I read a great comment (David Horowitz perhaps?) on Noam Chomsky about the issue of context. The commentator said that If Chomsky was writing about the Second World War, he would describe all of the Allied war “atrocities” without even mentioning the existence of the Axis powers.

Like many children raised by radical New Left parents in the 1960s and 1970s, my early political education was grounded in a few simple truths: the Vietnam war was terrible; blacks and the poor deserved better lives; Nixon was a corrupt president; and the United States was hurting the world. I remember also giving a school report on Wounded Knee and John Brown. McGovern’s Come Home America speech sounded perfect – and couldn’t understand why Nixon won re-election in a landslide.

Part of the difficulty of rejecting progressive logic is that the first three beliefs were correct – even if the proposed solutions were incorrect. Too many American have done too many awful things in history – and too few people cared about human rights.

Yet that same dynamic plays out across the globe, and I thought it was just an American and German disease. Perhaps the biggest error was always holding the United States to utopian standards – and overlooking the crimes and sins of other societies. Why did I learn so much about persecution of American Indians and nothing about the gulags? I remember being completely shocked to learn that “good guys” persecuted their own people in Cambodia, Vietnam, and in China. Reading the British historian Paul Johnson as an adult was a powerful experience – and provided some rational perspective on American history.

Text, subtext, and context all matter. Teaching American history in isolation from a larger global context often seems to lead to this sort of distorted misperception and often generates a false faith in radical ideas. Or so it seems to me.

I have this quote posted several places on my blog. It should be said all the time. I heard David say this when he was a guest on the Sean Hannity Show. I believe it is also in an article on ,”Front Page Magazine”. The quote speaks for itself.

I have always said the far left would kill us if they could and they are either evil or stupid or both. They are probably both.