In addition to being Polish National Independence Day, today is Veterans Day, a.k.a. Armistice Day, a.k.a. Remembrance Day, which commemorates the end of the Great War on the same day in 1918.
Here’s how Richard Falknor honored our veterans today at Blue Ridge Forum. See the original post for the embedded links.
Philippines, Bataan Airfield 1942, 24th Pursuit Group, P-40E Warhawk
Veterans Day 2017: Honor those who served by learning and teaching our unique heritage!
“We’re the battling bastards of Bataan;
No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam.
No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,
No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces
And nobody give a damn
Nobody gives a damn.” –Frank Hewlett 1942
Six years ago on Veterans Day, we asked in our Will Veterans Day Fade When Only A Few Still Grasp Why?
“All this military history and much more should be part of our national conversation –– not topics relegated to the archives of academics and locked away from school children.”
Two years ago on Veterans Day, we reported in our Preserving Our National Heritage To Guide And Energize Our Next Generations
“This last year has revealed even more sharply the organized civic collapse of undergraduate bodies in too many of our universities.
Most recently, Yale University and the University of Missouri have brought shame to what was once the higher learning in America.
As Andrew McCarthy wrote yesterday–
’The university is a terrible deal for the country and for too many students. It is no longer a center of learning and the promotion of reason. It is a cauldron of hard Left indoctrination and victim narratives where reason no longer has a home.’”
Now traditional liberals like Camille Paglia highlight the collapse of learning in America which failure means that the work and sacrifice of veterans from 1775 to this day will disappear from ordinary memory.
Breitbart’s Dr. Susan Berry writes —
“In a discussion with American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, Paglia said:
’What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history of any kind. No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on, and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization, etc. So they now are being taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!’
Paglia, a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, slammed the trend of public schools beginning the teaching of ‘identity politics,’ such as that found in ‘sexual harassment sensitivity training’ and ‘diversity training,’ all the while true education is absent.” (Highlighting added.)
Patriots of all persuasions must act to learn and to teach our special heritage of freedom.
If they do not do so, this heritage will shortly be lost!
Barbary Wars 1804: Navy Lieutenant & Eastern Shore Native Stephen Decatur Boarding Tripolitan Gunboat by DM Carter
I fully agree with Ms. Paglia’ s view.I started reading her about gender issues years ago and found her ideas very reasonable. As are the views of the ” identity question” and students achievements by John Mc Worther, an afroamerican scholar of linguistics. His findings about the decline of knowledge in context of identity teaching are depressing.His book has the ambiguos title ” Loosing the race”. This says it all.
On Friday, a twelve-year old in 7th grade phoned the Rush Limbaugh show to tell him she liked his Rush Revere book series, because it taught her American history. Including her present school year, she had had NO instruction on American history, but repeated lessons in “world religions,” meaning Islam. You cannot value your culture and those who protect it, if you don’t know you have one.
The poem by Frank Hewlett reminded me of the observation by Diana West in her book American Betrayal the paradox that even though it was the Japanese who actually attacked American territory and American forces, the entire strength and resources of the US were put into assisting Russia in fighting the Germans. The Germans, although they inexplicably declared war against the US on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, were not engaged in actual hostilities against US forces and were up to their necks in their Russian adventure.
The US forces fighting the Japanese got almost no support for years, while mountains of arms and supplies were being shipped to Russia.
So, why are universities, particularly publicly-funded universities, teaching no history at all? So-called education is one of the largest expenses of the country.
Universities are now huge, government or tax-funded bureaucracies, headed by bloodless bureaucrats whose primary skills are political pandering, fundraising, and bureaucratic empire-building. The primary objective of a university bureaucrat is to stay where he is, without career-threatening disruptions. The biggest threat to them comes from well-organized, potentially-violent, cultural Marxist gangs of professors, students and trespassers, who are set off by any expression of cultural or national awareness.
The situation cannot be remedied by taking control of the bureaucracy. Bureaucrats to control bureaucrats simply generates another level of bloodsucking chair-warmers.
Truthfully, the best way to address the problem is to remove all employment requirements for a university degree, defund all government support of education, and eliminate all laws and regulations interfering with complete freedom-of-association, including the freedom to not hire or rent to blacks, Jews, Irish or whoever. Of course, I think private employers should be free to require degrees if they think that will add to their efficiency or competitiveness. I suspect the market forces would set them straight rapidly.
In a free, competitive atmosphere, I suspect even schools sponsored by fundamentalist Christians would include some sort of evolution dynamics. Otherwise, their graduates would not have a prayer (so to speak) of getting into medical or dental schools.