“The 10 Big Lies About America: Combating Destructive Distortions About Our Nation”, by Michael Medved

 

280 pages, Crown Forum, ISBN-13: 978-0307394064

Josh Billings (otherwise known as Henry Wheeler Shaw) was a famous humorist and lecturer in the United States during the latter half of the 19^th Century…but what concerns us here about him is one of his most famous quotes, namely: “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so”. Quite. And it is just this idea, our own ignorance of the important questions of the day, which concern Michael Medved in his The 10 Big Lies About America: Combating Destructive Distortions About Our Nation. And just what are these 10 Big Lies About America? Thought you’d never ask:

1. America was founded in genocide against Native Americas 
2. The United States is uniquely guilty for the crime of slavery 
3. The Founders intended a secular, not a Christian nation 
4. America has always been a multicultural society, strengthened by diversity 
5. The power of Big Business hurts the country and oppresses the people 
6. Government offers the only remedy for economic downturn and poverty 
7. America is an imperialist nation and a constant threat to world peace 
8. The two-party system is broken and we urgently need a viable third party 
9. There is a war going on against the American middle class 
10. America is in the midst of an irreversible moral decline

No nation is perfect, but the United States is, I have no problem in asserting, less evil than most. Take the founding, for instance: the long conflict between European settlers and the people they encountered in the “New World” was a lot more nuanced than the “policy of genocide” the left alleges based on either a distorted reading of historical events or on no evidence at all. The truth is there were brutalities on both sides, but even more examples of friendship and cooperation between American Indians and European settlers than there were bloody skirmishes. Medved also shows that a view of Native Americans as near saints living peacefully in harmony with their neighbors and the environment until Europeans showed up and ruined Eden is a total fiction. Americans Indian tribes fought almost constant wars between themselves before Europeans arrived.

Or how about slavery? As grotesque and utterly unjustifiable as the institution of slavery was, it was not peculiar to the West in general or to America in particular. It has existed throughout all of human history on all continents (in fact, it still exists in parts of Africa today and even China; think of the Uighurs). Indeed, it was Britain and America, with no help from anyone else, who were responsible for bringing it to an end in the West. Medved in no way apologizes for slavery (as some of the left have falsely claimed) but shows how ubiquitous it has been and how Western Christian values were central in ridding most of the world of this plague.

On Christianity, clearly the Founders only meant to prevent the central government from establishing one sect of Christianity as the nation’s official religion, not to drive all traces of religion from the public square. There are constant references to God and Christian principles in our founding documents and in the speeches of the Founders themselves. No one thought it the slightest problem that many states maintained official religions for decades after the First Amendment was adopted.

How about the role of government? Consider just one example: in 1931, during the middle of the Hoover administration and deep into the Great Depression, the national unemployment rate was 17.4 percent; in 1938, five years into FDR’s administration and after federal spending had tripled, regulation put into overdrive and countless economic experiments from Washington had been visited on the economy, the national unemployment rate was…17.4 percent. At no time during the New Deal decade of the 1930s did unemployment drop below 14 percent. So much for the idea that only Washington has all the answers.

You really need to read The 10 Big Lies About America I order to get the whole story, but I will leave you with words from the Gipper’s farewell address of Jan. 11^th, 1989: “We’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important…If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are”. Looking at the US of A today, with ignoramuses burning down cities and calling for the imposition of friggin’ socialism – a system that has failed every single time it has been tried – I fear that we have already forgotten.