But you still won’t be able to change what has actually happened in the past. 

For starters, the Civil War really happened… no matter how many statues get torn down or places renamed.  Fort Liberty in North Carolina was, until recently, named Fort Bragg -- after Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general.  Fort Bragg, a town in Mendocino County, California, is also named after Braxton Bragg.  He was there first, but then he was an officer in the U.S. Army.  He then became one out of the approximately 27% of the U.S. Army officers who defected to the Confederacy at the outbreak of the war.  What the U.S. is today has a lot to do with the reality of the Civil War.  Among other things, it remains the costliest war, in terms of casualties, in U.S. history -- obviously because only Americans fought in it.  Another conceptual inaccuracy exposed by the aftermath of the Civil War is the old saw that history is always written by the victors.  One of the most influential historians of the Civil War, Shelby Foote, was Southern.

The history of slavery is fraught with erroneous inferences. The American colonies were not in any way unique in their exploitation of slave labor. The practice was well in place long before Columbus was a twinkle in his father’s eye. When the Brits began to develop their American colonies, they plundered their own orphanages for warm bodies -- mostly Scots and Irish lads.  Northern Europeans, however, were quite vulnerable to the scourge of malaria.  The losers of tribal conflicts in tropical and subtropical Africa, however, were significantly resistant to the bug.  Thus began one of the earliest examples of interracial slavery.

Hitler and his Nazi cronies are constantly being erroneously referred to as “ultra right-wing” zealots. Nazi is a contraction of National Socialist (Nationalsozialistische). They were both nationalists and socialists. In some ways Hitler was a reformer.  He outlawed dueling, which had been a mainstay of Prussian aristocratic life for generations.  In the true spirit of Socialism, his Third Reich seized many business enterprises -- including I.G. Farben chemical conglomerate, which became notorious for making Zyklon B poison gas.

Now we come to the Middle East. There’s so much agenda-charged misinformation about that place that it’s really a serious challenge to distil an accurate picture. Barack Obama’s Cairo speech was given in the early days of his presidency.  In it, he way overstated the existence of friendly ties between the U.S. and the Moslem world.  He also emphasized, falsely, the complete equivalence between Jewish and Arab claims to a homeland in the area of Palestine. Suffice to say that today’s Middle East is largely the result of the mess that was created by the destruction of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the first World War.

Henry Wickham Steed, an influential person who was also an anti-Semite, attended the proceedings for the formation of the Treaty of Versailles -- as he was also serving as the editor of the Times of London.  While there, he happened to encounter T.E. Lawrence, who was extremely displeased by the unveiling of the previously secret Sykes-Picot Treaty, which split up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France.  It had been Lawrence’s mission to assist his Arab allies, the Hashemites, in establishing an autonomous Arab nation.

Before all this dust could settle, the Arabian Peninsula was gripped in a struggle for rulership between two rival clans: the Rashidis and the Saudis.  It’s obvious by Arabia’s modern name that the Saudis ultimately prevailed.  Ibn Saud, being nobody’s fool, enlisted the support of the Ikhwan -- a ferocious militia that was bent on compelling the nomadic Bedouin into settling down into villages, so they could attend prayers at a mosque on a more regular basis.  During the struggle, what villages there were would likely evacuate once they got word of the Ikhwan’s nearness.  They were that fierce. 

Sound familiar? The late professor Abraham H. Miller gave an eye-opening synopsis of the formation of today’s conflict.

George Santayana wasn’t exactly right when he said that people who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.  What is really the case is that people who don’t know their history are doomed to have political demagogues keep getting away with lying to them about it.

Image: Marco Verch Professional Photographer