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logo    Do Historians Contribute to the Decline of Nations?


The United States of America did not achieve great status until after the Second World War, and except for that war, it may never have achieved it, for America's achievement was accidental. Because the industrial nations of Europe destroyed themselves in two major wars within thirty years, America, being isolated from the battlefields of both wars, was able to become the arsenal of democracy and the re-builder of Europe's destroyed infrastructure which boosted America's manufacturing prowess and economy to heights never seen before in history. Yet America today appears to be in an unprecedented, swift decline which has taken place over a mere half century. If this decline is real, America's stature as a great power will be the shortest in history. So one has to ask, how could this have happened?

The common answers given are its greed, profligacy, immorality, violence, and injustice, and all of these may have played a role. But I doubt that these answers are profound enough, because we can ask, why has America become so greedy, profligate, immoral, violent, and unjust?

We are often told that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But what do historians mainly teach us?

Historians, especially the writers of textbooks used in schools and colleges, tend to emphasize a nation's accomplishments. We read about the great battles, the wars won, the conquests made, and the achievements. We rarely read about the failures, the frauds and deceptions, the injustice, the bigotry, the violence, and the poverty.

Few Americans know, for instance, that most of America's major wars were begun for unjustified reasons. The Mexican War was begun because of a serious over-reaction to a minor, incidental, incursion of Mexican troops. The Spanish-American War was begun on the unjustified supposition that the Spanish were responsible for the battleship Maine's destruction. The Vietnamese War was escalated because of the fictitious Tonkin-Bay incident. We rarely read these facts in history books.

In Texas, where Texas History is a required subject, we read about the accomplishments of that small band of Texans who defeated the Mexican army and established the freedom of Texas from Mexico, but we rarely read about what scoundrels that small band of Texans were.

The Americans who, along with Moses Austin, obtained a colonization grant from Mexico never intended to keep the agreements they were a party to. Their intention all along was to take the territory and turn it into another Southern slave-owning state. After achieving independence, Texans joined the Union and seceded from the Union in just 25 years. When we read about these Texan heroes, we rarely read about what agreement-breaking scoundrels they were.

We rarely read about our almost complete genocide of native Americans, about the sweat-shops and industrial accidents that Americans endured, of the violent suppression of labors attempts to be treated with human decency, about Jim Crow and lynchings, and bigotry, about the incessant poverty in the world's most prosperous society. 

The consequence is that the peoples of great nations think far too highly of themselves than reality justifies and therefore tend to neglect their faults which fester and expand until they become so overwhelming that the nation collapses in its own dissoluteness. The lessons of history that we need to know if we are not to be doomed to repeat it is not the history commonly taught but the history that is commonly ignored, for only by correcting faults can nations become better. (10/5/2007)