January of 1776 his famous 50-page polemical pamphlet Common Sense, in which he systematically attacked King George III’s divine right to rule Americans. Paine’s book quickly sold 100,000 copies and approximately half a million copies by 1800. If Marxist historians were correct, Paine could have profited mightily from his writings, yet he donated all of his royalties to the cause of the American Revolution.
Although he was not a signer of the Declaration of Independence and was never fully acknowledged as a Founding Father, Jewish broker Haym Salomon was one of the premier financiers of the American Revolution. He lent his own personal funds to support the revolutionaries at below market interest rates and never pressed for repayment. He raised the enormous sum of more than $650,000 to finance the war effort and to support General George Washington’s military campaigns. If not for Salomon, Washington’s soldiers would have had no money for cannons, muskets, ammunition, food or clothing. Salomon died penniless in 1785 in Philadelphia at the age of 44, leaving his family destitute after the young nation and his private borrowers failed to repay him even a tiny portion of their loans. Salomon did the exact opposite of profiteering from the American Revolution. His name is conspicuously absent from the history books of Charles Beard, Howard Zinn, and similar leftist historians because he invalidates their Marxist paradigms.
Even a cursory reading of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense irrefutably proves that the American revolt against King George III is more properly considered an enthusiastic endorsement of John Locke’s political masterpiece Two Treatises of Government. It is a wholehearted rejection of the divine right of all hereditary kings to exercise their absolute rule over their subjects. Thus, the American Revolution was the logical continuation of the process of curtailing the unfettered rule of British kings, which was started in Magna Carta of 1215 and continued with the parliamentarian victory in the English Civil War of the 1640s and in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Due to the leftist subversion of the education system, present-day American high school and college students — as well as adults — do not truly understand why the American colonists took up arms against the British Crown. When teachers and history textbooks explain that the American Revolution was precipitated by British taxation of the American colonies, Americans nowadays are dumbfounded. The average American does not understand the colonial objection to the taxes levied by the British Crown. A century after the 1913 passage of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, when a direct income tax was imposed on the citizenry, Americans are conditioned to view heavy taxation as inevitable and that it must be paid whether or not one chooses to vote in political elections.
Also, contemporary Americans have been conditioned to accept taxation as the price they pay for government-supplied roads, hospitals, police and fire protection, and various and sundry social welfare services. They have no idea in 2017 why the colonists objected to being taxed if they received government services and benefits. Yet, in 1776, the local colonial governments supplied very little in terms of services and benefits. Medical care was completely private, as was education. There was no police, thus, people were forced to rely on themselves and on their own firearms. Social security and welfare did not exist, and charity was supplied through churches and other charitable institutions. Instead, colonial America was taxed by the British Crown ostensibly for defense of the colonies. More truthfully, it was taxed to support Britain’s military adventurism in competition with France, Spain, and other European powers, worldwide nation building, and to enrich the Crown’s favorite aristocrats with statutory payoffs as an integral part of Britain’s crony mercantilism. Yet, unlike British subjects living in the British Isles, the American colonists lacked true representation in the British Parliament to effectively object to the Crown conscripting them as Britain’s economic beasts of burden and mortgaging their properties.
Neither were the Founding Fathers fellow subjectivist revolutionaries, as leftists contend. The Founders did not believe that just any public discontent justifies an armed insurrection. Contrary to Congressman Herlong’s list, they did not hold that violent insurrection was a legitimate mechanism for solving just about any economic, political or social problem. On the contrary, it was only a last resort, as the Declaration of Independence, itself, specifically states that “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed”. Partisan hatred for an elected government official or an interruption in the government’s bribes of bread and circuses to the public are not reason enough to topple the existing order.
In his masterpiece 1984, George Orwell incisively wrote “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Americans must protect their past by defeating the leftist conspiracy to destroy the Founding Fathers and the respectful pedestal upon which they are placed in our nation’s consciousness. Americans must decisively reject contemporary leftist thinkers, who seek to judge the Founders by the lofty standards of present sensibilities, not as men of their own historical period, and to find the Founders sorely wanting.
On this Fourth of July, Americans must realize that, to ensure America’s future as a free country, they must zealously protect the exceptional nature of its past history.