Myths Passed Off As History
Edward J. Dodson
[Reprinted from
Land & Liberty, January-February 1991]
If we are ever to learn from history we must recognize that
understanding history demands that facts be placed in their proper
context. History is neither an aggregation of a series of events nor
merely a description of actions taken by individuals or groups;
rather, history is a continuum of how people behave within their
socio-political and natural environments.
The earliest hunter-gatherer societies were universally cooperative
in structure. Technology improved their ability to hunt large game
animals, and an increased food supply yielded larger populations
which, in turn, decimated the food supply followed by the break-up and
migration of tribes into smaller groups.
When, some 8-10,000 years ago various groups discovered the secrets
of horticulture and settled into fixed communities, hunters became
warriors and then chieftains; this elite group eventually came to
practice systematic extortion on their own people as well as any
outside groups they could dominate by force.
When history is viewed as a continuum, a considerable degree of
relevance comes through in any discussion about recent events and
those of antiquity. All agrarian-based societies came to be ruled by
hierarchies of non-producers who relied on coercion to sanction and
entrench their positions of privilege.
Some societies achieved critical mass sooner than others
(often aided by even only minor advantages in technology or strategy),
resulting in the rise of their dominance over others.
The French historian Ferdinand Lott (even more than Gibbon) leaves no
doubt by the example of Rome that all empires contain the seeds of
their own eventual destruction. Romans during the empire period
produced almost no wealth; what they gained they gained by conquest or
extortion. Eventually, the more cooperative tribal societies hastened
its decline, then fought with one another for the next 1,000 years for
control of Eurasian territory.
These tribal wars have never really ended. For sometimes brief or
relatively longer periods certain tribes allied with one another and
achieved a degree of hegemony over others.
The Moslems, Byzantines and Franks filled the gaps left when the
western empire dissolved. What we think of as modern Western
civilization began when Spanish power consolidated into a strong
monarchy and pushed the Moslems from the Iberian peninsula.
The centralization of power was next achieved in France; however,
what had the most profound influence on both the indigenous people and
immigrants to North America was the inability of the monarchy to
consolidate its power in Britain.
The socio-political arrangements that arose in Britain were more
effectively balanced between the landed and commercial interests than
in either Spain or France. This is not to say that Britain was not
dominated by a privileged aristocracy. As bad as things were in
Britain, they were much worse in Spain and France. Moreover, British
colonial policy was driven by commercial interests; large land grants
brought profits to their recipients only when enough colonists had
arrived to bid against one another for farmland or business sites and
quasi-monopolistic trading licenses.
Britain established settlements and new markets for its manufactured
goods; the French and Spanish chose to exploit furs and precious
metals because their productive capacity to produce manufactured goods
was severely underdeveloped and discouraged by gross maldistributions
of wealth and crushing taxation of producers at home.
For nearly 150 years the colonists in North America functioned
without any real central government. They experienced self-government
and the nearly universal ownership of landed and other property. Thus,
when Britain finally got around to challenging this arrangement of
salutary neglect, the conflict that followed was conservative in the
sense that Americans were trying to protect the individual liberties
they in practice enjoyed.
In France, the people were revolting against the despotism of the
monarchy but had no practical experience at participatory government
or widespread ownership of property to guide them in forming a new
highly decentralized system of government. As history shows, the
greater the centralization the greater the probability of government
by tyranny. The French and Spanish were only the first societies
formed in the modern era to experience the crushing weight of
centralized power.
In North America, the final break with Britain set the stage for a
tragic and ongoing drift toward centralized authority and the loss of
individual liberty. Adoption of the Federal Constitution forged a
national government at the expense of a Confederation of sovereign
states. The power to raise a national army made it very much easier
for the Americans of European descent to acquire new lands at the
expense of the indigenous tribes, lands promised by the nation's
political leaders as payment of the government's war debt.
Thus, national government shifted the burden of paying for
independence from Britain to the vanquished. In the process, the
concept of voluntary association was thereafter destroyed; force,
rather than the inherent justice of positive law, would become the
means of holding the United States together.
What is so troubling to me is that not only have we ignored the true
lessons of history, most of what is taught in our public schools that
passes for history is either half-truth or myth. For example, very few
of the framers of the U.S. constitution believed in democracy or
widespread participatory government; they were elitist and
conservative, anxious to preserve and expand the privilege they had
for so long enjoyed. When the North American frontier was settied a
century later, the true extent of these privileges brought misery and
poverty to millions of immigrants -- often worse than what they had
left in Europe or Asia or Africa. .
The social democracies have engaged in 45 years of centralized
intervention. This has had a socialistic flavour in many of the
European states; in the United States and Canada the experiment is
thought of as Liberalism. Decades of massive government spending and
heavy taxation of those who produce the wealth in these societies have
only pulled us closer than ever before to becoming societies of haves
and have nots -- despite an increase in productive capabilities that
could provide a level of material well-being undreamed of two
generations ago.
We have no one but ourselves to blame.
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