Fake history: how '1619' distorts the story of America's founding
The project's basic thesis is that the main reason for the US War of Independence was the American settlers’ determination to maintain the institution of slavery.
By ZALMAN SHOVALSister Vanaja Jasphine, 39, Yaoundé, holding her US State Department '2017 Hero Acting to End Modern Slavery Award', standing in the grounds of a religious seminary, Yaoundé, July, 25, 2017. (photo credit: REUTERS)
‘Fake news” is the lies of today, “fake history” is the lies of yesterday.Napoleon once defined history as “a set of lies agreed upon.” The Nazis and the Bolsheviks were experts at engineering history to serve their political purposes and so are Palestinian leaders, who, together with their efforts to prove the historical existence, as it were, of a Palestinian peoplehood, try to undermine the Jewish nation’s historical connection to the Land of Israel, and to Jerusalem in particular.The procedure is usually the same, i.e. mixing truths and falsehoods together so as to make the faked sum total appear more credible.However, one of the most sensational examples of “fake history” these days is The New York Times’ sponsored, far-reaching historical initiative regarding slavery in America. The introduction to this project says: “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed… It is finally time to tell our story truthfully.” But the telling of the “story truthfully” is precisely what did not happen.The project, titled “1619” for the year in which the first African slaves reached the shores of Virginia, was led by African-American journalist and social activist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who apparently decided in advance to match the findings to her opinions. Her basic thesis is that the main reason for the US War of Independence against British colonialist rule from 1765-1783 was the American settlers’ determination to maintain the institution of slavery, upon which their economic prosperity was based, as they feared that the trends against slavery both in British public opinion and in Parliament would lead to the elimination of slavery also in America.In other words, it wasn’t the quest for freedom and democracy, not the taxes that Britain imposed on them, not the liberal ideas received from European philosophers that motivated the leaders of the struggle for independence, but just their economic concerns. According to this, the patriots fought the revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America and they may never have revolted against Britain, had they not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. Hannah-Jones even portrays president Abraham Lincoln, for whom the abolition of slavery was certainly a main objective in the Civil War as a closet racist.Hannah-Jones does not mention that in some of the northern colonies, such as Vermont and Pennsylvania, slavery had in any case already started to dwindle. On the contrary, she repeatedly makes the assertion that “America’s entire uniqueness, its economic and industrial power, and even its method of elections, are the fruit of slavery, i.e., the result of enslavement of Black Americans.” According to her, the very “American Dream” is a nightmare.Many well-known American historians, including African-Americans, did not accept the distorted and tendentious picture presented by the study, but the New York Times preferred not to respond to the criticism, even to that leveled by Northwestern University Prof. Leslie Harris, a renowned expert on the history of blacks in America, and herself an African-American, in spite of the fact that they had initially hired her to check the material before it was published. The Times has long ceased to be the unimpeachable source of knowledge it was once, but the potential damage of this distorted project lies in the fact that its conclusions have already begun seeping into scholastic curricula throughout the US, and may turn “fake history” into normative historical study material.To make things clear, the justified criticism of some of the principal aspects of the 1619 project should not in any way detract from the disgust at the institution of slavery in America, which is an indelible stain on US history, or of the cruelty of many slave owners, nor at the hypocrisy of several of the Founding Fathers of the US, such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and even George Washington, who were themselves slave owners. (Washington instructed in his will to free his slaves after his death).What Hannah-Jones’s project completely ignores, and apparently not by coincidence, is the central role that the Arabs played in the slave trade, and apparently also long after, capturing Africans and transporting them to the ports from which the mostly British ships departed for America. Also, it is difficult not to have the impression, as an American political (admittedly conservative) blog put it, that “the 1619 project was intended to promote the political aims of the Left.”One may assume that there is a measure of ideological and political affinity also between the promoters and the author of this project and the “progressive” anti-Israel – parts of it antisemitic and supportive of BDS – caucus in Congress.African-American politicians from the mainstream, such as former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and president Barack Obama, have in the past, compared the situation of the Palestinians to the situation of black Americans in earlier times. But today’s anti-Israel agenda on parts of the American Left goes beyond that, arguing that the entire Zionist enterprise is nothing more than a colonialist plot by the Jews, supported by the world powers, to profit economically at the expense of the indigenous Arab population.In their view, just like the American struggle for freedom and independence; so the Jewish struggle for freedom and independence is nothing more than a sham for the purported colonialist exploitation of cheap Arab labor.The fact that one of the most basic principles of the Zionist enterprise was Jewish labor as reflected among other things, by prime minister David Ben-Gurion’s struggle against Petah Tikva orchard growers who employed Arab workers, won’t divert them from spreading their fake history.The author is a former ambassador.
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