Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice-president and authoress of the unintentionally hilarious lesbian western novel Sisters, has long decried history curriculums that highlight the popular American traditions of oppression and failure. “Emphasizing the negative over the positive,” claims Mrs. Cheney, “is a warped view of American history with very little sense of our greatness as a nation.”
Mrs. Cheney knows a lot about history — of the Stalinist, revisionist variety. Last summer she had the Department of Education destroy 300,000 copies of the how-to booklet “Helping Your Child Learn History” because they didn’t jive with her worldview. The booklet referenced a set of teaching guidelines that Cheney felt were “not positive enough about America’s achievements.”
Translation: By interrupting a Disneyfied version of our past to discuss Harriet Tubman, the KKK and McCarthyism, children may learn about the fallibility of their country. Multiculturalism? Yuck. Impeding indoctrination of our next generation of cannon fodder? Double yuck.
The booklets were promptly shredded.
Fortunately, all conservatives aren’t zealous book burners like Mrs. Cheney. Many, however, seem to suffer from the same troublesome historical amnesia. This is unsurprising given the rhetoric of our current administration, who would prefer that we forget even the most recent past — that real conservatives don’t run record deficits, for example, or that we didn’t invade Iraq for the blue-fingered, election day photo-ops.
One would think that true conservatives would be eager to teach the history of governmental abuses and blunders as a cautionary tale against bloated, unbridled state power. Unfortunately, today’s political climate, with its frightening neoconservative sheen, refuses to tolerate anything that contradicts the nationalist narrative of America as a paragon of virtue, justice, and democracy.
A popular delusion is that playing democratic nice-nice is a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. Although often used to justify our imperial romp through Iraq, this perception of America is contrary to reality.
Think back to the 1980s, when the CIA backed Afghani guerrillas against the Soviets, resulting in the US arming and training jihadist terror groups — including Al Qaeda. Recall how the Reagan administration underhandedly enabled South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime. Recall how the U.S. slapped Romania on the wrist for its human rights abuses — state-controlled media, secret police, food rationing, and criminalization of birth control coupled with birth quotas – by suspending Most Favored Nation status for a mere six months.
Remember that the first African leader to visit the Bush I White House was Zaire’s president, Mobutu Sésé Seko, a kleptocrat and enthusiastic supporter of genocide. Don’t forget how we canoodled with Saddam when we thought his dictatorship would protect our interests in the region. Due to the U.S. fetish for foreign policy fraud and supporting “friendly” authoritarian leaders, space constraints prevent me from presenting a full list of U.S.-backed tyrants and thuggery.
It is not particularly shocking that the GOP Ministry of Truth would prefer whitewashing and jingoism to fact. Ignoring history in favor of the myth of America the Good is a politically useful concept. With the idea of America as virtuous and nearly infallible ingrained in our collective consciousness, the public readily excuses the most heinous abuses – even torture and elective war. Recall the disturbing ease with which Abu Ghraib was explained away. Americans are “good people” — after all, we shut down Saddam’s rape rooms! What does it matter if we created another?
“The fundamental assumption behind [our] imperial grand strategy is the guiding principle of Wilsonian idealism: We are good, even noble,” writes professor Noam Chomsky. “Hence our interventions are necessarily righteous in intent, if occasionally clumsy in execution. What we achieve is for the common good, so empirical evaluation is unnecessary, if not faintly ridiculous.”
Empirical evaluation of US policy and history is not only seen as ridiculous, but downright unpatriotic. Laments Lynne Cheney of reality-based history curricula: “They make it sound as if everything in America is wrong and grim.”
But those committed to democracy and liberty would be remiss not to point out the violent reality – the wrongness and grimness – behind the lofty US rhetoric. Injustice and ceaseless struggle against it is a basic pattern of history, but Lynne Cheney would have us believe that America is somehow exempt.
History, it seems, has a liberal bias.