House of Eratosthenes

One of the things to scroll up Memeorandum while I was off this weekend picking up the kid, was a snarky little hit piece that spread to all kinds of liberal blogs asserting why it is that left-wingers should maintain their iron-fisted control over how our public school systems educate the next generation about history. It purports to be sounding an alarm bell that the conservatives are invading our schools with a bunch of falsehood about history.

The right is rewriting history.

The most ballyhooed effort is under way in Texas, where conservatives have pushed the state school board to rewrite guidelines, downplaying Thomas Jefferson in one high school course, playing up such conservatives as Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation and challenging the idea that the Founding Fathers wanted to separate church and state.

The effort reaches far beyond one state, however.

In articles and speeches, on radio and TV, conservatives are working to redefine major turning points and influential figures in American history, often to slam liberals, promote Republicans and reinforce their positions in today’s politics.

The Jamestown settlers? Socialists. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton? Ill-informed professors made up all that bunk about him advocating a strong central government.

Theodore Roosevelt? Another socialist. Franklin D. Roosevelt? Not only did he not end the Great Depression, he also created it.

Joe McCarthy? Liberals lied about him. He was a hero.

The piece attempts to set the record straight. But keen-eyed observers will notice it quickly diminishes into an exercise of cataloguing personal shortcomings of Republicans, some real and some imaginary, and only occasionally pretends to concern itself with historical fact. And the conclusion to be reached was: Keep those other guys from saying anything. Leave our monopoly exactly where it is.

The structure of it is a Snopes-like one of “debunking.” Very slowly, over the last few years, I’ve come to realize liberals like this format. It offers the appearance that you, the debunker, are cranking out durable, well-researched material fit for consumption by an antagonistic audience — when this is not really the case. Your logic doesn’t have to be that strong. You just provide a fair overview of what you’re debunking, you say “not true,” and then jot down a couple paragraphs that carry a cosmetic appearance of being related to the claim. Source your statements — but they don’t really have to be connected. The audience will fill that part in without realizing they’re doing it. It’s sort of like watching the magician’s assistant float in the air, tricking oneself into seeing what one is not really seeing.

I noticed this with the Joseph McCarthy claim. If you read through it carefully you see there’s really no claim, very little basis of disagreement. It comes down to “What McCarthy did was wrong” versus “not necessarily.” If you stick with the facts you see the now-ancient morality play, following the release of the Venona papers, has some real problems with it. Yes, McCarthy was hounded into oblivion and an early grave. But that doesn’t look quite so much like just desserts, when the Senator claimed there were communists working in the government, and the facts later revealed that’s exactly what was going on. It ends up looking like payback. Every good murder movie has a scene in which someone catches on to what the bad guy’s doing, and the bad guy manages to frame the whistleblower and take him down. Gee willikers, with the communists and McCarthy, we saw that happen in real life and it would be four decades before we understood what was really happening.

But on that claim, we end up arguing about righteousness. Always a problematic thing where flawed mortals are involved.

On the Socialism in Jamestown issue, this article ends up lying. There’s just no other word for it, it’s bald-faced flat out lying.

Reaching for an example of how bad socialism can be, former House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said recently that the people who settled Jamestown, Va., in 1607 were socialists and that their ideology doomed them.

“Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow,” he said in a speech March 15 at the National Press Club.

It was a good, strong story, helping Armey, a former economics professor, illustrate the dangers of socialism, the same ideology that he and other conservatives say is at the core of Obama’s agenda.

It was not, however, true.

The Jamestown settlement was a capitalist venture financed by the Virginia Company of London — a joint stock corporation — to make a profit. The colony nearly foundered owing to a harsh winter, brackish water and lack of food, but reinforcements enabled it to survive. It was never socialistic. In fact, in 1619, Jamestown planters imported the first African slaves to the 13 colonies that later formed the United States.

Got that? Jamestown had something to do with what was called a “joint stock corporation” and that makes it a capitalist model. “It was never socialist.”

