by
Gadfly
Folklore need not be true, merely plausible. If it’s a good story, it will replicate
within a culture, essentially shaping and possibly defining the culture. Why is this important?
On October 30, 2008, an
individual running for the most powerful position in the world, remarked that
he and his followers were a mere five
days away from fundamentally transforming America. Without specifics, the transformation was all
about hope and change. What did the
change involve? Nobody really knew, but
it was a good story. Eventually the
change came to light. Dr. Paul Kengor
captured it well in his commentary, “How
Obama Made Good on His Promise to Fundamentally Transform U.S.A.” America has been transformed.
In an interview
with Charlie Rose (before he was outed and put out to pasture by the #MeToo cohort),
Obama was asked what his biggest mistake was in his first term of office. He answered that the nature of the office “is
also to tell a story to the American people that
gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough
times.” This story telling included
lionizing Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Black Lives Matter while demonizing
the top 1% in America (“If
you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that”) and Christians (“And
lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place,
remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed
terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and
Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”).
Peter Wehner
rebutted the Crusades-related “high horse” comment in his commentary, “Get
Off Your High Horse, Mr. Obama.”
Much of what modern Americans know about the Crusades is folklore. In a book
review of Jonathan Riley-Smith’s book Crusades,
Christianity, and Islam, Thomas Madden observed: “It was
Runciman [an untrained historian] who called the Crusades ‘a long act of
intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.’ The
pity of it is that Runciman and the other popular writers simply write better
stories than the professional historians.”
So how
does the folklore keep plowing on in America today? One major example is The New York Times “1619 project.”
Speaking to a choir audience, a Times’
editor bemoaned the failure of the Russia collusion project; thus, they felt
compelled to make the case for Trump racism in an attempt to defeat him in the
2020 election. This year, 2019, they
assert is the 400th anniversary of the birth of racist America. Their research revealed that the first black
slave arrived in 1619. I do not dispute
this fact. Yet, the Times’ story does not tell a more complete one. If one reviews the history
of slavery, it lasted several millennia and had little to do with the color
of one’s skin.
In 1619, America was a British
colony. The slave trade from Africa involved
much more than America. As the table
below reveals, America, as a British colony, represented 2.7% of the nearly 11
million slaves transported via the Atlantic slave trade.
As the British colony, called
America, matured and realized its citizens preferred liberty and individual
sovereignty over rule of subjects by a King, they severed their bond with the
British monarchy in 1776 (157 years after the first slave arrived in the
British colony called America). Language
in the Declaration of Independence declared “all men are created equal.” There were no racial or ethnic qualifiers in
the Declaration. Wrestling with the
issue of the international institution of slavery that the new nation of
America inherited, language in the Constitution was also very carefully worded
in order to accommodate a transition away from slavery. In defense of our Founders, a recent book, No Property in Man: Slavery and Anti-Slavery at the Nation’s
Founding, by Princeton scholar Sean Wilentz, provides a compelling analysis
of the language. Peter C. Myers provides
an excellent review of the book in a Claremont
Book Review article, “Vindicating
the Constitution.”
Less than 80 years after the
Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified, America entered into a civil war
to set all men free. The cost was well
over 600,000 casualties to pay for the sin of slavery. Many would argue this cost met or exceeded
just reparations. How many other nations
in the table above sacrificed that many humans on the altar of reparations?
Today, we again hear political
candidates calling for reparations. Not
a single individual in America today is or has ever been a slave. Nor has any individual in America today owned
or ever have owned a slave. If the
definition of justice is to give to a person what is due to them, then after
154 years since the end of the Civil War how would reparations in America be
just?
There certainly are
individuals who harbor hatred towards others for bigoted reasons. This does not represent America as a
whole. And for those who believe Trump
falls in this category, they distort what he actually says and does or simply
repeat mainstream media folklore. For
example, Trump is not anti-immigration (he’s married to an immigrant). He is against illegal immigration. He believes in the rule of law, even to the
point of honoring federal injunctions to his executive orders. Trump didn’t criticize Colin Kaepernick
because he is black. He criticized him
because he’s unpatriotic and visibly insulted a national symbol for which
millions of fellow Americans have died protecting.
Folklore can feed bigoted
hatred. Unfortunately, when someone in
America aspires to the Office of the Presidency and pushes false folklore, such
as institutional racism in America, we should call them out. This includes The New York Times, which is clearly demonstrating it may be the
modern-day version of The
Daily Worker, which aggressively advanced propaganda (which, in turn,
became folklore among the rank and file) in support of Soviet Communism.
America has been a beacon for
other nations because it was known as a free and just society. America has no slaves (with the exception of
the sex trade industry); but with the ever-powerful administrative state, many
Americans are now experiencing characteristics of serfdom where political elite
determine how much of our income we get to keep and how to redistribute wealth.
Truth will set us free from
the chains of illusions and delusions.
And there can be no justice without truth. Folklore is not an advocate
of truth. Yet, it keeps plowing on.
