By ALEXANDER DOLITSKY
Today, many radical school teachers believe themselves to be teaching the “truthful” history of the world, including American History.
They aggressively and unwisely inject divisive concepts of gender identity, the 1619 Project, and white privilege and critical race theory doctrines into their teaching curriculums.
This neo-Marxist type of teaching accomplishes two main objectives—racial segregation among our youth and hatred of our nation’s past.
For example, according to the New York Times website: “The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contribution of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
It is imperative, however, to acknowledge and understand that world events, including history of American slavery, must be interpreted and understood in the historic context of their time, relying on facts rather than on subjective “truth” wrapped up into neo-Marxist ideology.
In short, Marxists believe that economic and social conditions, and especially the class relations or “class struggle and class warfare” that derive from them, affect every aspect of an individual’s life, including economic conditions, religious beliefs, moral values, legal systems and cultural frameworks.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is a key slogan popularized by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. This key Marxist principle, in addition to the “class struggle and class warfare,” refers to social equity and free access to and distribution of goods, capital and services.
Just like beauty, truth is also “in the eye of the beholder.” Although history is created by facts (a reality independent of human minds), history becomes a story told by storytellers, and the biases and viewpoints of the story tellers become very much a part of that history; and what people remember of those stories depends on their own biases and viewpoints. Thus, history, like truth and beauty is also “in the eye of the beholder.”
History can also be rewritten and manipulated to fit politically correct narrative. Once a new story becomes the one people have learned, it becomes moot whether it really happened or not. Indeed, today we are living in the bleakly dystopian time reminiscent of George Orwell’s science fiction book, 1984, written in 1949. Orwell’s novel, 1984, is about the dangers of totalitarianism and warns against a world governed by propaganda, surveillance and censorship.
Interestingly, the job of Winston Smith (the protagonist in the George Orwell’s novel 1984), while working for the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, was to rewrite historical documents so they matched the constantly changing party line. This involved rewriting newspaper articles and doctoring photographs (i.e., rewriting history) so they would correspond with whatever new history was being told.
This is the reality of today’s progressive socialist movement—facts are simply being rewritten by clever radical activists in order to change the narrative of American history and to establish a socialist regime in our country. Indeed, progressive socialist must be reminded by Winston Churchill insightful observation, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessing; the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
One of my former students is a Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard University. In our private correspondence, he elegantly described his interpretation of truth:
“One of the things that has always worried me about social science, psychological studies, and medical trials is the widespread and deliberate use of deception in experimentation. Now, I understand that deception is used to prevent “response expectancy” or placebo effects—to create a kind of “double blind” situation—and that argument makes sense to me—to a point. But I also strongly doubt that any kind of truth about men and women can be arrived at through deception, beyond the truth that people are easily deceived. I suspect, further, that the replication crisis currently vexing the sciences has something to do with the widespread use of deception in experimentation—through a kind of moral rot, so to speak. Lies, to put it bluntly, may primarily, if not exclusively, give birth to other lies. And this moral-epistemological rule, if valid, may be setting limits on the scope of our science in real time, by delineating the boundary at which research turns into sophistry.”
Here is the “Truth” that guides my life: Believe in the Judeo-Christian moral values, advocate good vs. evil, and stand for freedom, liberty, and factual truth.
Alexander B. Dolitsky was born and raised in Kiev in the former Soviet Union. He received an M.A. in history from Kiev Pedagogical Institute, Ukraine, in 1976; an M.A. in anthropology and archaeology from Brown University in 1983; and was enroled in the Ph.D. program in Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College from 1983 to 1985, where he was also a lecturer in the Russian Center. In the U.S.S.R., he was a social studies teacher for three years, and an archaeologist for five years for the Ukranian Academy of Sciences. In 1978, he settled in the United States. Dolitsky visited Alaska for the first time in 1981, while conducting field research for graduate school at Brown. He lived first in Sitka in 1985 and then settled in Juneau in 1986. From 1985 to 1987, he was a U.S. Forest Service archaeologist and social scientist. He was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Alaska Southeast from 1985 to 1999; Social Studies Instructor at the Alyeska Central School, Alaska Department of Education from 1988 to 2006; and has been the Director of the Alaska-Siberia Research Center (see www.aksrc.homestead.com) from 1990 to present. He has conducted about 30 field studies in various areas of the former Soviet Union (including Siberia), Central Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and the United States (including Alaska). Dolitsky has been a lecturer on the World Discoverer, Spirit of Oceanus, andClipper Odyssey vessels in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. He was the Project Manager for the WWII Alaska-Siberia Lend Lease Memorial, which was erected in Fairbanks in 2006. He has published extensively in the fields of anthropology, history, archaeology, and ethnography. His more recent publications include Fairy Tales and Myths of the Bering Strait Chukchi, Ancient Tales of Kamchatka; Tales and Legends of the Yupik Eskimos of Siberia; Old Russia in Modern America: Russian Old Believers in Alaska; Allies in Wartime: The Alaska-Siberia Airway During WWII; Spirit of the Siberian Tiger: Folktales of the Russian Far East; Living Wisdom of the Far North: Tales and Legends from Chukotka and Alaska; Pipeline to Russia; The Alaska-Siberia Air Route in WWII; and Old Russia in Modern America: Living Traditions of the Russian Old Believers; Ancient Tales of Chukotka, and Ancient Tales of Kamchatka.
Read: Neo-Marxism and utopian Socialism in America
Read: Old believers preserving faith in the New World
Read: Duke Ellington and the effects of Cold War in Soviet Union on intellectual curiosity
Read: United we stand, divided we fall with race, ethnicity in America
Read: For American schools to succeed, they need this ingredient
Read: Nationalism in America, Alaska, around the world
