Cultural Gadfly

I have previously promised my fellow Gadflies updates on my skirmishes with the Wisconsin Public College educators. Most of the professors so far have been relatively harmless, with the science professors of course taking evolution as established fact, not theory. There is, as Fabius is now painfully aware, one glaring exception to that rule: my History 176 (America before 1877) professor. To give you an example, let me give you some quotes from her class last night:

“There were three major clashes in Texas’s bid for independence: The Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto. The first two were utter routs of the Americans, but at San Jacinto, Sam Houston got his revenge, slaughtering 600 Mexicans.”

That was our coverage of one of the most famous last stands in history, a “rout of the Americans”.

And this, on Napoleon: ” His failure to take Russia in 1812 was a devastating blow for Europe and Humanity”

But she really went to town on post-Colombian New World expansion, calling all Europeans guilty of genocide in Latin America, reading statistics from Howard Zinn on the apparently hundreds of millions of natives we slaughtered in our first few decades in the Americas. She did mention the “few hundred” human sacrifices of the Aztecs over the centuries in passing.

She despises Andrew Jackson, calls Jefferson the biggest hypocrite and most racist of them all, says the American Revolution was basically a massive land grab (colonial aristocracy vs loyalist aristocracy) and an attempt to funnel the radical tendencies of the populace away from the likes of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin.

The War of 1812 was provoked by the likes of Clay and Calhoun, not the British foreign policy and trade restrictions. And the Battle of New Orleans was an illegal massacre of British troops after the war was over.

You get the idea.

And Fabius, who in the hell dreamed up the name “The Republic of Fredonia”?

Categories: Culture, Education, Political Philosophy