We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know
By Al Benson Jr.
Unfortunately, most Americans in our day are “educated” (if you can call it that) in government brain laundries called public schools. This is obvious from many of the statements that they make on historical subjects, including the history of the War of Northern Aggression.
For example, I once talked with a lady in eastern Kansas who bluntly informed me that Jeb Stuart, the gallant Southern cavalry commander, was a terrorist. This lady seemed to have no problem whatever with the genuine terrorism of rabid abolitionist John Brown, but she seemed to confuse Stuart’s gallant defense of his homeland with terrorism. I suppose there are some today that would consider any Southern defense of their homeland against socialist Yankee invaders as terrorism. In other words, when the Yankees invaded, you were a terrorist if you resisted their invasion. This seems to be, at present, the major definition of terrorism.
I noted a quote from the “Richmond Times-Dispatch” for April 18th which quoted two people making their first visit to the Museum of the Confederacy. The article noted the names of the two individuals and said they “…paid their first visit to the Museum of the Confederacy and wondered about the description of the damage done by the ironclad Virginia warship to the U.S. fleet.” One of the two said “We would consider that terrorism today.” I’m sorry, folks, but you are wrong. That was an act of war by one military force against another, not terrorism. Real terrorism was what Sherman did in Georgia, what Sheridan did in the Shenandoah Valley, and what the Kansas Red legs did in Osceola, Missouri, not what the Virginia did to two Union warships. Our people have been taught to respond, like Pavlov’s dogs, to the buzz-words without a proper understanding of what they really mean.
By the same token, we have been purposely misled as to the real reasons for the War. Over recent decades various political, religious, and educational gasbags have poisoned our climate with their erroneous flatulence about what the War was really all about. Newspaper columnists have been particularly susceptible to the gaseous educational views that the South only fought the war to preserve slavery.
Recently Professor Thomas DiLorenzo wrote a column for LewRockwell.com in which he quoted author Robert Penn Warren. Mr. Warren noted that: “It is forgotten that the Republican platform of 1860 pledged protection to the institution of slavery where it existed, and that the Republicans were ready, in 1861, to guarantee slavery in the South, as bait for a return to the Union. It is forgotten that in July, 1861, both houses of Congress, by an almost unanimous vote, affirmed that the War was waged not to interfere with the institutions of any state but only to maintain the Union…”
This kind of information has been buried by our current crop of court “historians” in pursuit of their agenda to convince the American public that slavery was the sole cause, the only cause, for the War. And with the sesquicentennial for the War coming up next year, you can imagine the push there will be to re-convince a public that was beginning to doubt, that it was really all about slavery after all.
Lots of facts about the War have been buried by the “historians”–so called. They almost never begin to deal with the amount of socialist and Marxist penetration of both the military, journalistic, and political realms in the North. This is forbidden territory. You don’t go there and most importantly, you make sure your readers don’t go there.
They will not let you know that the Republican platform of 1860, which pledged to protect slavery where it already existed, was, in part, written by European socialists such as Carl Schurz. It has been left up to writers like Donnie Kennedy and myself to bring this kind of information out in our book “Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists.” If that sounds a bit unbelievable, check out the Internet and see how many books you find out there written on this subject.
These are but a few examples of what our history-starved populace doesn’t know that it doesn’t know.
Content ©2010 Al Benson Jr.
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