[biased history] and the boiling frog principle

Political power could be said to be the ability to influence other people’s way of thinking and vital ways are through the education system, film and literature.

That’s why the history books have been revised by certain types hell bent on presenting a distorted view of reality to children, e.g. here and the way it is achieved here; the rectors and vice chancellors come from this group of likeminded people and the children grow up in a world bereft of broader learning, the more unfettered accounts of what is good and what is not. As Wiki put it, it is: "the process that attempts to rewrite history by minimizing, denying or simply ignoring essential facts."

What is even more worrying is that these people truly believe that they are doing good, that by imposing their world view and vilifying any dissent, thereby becoming the new tyrants, the new USSR, they are doing vital work.

They are, wittingly or unwittingly – for the new socialistic feudalism.

An example is a book I dipped into for the post on feudalism – Brockhampton Reference World History, Geddes and Grosset Ltd, New Lanark, Scotland, 1995. There is no stated author, no listed credentials for writing the book and yet it is part of a series which has clearly done the rounds.

A child’s grandmother goes into a shop, maybe a newsagents, sees World History, thinks it will be educational for the grandchild and buys it. The only thing protecting the grandchild is that he is more into the World of Warcraft and other enemy zapping fun on the net than reading a historical tome.

The book itself.

By and large, the commentary follows the traditional line at the beginning – the blind acceptance of evolution et al and then the first eyebrow raiser appears: "... in Sumeria, some had serious wealth. " It's therefore either a revisionist or less learned scholar who uses jargon of the current day. Nothing wrong with that but it is indicative.

Then we get to “the Hebrew creation myth, which … [was later] written into the book of Genesis” and the eyebrows are now sky high. Now we get to the nitty-gritty. A section appears, called “Male Centred Religion”, [no, I’m not making it up – it’s on page 360 - and don’t forget that there is no stated author to this "history"], dismissing Christianity as “woman is depicted as a secondary creature” and “the cult of the virgin”.

It is my bet that any feminist reading this would think, “Yes, and what’s wrong with that?”

What’s wrong with it is that this is a supposedly evenhanded, unbiased history. I read the Hebrew myth chapter to my friend and he immediately picked up on that “myth” reference as out of place, even though he has no religion himself.

The feminist would continue, “But children have to see the appalling treatment women have received,” and so on. Look, we’re not discussing that point here. What we are discussing is that a quite categorical statement is being made, under the guise of impartiality.

It goes on, in a later chapter – “they picked up the words of the writer from the Babylonian exile and declared him and announced him as the saviour of the world”. Sheesh! Not a word about what He himself was claiming during his lifetime, not a word about the lack of corroborating evidence that He was not what He claimed, not a word about Josephus, Tacitus, et al.

And this person calls herself a historian?

By the time she described Spain as a “great Arab culture replaced by a fanatical Christian state”, Christian state being a contradiction in terms anyway, I’d had enough. “Illiterate worshippers”, as distinct from “the common people who were devout”, was the last straw.

The standard retort is that all history is biased. Not all - some historians have a love of history rather than any particular axe to grind.

Take David C. Whitney, The American Presidents, Guild America, Nelson Doubleday, 2001, in which the Bush/Gore battle in Florida was mentioned. Though I suspect the author and daughter are Democrats, it is really difficult pinning them down through the selection of sources or through the use of adjectives, as to where this bias is.

Similarly with another touchy point – the Kennedy assassination. He wrote that the accepted view at the time was that Oswald had done it alone but that this was progressively challenged in the coming years, with no final conclusion being reached. Not a word about his own point of view on that.

Reviews include:

"This book offers as much as I really wish to know. David Whitney had given us a very nice bit of helpful work here. Recommend this one highly."

"For those who would like to know about US president for the first time, or for just support your knowledge, this book is excellent enough to fulfill your needs. A must buy for junior high students. "

The most notorious examples of revisionism include the expurgating of Shakespeare, which admittedly has being going on for a long time. This has now been stepped up, particularly in the late 90s [and the process is now almost complete], to bowdlerize Shakespeare or even ban him outright. Professor Levin is one of the more respected academics to take the revisionists to task over this:

Professor Levin's deepest disagreement with the feminists turns on their blindness, as he sees it, to the sense of ''resolution and catharsis'' that he believes is essential to the genre of tragedy. For tragedy to work, he says, the tragic hero must discover the cause of his unhappy ending in some fatal flaw in himself.

But this, he says, is impossible in the feminist readings of Shakespeare, because none of the heroes ''seem to learn what these critics insist is the thematic lesson of the play - namely, that the concept of masculinity itself is to blame for the tragedy.''

This post is about the shoddiness of much modern “scholarship”; it’s about the way children are fed this pap and grow up with jaundiced views on major and minor issues and how, in adulthood, even evidence to the contrary will not dislodge these misconceptions from their minds.

It’s about the way that a certain type of person is completely convinced of his/her impartiality and happily hums along, rewriting history in the most shoddy way, which is then lapped up by the new powers that be and distributed around the nation as “the truth”.

It’s about boiling frogs – the principle that if you suddenly immerse a frog in boiling water, it will jump out but if you put it in water and then gradually heat the water, it doesn’t notice it is being boiled and won't jump out.

As for that scientific principle, it will have to wait for another post on the omnipotent callousness of science.