WILFUL BLINDNESS

Somehow in the 1980s we redefined in our schools colonialism, slavery, and imperialism as exclusively European, rather than merely human pathologies — as if the Arab world did not match or trump the European slave trade, as if the Ottomans had no empire before the Europeans in the Mediterranean, as if Persians, Japanese, and Chinese had not sought to conquer, enslave, and exploit their weaker neighbors.
We seem to have forgotten that what is admirable in the U.S. is not just the result of the vast American landscape, a natural selection of the more audacious and risk-taking immigrants, frontier life, and the resulting rugged individualism, but because the Founders were nursed on the European Enlightenment, Christianity was imported from Europe, and Anglo-Saxon law was built upon in a new continent. We live in such a strange age of lies: to say the above is considered heresy, but to live our daily lives on political or economic premises other than the above is synonymous with chaos and misery. So we live two lives: the counterfeit one that we declaim loudly in a politically correct fashion, and the real one we live by but do not dare articulate.