Well. I didn’t read A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’ Great Discovery to the War on Terror…but this guy did —

In the 15th and 16th century, it was common for the King to grant great swaths of land via a charter. The London Company received its charter in 1606 from King James. The initial stock-holders were 600 individuals and 50 commercial firms. The first wave of colonists settled at Fort James, later Jamestown, Virginia. These were mostly gentleman adventurers who disdained hard work. There were few farmers, carpenters husbandman, blacksmiths, masons or fisherman etc. Unfortunately, the colonists reaped what they did not sew and 60% died from disease and starvation the first winter.[4]

Captain John Smith, as council president, assumed control and instituted military style discipline; issuing the famous biblical edict: “He who will not work will not eat.” Less than 15% of the population died the second winter. Smith continued to run the settlement like an army until 1609, when confident of its survival, the colonists tired of his tyrannical methods and deposed him.

At this point, Smith returned to England, whereupon the London Company (by then calling itself the Virginia Company) obtained a new charter from the King. The Virginia Company sought to raise capital in England by selling stock and by offering additional stock to anyone willing to migrate to Virginia. The company provided free passage to Jamestown indentures, or servants willing to work for the Virginia Company for seven years. The would-be colonists were also promised by the King all the same rights afforded to them as they enjoyed in England. Nevertheless, the colonists were considered “employees” of the Virginia Company, were not granted land in the New World and were subject to the absolute rule of the Governor of the Company. More “employees” arrived at Jamestown, more starvation, disease and death.

Like Smith, subsequent governors, such as Lord De La Warr, attempted to run the colony in a socialist model: Settlers worked in forced-labor gangs; shirkers were flogged and some even hanged. Negative incentives only went so far because ultimately – and this is the important point – the communal storehouse would sustain anyone in danger of starving, regardless of individual work effort. Administrators eventually realized that personal incentives would work where force would not, and so they they permitted private ownership of land. The application of private enterprise and land ownership (which came with voting rights and the fruits of ones labor) combined to help Jamestown survive and prosper.

Thus, the settlement at Jamestown failed in large part due to socialism and statism, but recovered only after the Governor reestablished land rights and the right to the fruit of ones own labor. It appears that the force of equal outcome fails to motivate people to do any more than the minimum (even when faced with starvation and death). Thus the old adage: “Men who don’t benefit from their hard work tend not to work very hard.” (Sir Thomas Dale). [emphases in original]

I suppose the blogger linked could be lying his ass off about the book, but it doesn’t seem very likely because unlike me, he isn’t replying directly to the McClatchy piece; he’s just talking about a book he read that he found educational and enlightening. Regardless, it would be good if I had the book myself and didn’t have to rely on someone else. But I suspect the point of my disagreement with the McClatchy writer doesn’t have to do with citing sources, it has to do with defining “socialism.” It’s a devil’s-in-the-details thing. This is, much of the time, how liberals do their lying.

According to what I call socialism, much of early America was a failed socialist experiment. Including Plymouth, birthplace of Thanksgiving, which had learned much the same lesson as Jamestown:

This “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” was an early form of socialism, and it is why the Pilgrims were starving. [Gov. William Taylor] Bradford writes that “young men that are most able and fit for labor and service” complained about being forced to “spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children.” Also, “the strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak.” So the young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.

It’s all right here if you think that guy might be lying his ass off too.

As Ryan Siefert pointed out last summer as the tea parties were kicking into high gear, “There seems to be a need in American society to have to relearn the same hard lessons over and over again” with regard to socialism. He, too, is saying untrue things about socialism in Jamestown; in fact, if this really isn’t true, the conspiracy must be spread far and wide. Into the archives of historical documents. All the way back to the contemporaries. Someone in the vast, right-wing conspiracy must have gotten hold of a time machine, gone back and bribed them.

Well, it seems it is true; at least two pre-revolutionary era colonies practiced hardcore socialism straight out of the Twentieth Century Motor Company in Atlas Shrugged — from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. I’m really not sure how you go about pretending to offer decent service to the truth and write a sentence like “it was never socialist.” All of the ingredients were there, after all. Relying on senses and intuition, I conclude we are perhaps in the midst of some kind of game involving semantics. They didn’t call themselves socialists, perhaps, because the word had not yet been invented; or maybe, to be a socialist, your economic model has to be interwoven with an energized political movement. I notice this in the here-and-now; I’m told President Obama is not a socialist, and nobody substantiates the dismissal by offering me a criteria for being a socialist that the President fails to meet. That never seems to happen. They just threaten to make fun of me or anyone else who dares to call Him a socialist.

