Bill Benett's 2011 Message* for America

Bill Bennett’s 2011 Message* for America
In pursuit of the truth - cinops be gone - Sunday, Nov. 18, 2012
“Knowing the Enemy, Speaking the Truth and Choosing to Win the War against Radical Islam”

“The defense of the West and America has long been too weak - in our schools as much as in our entertainment and from our own leaders. With a feeble sense of the Western self, is it any wonder that lost and thirsty youth looking for something firm in which to believe can be attracted to the strong message of Islam? We have seen this phenomenon growing in Europe and worry about it here in America.

“Having denied our children an understanding, knowledge and appreciation for our Western and American ethics and history (which includes the teachings of equality and liberty, equanimity, and charity), we have ended up where we are today.

“This failure, more than anything else, could prove the West’s undoing. In America, one can graduate from any of America’s top colleges and not take a single course in American history. Meanwhile, our political scientists and historians teach that our founding was racist or classist or elitist, at best. “You can’t assimilate with a nullity - which is what multiculturalism is,” said Mark Steyn. “So, if Islamist extremism is the genie you’ve trying to put back in the bottle, if doesn’t help to have smashed the bottle.”

“Indeed, we have smashed the bottle of national identity and proper and purposeful assimilation - in both the United States and Britain, as well other European nations. A great relearning is required if we are to endure and be safe.

“Historian David McCullough testified before Congress in 2005 that U.S. history is the “worst subject” in our nation’s classrooms. In the same hearing, U.S. Senator (and former secretary of education) Lamar Alexander cited the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. “Fewer students have just a basic understanding of American history than have a basic understanding of any other subject which we test,” he said, “including math, science and reading.” Our children’s grades are naturally as low as our national sense of self - the two are linked.

“Meanwhile, the uber ethic diversity replaces history with “social studies,” a feckless and disappointing substitute that, a Stanford professor William Damon noted, emphasizes “tolerance for non-Western cultures and criticism of our own.” While we criticize ourselves, we do not teach, he said, “about parts of the world that have not been blessed by freedom and democracy.”

“We do not teach “how women feel in cultures that keep them illiterate and disenfranchised, force them to wear smothering clothes or undergo involuntary genital surgery, punish them when they are raped, and threaten them with harm when their families cannot afford huge dowries. We do not contrast those societies “with societies where everyone gets to vote, protest, join unions, start businesses, marry and divorce at will, choose partners our of affection, not coercion, worship or not worship as they wish.”

“In short, we no longer teach, said Damon, “ a sense of how freedom has been won in some places and lost in others. How American rights were forged through suffering in Valley Forge and Selma; how utopian Russian dreams slipped away into tyranny; how German democracy was brought down by terrorism and divisiveness in the Weimar years; how Japan succumbed to its leaders’ militarism and expansionism.” And we do not teach the American role in reforming itself while fighting the various evils arrayed against us.

“We have made aliens in our country by alienating ourselves and our children from our history and our cause… That’s the cost of denigrating our own story. Said C.S. Lewis, “We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bit the geldings be fruitful.” …*p. 143-146, The Fight for Our Lives, by William J. Bennett and Seith Leibsohn, Thomas Nelson, 2011

George H. Kubeck, Bill is the former U.S. Secretary of Education & presently on very late talk radio.