book review
This History Book is Different:
It's True - Setting the Record Straight
By Gailon Totheroh
CBN News Science & Medical Reporter
CBN.com - (CBN News)
- My apologies for not bringing a should-be classic, "The
Politically Incorrect Guide to American History," to
the attention of our Internet readers in a more timely fashion.
What Dr. Thomas Woods does is directly confront many of the falsehoods
that are weighing down Americans with boatloads (dwarfing the
Mayflower) of junk knowledge.
Frankly, many well-meaning people, including many educators,
have been sucked into thinking things "that just ain't so."
In fact, I have been divested of quite a number of things in my
head. The academic world has miserably failed the public in accepting,
teaching, and promoting many "clichés," to put
it nicely. The majority of them (polls show) are heavily biased
against God, representative government, patriotism, free markets
and true family values.
And, speaking of the Mayflower brings us to the subject of the
colonial origins of America. Take the Puritans, for example. Weren't
they racists toward the Indians? Didn't they steal their lands?
Didn't they commit genocide against these Native Americans?
Let’s take a few choice quotes from Woods on this topic.
Here’s his comment on John Eliot (1604-1690), the missionary
who learned the Massachusetts Algonquin language, developed a
written form of it, and translated the Bible into Algonquin:
"If Eliot and the Puritans had wanted to oppress the Natives,
they could have come up with an easier way."
Here are comments on colonist-Indian relations:
"Colonists could and did receive the death penalty for murdering
Indians…. [one] English settlement in the Connecticut Valley
was positively encouraged (author’s emphasis) by some tribes
in the 1630s, who hoped the English might prove a useful obstacle
to the ambitions of the Pequots, a hated tribe that had begun
to force its way into the area…Each colony negotiated with
the Indians, who were all too happy to sell the land--a commodity
they enjoyed in great abundance.... The Puritans recognized Indian
hunting and fishing rights on lands that the Indians had sold
to them (author’s emphasis).”
Now don't misinterpret Wells. He does affirm that Indian peoples
received horrible mistreatment at different times in American
history. Still, he wants to set the record straight about the
devout Puritans and other early colonists. They’re far from
the Indian bashers they’re made out to be.
After his foray into the early Colonial period, Wells then takes
the reader on a tour through American history, to correct the
misinformation and disinformation that abounds. He contrasts the
American Revolution with the French Revolution (poles apart),
looks at the North-South division (Civil War distortions), highlights
the realities of the Great Depression and the New Deal (the scoop
on FDR), and covers much, much more. He finishes with a look at
the Clinton presidency.
In fact, Wells takes the Republicans to task for their response
to former President Clinton’s wrongdoing: “As despicable
as the president’s philandering was, the GOP leadership’s
decision to dwell upon various aspects of the president’s
character left the impression—even if unintended—that
his policies were not so objectionable.” The author then
lays out what he finds were some of the worst examples of bad
policies, though largely perceived as positive.
One that really caught my attention was the Balkan situation.
Wells suggests that Clinton abused military power, had our government
grossly exaggerate atrocities against Albanian Muslims (400,000
claimed, vs. under 2,500 estimated) to justify the action, and
ultimately left the region with an “uneasy, unstable, and
unenforceable peace.”
In light of 9/11, an extremely troubling aspect of that war is
described by Wells. “Moreover, the Clinton administration
fanned Islamic extremism in the area, not only by siding with
the Muslims against the Serbs, but by even going so far as to
help import mujahedin (radical Islamic jihadists) from the Middle
East—something that even Clinton’s chief negotiator,
Richard Holbrooke, called ‘a pact with the devil.’”
That war was just part of the big picture of the questionable
(i.e., non-strategic) use of the U.S. military. Wells points out
that Clinton dispatched our service men and women 44 times, while
the previous nine presidents had only deployed the nation’s
military might eight times over the 45 years prior to 1992.
While Woods deals admirably with a panorama of the all-too-sordid
details flowing from the ‘myth monolith’ (that's only
a slight exaggeration), there is the bigger picture to consider.
That's the issue of worldview. In other words, why have all these
myths come about, and why have they been perpetuated? From what
view of the world and life do these cockamamie twists on reality
arise?
Mind you, this is not a criticism of Dr. Woods' book; the book
accomplishes what it purports to do and does it well. But Christians,
in particular, need to take a look at the dominant worldviews
of our times -- and educate their children in what they are and
the gulf between them and the Biblical worldview.
That calls for what would be an excellent prerequisite—or
companion reading--for "The Politically Incorrect Guide."
That book is "Understanding
the Times: The Religious Worldviews of Our Day and the Search
for Truth", by David Noebel.
Dr. Noebel covers the major worldviews today such as Marxism/socialism,
cosmic humanism (New Age), atheism and, of course, Christian theism.
If readers take on Noebel first and understand the reigning philosophies,
then he or she could amply apply that knowledge to understanding
the mental motivation for many of the myths about American history.
And lastly, there's the obligatory criticism of the book--reporters
always have to find a flaw or two in a book so that we feel like
we've done our job. I would respectfully submit that Woods should
have added a section on the Scopes "monkey trial."
Many of the myths about the trial arose from the deceptive play,
and later, movie versions of Inherit the Wind. One basic myth
from the trial is that Darwin's evolution was somehow shown to
be superior to an ignorant belief in divine creation. Evolutionists
and leftists had been distorting the trial from the summer it
took place, onward.
Indeed, as legal scholar Phillip E. Johnson writes in the Regent
University Law Review, "(T)he stereotype it promoted helped
the Darwinists to capture the power of the law, and they have
since used the law to prevent other people from thinking independently.
By labeling any fundamental dissent from Darwinism as ‘religion,’
they are able to ban criticism of the official evolution story
from public education far more effectively than the teaching of
evolution was banned from the Tennessee schools in the 1920s."
So, Woods could have made a fine addition to his book by including
the truth about the Scopes trial -- often called "the trial
of the century" -- as an additional key item in his chapter
"The Misunderstood Twenties."
In sum, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History"
is in the must-read category. Whether you're 90 or nine, this
book will help you increase the accuracy of your ‘baloney
meter.’ After all, there's certainly more baloney out there
than ever before.
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