“A nation that forgets its past has no future” – Sir Winston Churchill

For over the course of the past 50 years those in the west have drifted further and further from their history to the point that few people have any basic understanding of it. I learned this first hand in 2008. I was hired by a local community college in January of that year to teach freshman level US history.

The majority my students were part of the college’s dual credit program, meaning they were technically high school students seeking to earn credit at both the high school and college level. What I quickly ascertained at the beginning of my first semester is that I had been given an impossible task. These students lacked zero knowledge of not just American history but any knowledge of any history the occurred outside their own lives. These were honor students but lacked basic reading and writing skills and would prove to be intellectually at about a seventh-grade level at best. How could I teach them about America when they knew absolutely nothing about any historical event that contributed to its founding?

I made every effort to give them a sort of crash course in Western Civilization before going into the course material. This was of little use the student’s ignorance and basic lack of effort ensuring that they grasped nothing. Writing assignments were a complete waste of time, a good percentage of them could not discern the difference from a history and historical fiction. Most would just plagiarize their book reviews, the ones that didn’t would hand in unintelligible garbage. All the while I was under constant pressure from the administration to continue to water-down the course to make it “easy” for them to pass the course.

First went the essay questions on the exams, which had been utterly pathetic,(one student wrote about how Native Americans immigrated to the US in the 1880’s.) I could have understood if these had been student with cognitive disabilities or students from inner city ghetto’s but these were middle class, mostly white kids who actually believed that they were intellectually “gifted”.

The tragedy is these students are products of an education system that has little to do with education.

Rather it has become more a process of indoctrinating children in “Goodthink”,(from George Orwell’s 1984 to describe thoughts that were in line with party ideology). This perversion of education can be wholly attributed Postmodernist philosophy that has become the dominant ideology among the intelligentsia of the western world. Postmodernism was born out Marxist ideology, a sort of re branding of Marxism for the modern era. Though the terms have changed, the message is still the same, and that is the destruction of a particular class and culture. Where as in traditional Marxism economics were the primary argument, the have not’s vs. the haves (Proletariat vs. Bourgeois ) locked in a struggle for economic egalitarianism.

Postmodernism has shifted the fight to the area of society and culture, (Oppressed vs. Oppressors). Both ideologies still hold to a sort “Transcendence through Destruction” mythos by which a utopia is constructed from the ashes of the society they destroyed. The key to this process is education or more accurately re-education because Postmodernism cannot draw support from traditional sources of knowledge because without undermining their assertions. Because having even a moderate grasp of history can insulate an individual from buying into the postmodern ideology. So the primary modus operandi of the postmodernists is subterfuge: they lie, cheat, obfuscate, conceal, disparage and destroy all opposing views.

This is why they hate free speech and free thought because their arguments cannot withstand any degree of scrutiny. For their goals to be achieved, society must be taught not to think rationally but to think correctly. To this end, the masses must be separated from their history so they can be groomed to accept the Postmodernist ideology. The first step is to teach Western history from the perspective of condemnation that it is something to disdain, to be ashamed of, a history predicated on the oppression of morally pure minority groups.

Over time the mere mention of these histories will be treated as thought crime. Major Ivy League universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale have already begun editing western thought from their humanities departments. In the field of history, traditional courses on Western civilization are being replaced with of course offerings in pseudo-history or “pop” history (Historian Niall Ferguson gave an excellent lecture on this subject). Given enough time and freedom, they will realize their end goal. Because at some point the society as a whole will be unable to discern truth from lies, good ideas from bad ideas, villains from heroes. Eventually, the masses will begin to despise the very things that built civilization and will run with open arms into the hands of barbarians. As we lose our collective memory of the past we lose our path forward we become strangers in a strange land without past to guide us. This leads us closer to the edge, to the place where civilization and barbarism meet.

A collapse of Western civilization will not bring about a new age of social justice rather it would lead to a second dark age of misery and death, that is if we survive at all. When you consider the fact that mankind possesses the ability to exterminate all life on the planet almost instantaneously (another fact we have collectively forgotten) it would seem obvious that as a society we should be vigilant towards preserving the knowledge our forefathers imparted to us.