Or, maybe the author, one Steven Thomma, just didn’t do his research. Or he’s got an axe to grind, and is immersed in this activity of deliberately cherry-picking “facts.” Either way, if early Jamestown wasn’t socialist then I don’t see the point of calling anything else socialist…nor do I see the point of blasting more holes in his little hit piece.

Once you know what really happened, even if you have a predilection toward liberalism and you really want to see the children grow up to be good little Obama-voting libtard-drones — nevertheless, allowing both sides to have some input into the educational process, including the curriculum design, seems like just the reasonable thing to do. Certainly more edifying for the children, than just learning how to draw outlines around their hands every November to make paper turkeys so Mom can stick ’em to the fridge.

Exactly. Which is why from now on when people dispute my charge that Obama is a Socialist, I’m just going to stop the car and they’ll be forced to tell me what they think socialism is, and I’ll tell them what I think socialist is, just so we’re all clear on that, and then we can proceed.

My guess is that they’ll refuse to define it, or bugle trying, dropping names like Stalin and such but really not defining anything. At best they’ll probably say that Socialism = the evil acts comitted in the name of socialism.

But I’m reading Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” right now, and he made a convincing case (back in the 1940’s) that statism is the inevitable outcome of government-enforced “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”-ism

I mean, seriously, this book is stunning in its foresight and clarity.

I have “A Patriot’s History of the United States”. I could check for you 😉 Haven’t started it, though.

To the point of The Jamestown settlement being a capitalist venture financed by the Virginia Company of London — a joint stock corporation — to make a profit… … this is something that Alinskyites seem to do a lot. If you can associate a with b in any possible manner, then a = b. At least when they’re talking about things they don’t like. The rules get completely flipped for things like Socialism, where we poor knucke-draggers just don’t understand “nuance”.

The fact that a “joint stock” corporation hired a group of people in a “for profit” venture doesn’t mean that that group of people didn’t try to govern themselves in a socialistic manner, as history clearly shows they did.

I love the little bonus “tack on” of slavery. This is to suggest that Corporations = Slavery. But there are, as usual, other explanations. How about this one I admitedly just pulled out of the air?

They tried socialism. The group got paid by the company, and the person in charge of governing the individuals in that group decided, apparently, that he would go the “economic justice” route. But when people found they would be kept adequatlely alive, sheltered, fed, and health whether they worked or not — things went south. The governor then flipped to a more capitalist system, but the folks remembered the time they didn’t have to work, and thought … hey…. So they brought in people they could force to do the work for them. Well it’s at least as logical as their argument.
- philmon | 04/06/2010 @ 10:33
Maybe they were confusing Jamestown with Jonestown.
- lordsomber | 04/06/2010 @ 14:50
We forget that the most of the Pilgrims died in their first year through communal farming before going to plan B.
- jamzw | 04/06/2010 @ 18:46
We forget that the most of the Pilgrims died in their first year through communal farming before going to plan B.

I was just about to mention that and you beat me too it. The colonists about starved before their leaders Gov Bradford figured out that collectivist agriculture wasn’t the best way to get results. I believe he wrote in his diary, “Men who were most fit for labor did repine that they should labor for other men’s wives and children.” Or some similar wording to that effect.

It’s funny how quickly people seem to figure out that the whole “take all the spoils and divide it equally regardless of individual input” idea…isn’t one which rewards hard work or innovation. It’s remarkable how quickly people realize that this “common good” stuff is a bunch of horse shit.

And the funniest thing of all? That the Mayflower Pilgrims figured this out, dropped the idea, and moved on…over a century before Karl Marx was even born.
- cylarz | 04/08/2010 @ 01:15
[…] And they lie. Even worse, wherever they can get away with it, they “demonize” others for merely telling the truth. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/31/2018 @ 02:34

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How Liberals Do Their LyingTuesday, April 6th, 2010

How Liberals Do Their Lying
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010