This
book is fascinating. I expected a 'man bites dog'
book about how the textbooks made errors in
facts but Loewen takes his reader on an
incredible journey; not only of American
History; but of self discovery. He
challenges the reader to wake up and start
asking questions about everything. He has
a wealth of knowledge but it's what he's done
with it that's so great.
He
shows that Columbus's most powerful impact on
the world was in opening up the Slave Trade, not
discovering the New World (which he never did
discover after all). Loewen demonstrates
that President Wilson was a White Supremacist
who threw the blacks out of the White House and whose
wife fought against women getting the
vote. But Loewen's point is not to just
smear dead people and show that History books
are wrong. He asks the question
'why?'. Why to textbooks treat
Thanksgiving as a celebration when it was the
beginning of slavery for the Indians? Why
are the books written as if things just happen;
that no one causes anything; or that History
seems inevitable? While exploring why
History Text books get it so wrong he suggests
on page 274:
"Perhaps
an upper-class conspiracy is to blame.
Perhaps we are all dupes, manipulated by elite
white male capitalists who orchestrate how
history is written and part of their scheme to
perpetuate their own power and privilege at the
expense of the rest of us. Certainly high school
history textbooks are so similar that they look
like they might all have been produced by the
same executive committee of the bourgeoisie.
In 1984 George Orwell was clear about who
determines the way history is written: "Who
controls the present controls the past".
We
are in a time when people want to know what is
true. We have the means to learn about
anything in the Universe. The Internet has
given us access to resources we couldn't have
dreamt of 20 years ago. We have the
knowledge but we lack the person with the vision
to connect the dots of our World and make sense
of the disjointed News Stories read by neutral
talking heads without points of view. Loewen
does this.
'Lies'
does more to explain history than several
encyclopedias. He's done his homework and
he's not afraid to say he might not have it all
correct. He implores us to look
further. As he says at the end of his book:" My
own quest to know what truly happened in our
American past has only begun. After
reading all this way, so has yours. Bon
voyage to us both!"
This
book was exciting to read all the way through. I
highly recommend it.
