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Even a fan of big brain central
planning like Isaac Asimov,
recognized the dangers of a
big bully wrecking the carefully
crafted central planning of society's
well-meaning mental superiors in
his "Foundation" sci-fi series. |
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Todd Starnes over at Fox News has sparked a debate over the issue of whether kids should study Islam in public school, when he wrote a piece that documented parental outrage over their children being "forced" to learn the principles of Islam in a Tennessee public school. The Huffington Post shot back with a piece that pretty much distorted what Starnes actually said and glossed over the fact that the teacher in question had decided to "put off" the chapter on Christianity till the end of the school year as one parent claimed or told another parent that it was "against school policy" to discuss Christianity in school.
Starnes' point was that the teacher in question had a double standard where teaching about religions in a history class was concerned, not as HuffPo accused the Fox commentator, that Christianity should be taught in public schools and not Islam. Starnes, in his column, wasn't calling for Bible classes down at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School. As usual, liberals muddy up the issue, call conservative hypocrites and then declare themselves a moral victory, thus claiming an unearned moral high ground for themselves. Speaking of junior high school, does anyone else think that sounds suspiciously like "Nanny, nanny, boo, boo." I don't know about you, but the Huffing and Puffington Post piece feels just like one of those playground bully that used to smack down the littler kids and claim the kingship of the playground for himself on the basis of his being genetically larger than everyone else.
Look, as to the issue of teaching about Islam in a high school or junior high school history class, I've got no problem with that. I think an examination of Islam's fundamental beliefs by school children would be quite useful - at least as part of history class.
"Know thy enemy," I always say. In reading T.H. Lawrence's (yes THAT Lawrence; the one from Arabia) "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" I came to an understanding of Islam that further convinced me that my "nutty" conservative political beliefs were dead on. Knowing the cultural background of Islam and the principles taught by Mohammed has made the Middle East all too frighteningly understandable.
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Were I a teacher again, I would definitely introduce Islam's tenets to my students, in hopes that, with all else they know about history and their own culture, they might at least put up a token resistance to the "fundamental change" that's being foisted upon America. A thorough understanding not only of Islam, but also of Roman Catholicism, the Protestant Revolution and the doctrine of the divine right of kings, just might open young eyes to see the Euro-Marxist invaders who have co-opted our government and somehow convinced the citizens of the greatest nation in the world so far, that it should be ashamed of itself.
A clear understanding of where this whole collectivism disease is all coming from, would, I hope, convince young Americans that we should NOT quietly recede from the world stage and join a homogeneous socialist proletariat under the rule of our mythical European/African/Asian/Latin American betters. As regular readers of my blog know, I blame Walt Disney. I love Uncle Walt as an entrepreneur, but he is also responsible for teaching generations of kids that hereditary princes and princesses are better suited to governing nations than the people themselves.
They don't mean the Hapsburgs, those European wastrel monarchs that decimated Europe for generations with their wars and taxes and castle-building when the collectivists talk about the special class of rulers. They mean Darwin's smart, strong people - those who made it big and have joined the social elite by virtue of their genetic superiority. The leftist actors, politicians, corporate elites, wealthy billionaires and academicians are busily teaching us that we are all not equal but the same and should submit to central planning and guidance. The guidence, of course, they mean to come from themselves, since, of course, they, being smarter, know what is best for us after all.
Islamists have a similar system in place. It's best that our kids know that and recognize the danger, if those of us who believe, not in collectivism, but in individualism are going to put up any useful resistance. In America, the government draws its power from the people. In most of the rest of the world, people believe they draw their rights from the government - the ancient European way. Brits draw their rights, they believe, from the queen.
Check out any "People's" republic or democratic-republic you care to name and the principle is the same, and it is the same in Islamic countries. Sir Robert Filmer, an opponent of John Locke whose philosophy guided the foundation of the United States, stated quite clearly the monarchist's philosophy or the so-called "divine right of kings". Filmer said flatly, that we are all born slaves and designed by God to serve that special few whom God ordained should be our sovereigns. Locke took apart Filmer's argument block by block through logic, reason and scripture. Locke was a notable theologian in his own right as it turns out, hammering Filmer's theory from Scripture.
