An American Ragnarök?
Are we on the brink cataclysmic destruction of America and everything in it - even the gods?
People who read my writings know my mind sometimes (often?) works in strange ways, making connections or drawing stimulation from strange places. This afternoon, I walked in the den and Thor: Ragnarök was on the idiot box. It was on the scene where Thor’s sister, Hela, was revealing the true history of Asgard by bringing down the domed ceiling in Odin’s throne room, destroying the “happy happy” mural of Odin, Frigga, Thor and Loki and revealing an older mural underneath depicting the violent conquest of the Nine Realms, with Odin using her powers as the mechanism behind his rise.
While Hela was in the process of handily destroying Asgard, its heroes and army and beginning the fulfillment of the Ragnarök prophecy, I realized that the Asgardians had no idea who she was, how powerful she was, and how to defeat her (or at least escape immediate death) because they did not know their own history.
Apparently, her existence and the tales of her exploits were lost in time because the Asgardian rulers forbade any teaching about that period of their history. Odin defeated and banished her once, and if the Asgardians, knew anything about her and had been exposed to their own history, they might have stood a chance of defeating her.
Then I thought about how America has been rendered into a mortal version of Asgard and her people – we are too ignorant of our own history to know how to defeat our own Hela, the surging scourge of leftist progressivism.
There have been several polls conducted by respected pollsters (Gallup, Pew and Harris to name a few) that indicate the American educational system of government schools is doing a terrible job of presenting American history. In 2003, George Gallup introduced one of their polls by noting, “If Jefferson and Madison returned today, they might be alarmed by the widespread ignorance of American history and civics among U.S. citizens. For example, slightly more than half (53%) of Americans do not know that the first 10 amendments to the Constitution of the United States are called the ‘Bill of Rights’."
And it hasn’t gotten any better over time.
In 2016, a study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that only 20.6 percent of Americans were able to identify James Madison as the father of the Constitution, more than 60 percent thought it was Thomas Jefferson, who was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence.
College graduates only scored marginally better that the average citizen. The survey also found that roughly 60 percent of college graduates could not correctly name a requirement for the ratification of a constitutional amendment, and 40 percent did not know Congress has the constitutional authority to declare war, less than half knew that the Senate oversees presidential impeachments.
And it isn’t just founding history and civics, multiple surveys in 2019 and 2020 revealed startling ignorance about the Holocaust and WWII. For example, a 50 state survey conducted by Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that 63 percent of all national survey respondents do not know that six million Jews were murdered and 36 percent thought that "two million or fewer Jews" were killed during the Holocaust. Additionally, although there were more than 40,000 camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust, 48 percent of national survey respondents cannot name a single one, that 56 percent of U.S. Millennial and Gen Z were unable to identify Auschwitz-Birkenau, and there was virtually no awareness of concentration camps and ghettos overall. Only six percent of respondents are familiar with the infamous Dachau camp, while awareness of Bergen-Belsen (three percent), Buchenwald (one percent) and Treblinka (one percent) is virtually nonexistent.
The survey synopsis goes on to note that “Perhaps one of the most disturbing revelations of this survey, 11 percent of U.S. Millennial and Gen Z respondents believe Jews caused the Holocaust.”
The fight against things like the teaching (indoctrination) of Critical Race Theory is not really against the primetime and weekend lineups of MSNBC and CNN, or the CRT theoreticians, it is against the educational establishment that does not teach history at all, rather opting for a campaign of activism based on censored, stilted, and politicized versions of the historical record, absent of context and supporting a curriculum specifically designed for a particular negative outcome.
Perhaps this is rhetorical, but how is it possible for anyone to understand current events without historical context? How is it possible for anyone to understand how ridiculous the contemporary and ubiquitous charges of fascism, Nazism and racism are if they do not know who the historical fascists, Nazis and racists were and what they did? How can they be expected to defend against communism if they do not know the evil done in the name of that ideology?
The short answer is that they cannot know anything. They cannot defeat Hela because they know nothing about her.
Worse than that, what they “know”, what they have been taught, is horribly wrong. As Reagan so accurately observed, “It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”
I have always thought it interesting that when the African American Smithsonian released their take on “Whiteness and White Culture, they listed things like rugged individualism, emphasis on the scientific method, the Protestant work ethic, respect for authority, planning for the future, being on time, taking action, writing things down, and using proper language (as if those were negatives). I have always wondered if they even had a clue what a negative light they focused on “Blackness and Black Culture”, especially since those are the very things upon which America was founded and are the characteristics that produced our success as a nation. While thinking they were attacking “White Culture”, they missed - because the logical conclusion is that black Americans are the opposite of those listed characteristics, the idiots at the museum confirmed every single racist stereotype of blacks in America.
Ooops.
I’ve no problem with examining American history - but examined in proper context. To ignore all the good that has been done so the sole focus can be placed on the bad is not the way history works. That is propaganda and to ignore the aggravating elements of context creates a false history, a misleading narrative of events.
I guess that when people expect and become accustomed to preferential treatment regardless of the quality of their input, equality seems an unnecessarily harsh disadvantage.
If America is in the middle of an existential crisis, it is not Critical Race Theory, the real existential crisis is the historical ignorance that allows this “theory” to be treated as fact and prevents its purveyors from being tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail.