Sanitized History
Dead End to Truth and Peace
by
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The small preface states the basic rationale of this book, by a veteran of WWII, Korea and Vietnam, which is not intended as a pejorative criticism. It, however, is a profound analysis of the missteps, and the attitudes behind them that have marred the otherwise exemplary maturation of our country.
The diagnosis does not only enumerate some of those lapses; it seeks the reasons for them by uncovering the attitudes which engendered them. By doing so, it also seeks out the origins of such damaging viewpoints.
This venture does not imply that such aberrations are exclusive to the United States, or that the Founding Fathers generally espoused ideas of preeminence. Some, as in the case of the Pilgrims, resulted from circumstances of religious and cultural beliefs, which spread and metamorphosed into a dogma of innate superiority, which has led to grave errors.
The example was set by England during the reign of Henry VIII when he separated his country from the Catholic Church, and in great part from the European Continent.
Certain British apologists sought to vindicate such a drastic move, at least to themselves, by looking for signs of superiority among what little was known about the northern Germanic tribes, the Angles and the Saxons, who in the early fifth century had invaded, and taken over Celtic England.
They had not been romanized due to the fact that they lived in the extreme north of Germania, and had not had any contact with the Romans, who ultimately went no farther north than the Rhine and the Danube Rivers.
The advocates of innate preeminence pounced on the writings of the Roman historian, Tacitus, about the tribes along those rivers, but who wrote nothing about the far northern tribes.
In England, much was written and proclaimed about Teutonic superiority, and it soon passed on to its North American colonies and the new republic, to the misfortune of the Indians, the slaves and other competing countries.
There was and is much evidence of the remains of those sentiments in the debacle to which the current government has taken this country. Those foolish ideas not only have no place in a democracy, which proclaims equality and justice, and they serve to undermine our relations with other countries - friendly or adversarial.