When Locke's principles were inculcated into the US Constitution, monarchy and the idea of a divinely appointed hereditary "nobility" took a heavy blow. America appeared to enjoy the blessings of the Almighty rather than his curses. Meanwhile the divine kings and princes back in Europe were "governing" themselves into an inevitable decline thanks to their unceasing wars and wasteful spending.
But thanks to Charles Darwin and the idea of evolution by natural selection or "Survival of the Fittest" as it came to be known, the ruling class found a new ally that supported the divine right of elites to rule. According to Darwin, those who had clawed their way to the top of society, were, the simplistic argument went, the hereditary "fittest" and therefore, an elite class of humans fit to meddle in the affairs of "the lower classes" or as Marx called the unwashed rabble - the proletariat.
Under Marx's vision, the world should return to a two-class system and the troublesome bourgeouise middle class would be conveniently absorbed into harmlessness as part of the new collectivism. There they would serve the state - meaning those who are already running things, instead of selfishly looking out for themselves and their families. The only problem (and the fat cats, for some reason, never see it coming), there's always some megalomaniac lunatic out there ready to seize the machinery of collectivism and proceed to exploit the "everybody serves the state" mentality that's been created by the well-meaning social elites. Then said strongman merely redefines the state to mean "myself" and then robs, rapes and murders the intelligentsia that gave him his power in the first place.
Individualists do not last long under the "divine right" of the elites system at whatever stage it happens to be at. That said, there is also the law of unintended consequences at play here. The argument is always made that socialism or communism or monarchism or whatever it calls itself, didn't work before because "we didn't have the right leader". They assure us with great fanfare and lots of symbols and logos that this latest version of the "Dear Leader" will give us the hope and change utopia we all long for. The trouble is that if you give any state that much power over the so-called masses, it is inevitably run by some class of bully.
Those who represent the bully state may, in-fact be well-meaning bullies, but any time bullies demand that everybody submit their will to themselves, the all-powerful state thus created is always vulnerable to the rise of a bigger, more dangerous bully. Isaac Asimov, who was actually a fan of letting the smart guys plan everyone's future, recognized that an unforeseen big bully might wreck even the carefully laid plans of well-meaning smart people when he introduced "The Mule" character into his "Foundation" series. He recognized that vast centralized power can be a dangerous thing, even in the hands of nice guys and that the best-laid plans, as Scots poet Robert Burns aptly put it, "Oft-times gang agley." They can, and probably will, given the lust for power that runs in the human race
That's why, I think that learning about how a bully like Mohamed took over the Arab culture via the drumming of a set of fundamental beliefs into the minds of his people, is a useful educational exercise. I think an honest study of comparative religions could be a very instructive for what Rush Limbaugh calls "young skulls full of mush". Don't get me wrong, I also think that comparative study should be America-centric. I don't mind investigating where Christianity went wrong while you're at it. The governmentalization of faith under the Roman church was a huge mistake and one that seems it is trying to repeat. There were good reasons for the Protestant rebellion. Those should be studied too, because the inform the history that followed, from the Spanish Armada, the bloody history of South and Central America to the reasons for the American Revolution. All these help us understand why the rise of the United States became the most earth-shaking thing to hit history since the Flood.
The brilliance of our founding fathers was in their structuring of the government of the new nation into three equal branches, each of which acts as a balance to the other, preventing any one branch from getting too big for its britches. It makes for a woefully inefficient system of government with a whole set of problems all its own, but if you paid any attention in history class when you were a kid, you realize that an "efficient" government is usually most efficient at murdering dissenters among the people it "serves".
And when I talk about history class, I don't mean the revisionist double-think version of history our leftist academia has foisted upon an unsuspecting generation of young Americans. I mean history - the kind you dig out of books written by those that history actually happened to. History unvarnished and uninterpreted for you. That's the sort of dangerous thing Huffpo and other liberal pundits would like to see eliminated. It's dangerous to allow kids to learn from source material. It requires them to learn to think for themselves. And that threatens the Progressive movement to no end, for without the proper interpretation of history by those in authority, kids might not realize that they are naturally born to slavery and to serve their betters as part of a collectivist state.
And we wouldn't want them to be squeamish about shooting individualists when the revolution comes, would we?*
Tom King - © 2015
* That was sarcasm by the way - for those of you from San Francisco, Rio Linda and any writers at the Huffington Post.
