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Konstantin Kisin said it better than almost anyone has.
“You spent 60 years teaching your children to hate your own civilization. Why are you surprised that they hate your civilization? It is hard to teach people to hate. It is much easier to just lie to them about history.”
That is not a political argument. That is an observation about cause and effect.
The narrative on slavery that fills American classrooms today runs something like this. There was no slavery. Then Western civilization came along and invented it. Then enlightened progressives came along and ended Western civilization. The end.
Every piece of that narrative is false.
Slavery was not invented by the West. It was practiced by every civilization in human history without exception. Native Americans kept slaves. Arab traders kept slaves. African kingdoms kept slaves and sold other Africans into slavery. Slaves were probably the first commodity human beings ever traded and it had nothing to do with race. It was about power. Conquered people were subjugated by whoever conquered them.
What actually happened is that Western civilization, specifically Britain, spent extraordinary amounts of blood and treasure to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Royal Navy patrolled the Atlantic for decades intercepting slave ships. Britain paid enormous diplomatic and financial costs to force other nations to stop. Western moral philosophy produced the arguments that made abolition not just possible but inevitable.
None of that is in the curriculum.
Instead American students are taught that their civilization is uniquely guilty, that they must eternally apologize for history their ancestors did not personally participate in, and that the appropriate response to being born in the freest and most prosperous civilization in human history is shame.
Then everyone acts surprised when a generation raised on that curriculum does not feel any particular obligation to defend or preserve what they inherited.
Kisin is right. It is not hard to teach hate. It is easier to lie about history. And for sixty years the people controlling American classrooms have been doing exactly that.
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