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Category: History

  • U.S. Students Ignorant of History; Will Repeat Mistakes of Past

    By Selwyn Duke Once again, a study has show that American students are woefully ignorant of history. Test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress demonstrate, writes the Wall Street Journal, that only “20% of U.S. fourth-graders and 17% of eighth-graders who took the 2010 history exam were ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’…” and only 12…

  • Gandhi Reconsidered: When Paganism Met Progressivism

    By Selwyn Duke When an Indian-born man I knew a couple of decades ago expressed an intense dislike for Mohandas Gandhi, I found it a bit surprising. Wasn’t the “Great Soul,” that quintessential 20th-century icon, India’s George Washington? That certainly is the narrative created by historians — who, history has taught us, can tell a…

  • Chinese Segregation: No Caucasian Mummies Need Apply

    By Selwyn Duke The Chinese exhibition “Secrets of the Silk Road” ran without incident in California and Texas. But now Chinese authorities have decided that parts of it really must be kept secret and have ordered that some artifacts and, most notably, a certain mummy not be displayed. The news came as a blow to…

  • Saul Alinsky Meets Dr. Seuss: Obama Pens Children’s Book

    By Selwyn Duke When discussing a new study about liberals’ and conservatives’ favorite television shows recently, pundit Bill O’Reilly and his guests mentioned that liberals like works about “flawed people.” If this is so, they will certainly appreciate Barack Obama’s just published children’s book, Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters. Much like…

  • Engineering Oblivion: Eugenics, the Remaking of Man and Unmaking of Morality

    By Selwyn Duke The year is 1941, and the Nazis are in the midst of their Lebensborn program. Men of pure Aryan stock — especially members of the Waffen-SS, thought the cream of the crop — have a special purpose. In many occupied countries, they are encouraged to mate with blonde-haired, blue-eyed women — those…

  • Liberals’ Lies about Religion in American History

    Become a big liar often enough and you start to believe yourself By Selwyn Duke When I was in high school in the early 1980s, I knew that my education was a cakewalk as compared to that of two generations earlier. And I assumed the other teens knew this, too. It took me a while…

  • Noam Chomsky: Rise of Far-right Imperils U.S.

          Will intellectualism ever intersect with wisdom? By Selwyn Duke A number of definitions of insanity have been put forth over the years, and a recent interview has inspired me to add the following: It is when one is wrong over and over again but still expects himself to be right. The interview was with…

  • And That’s All He Has to Say about That: Tom Hanks and Twisted History

    By Selwyn Duke Stupid is as Hollywood does . . . and does and does and does.  And the latest example is Forrest Hanks, who has just managed to graduate — in the Tinseltown U. way of thinking — from moron to imbecile.

  • Texas Board of Education Tries to Correct History

    After years of education’s leftward drift, Texas says remember the Alamo, remember America and remember the West. By Selwyn Duke In this age of new math and Newspeak, the term “revised standards” is usually a euphemism for lowered or, worse still, deformed ones. But not so in Texas 2010, where the State Board of Education…

  • Pope Pius XII: Hero in the Unmaking

    By Selwyn Duke The word “hero” so often conjures up images of the brash and the bold. We may think of Audie Murphy’s WWII exploits, the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the doomed holdouts at the Alamo. But then there are the quiet heroes, people such as Oskar Schindler. Ever since Schindler’s List hit the silver…