textbooks and terror - textbook terror

 The sub texts of Texts  and hidden Histories have always fascinated me.  As a Macaulay minuteman, well groomed  in the language  of  colonial power,  I was drawn to this more recent  text on how tyrannical  textbooks continue to be - even in nations that are 'the leaders of the free world' . Nations that impose freedom around the world with  weapons of not just mass destruction but mass deception. 

 Textbooks are weapons of exactly that - mass deception.  Textbooks   produced in Nebraska were used to 'educate'  students in Pakistani madarsas. Students who could be used to support Jihad  against the Russians  in Afghanistan.  

Students  who went on to become the Taliban of today.


The textbook would serve as a time-capsule for prevailing attitudes right after the attacks. And those attitudes would be frozen in print to inform students for some years to come.

With that in mind, what followed was fascinating. In the space of a few pages it conveyed the mindset that got us from the rubble of the WTC to Bush's invasion of Iraq, which wasn't a culprit.   

The textbook moves quickly from a description of 9/11 to a general definition of terrorism: "Terrorism is the use of violence by nongovernmental groups against civilians to achieve a political goal." On the very next page, a graphic called "Major Terrorist Attacks Affecting Americans, 1970 - 2001" labels the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole terrorist attacks, though neither fit the definition the authors just offered. 

What follows is an account of the early War on Terrorism told from the perspective of the Bush Administration, often using paraphrased or direct quotes from government officials rather than exercising judgment. "President Bush decided the time had come to end the threat of terrorism in the world," the authors say, as if discussing a plausible proposal that might well end up succeeding.

Isn't that the sort of myopia historical study is supposed to gird us against? 





 For historians, the last chapter of a book like this must be among the toughest to write. It is nevertheless unsettling to see the degree of deference these authors afforded sitting politicians, as if their job was to relay the narrative frame that president Bush chose. 

Re-reading it now makes it easier to understand the mindset that got us from 9/11 to the Iraq War. I'd be curious to see how the War on Terrorism and Iraq are handled in the most up-to-date version of this book. And I hope the kids who came up on the version discussed above took American history in college.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/what-high-school-taught-millennials-about-the-war-on-terrorism/265192/

what American schoolchildren are being taught about the War on Terror, in the form of excerpts from a widely-used high school history textbook. The whole piece is a disturbing catalog of hilarious propaganda presented as fact to kids who are increasingly too young to remember much about the immediate aftermath the 9/11 attacks, but  I figured I’d focus on the paragraph dealing with the Patriot Act, which manages to get a truly impressive number of things wrong in a short space.

The President also asked Congress to pass legislation to help law enforcement agencies track down terrorist suspects. Drafting the legislation took time. Congress had to balance Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure with the need to increase security.

I suppose in some strict sense all events “take time,” but this is a very strange way to describe a 342-page piece of legislation amending more than 15 complex federal statutes, the first version of which was introduced on October 2, and which had been signed into law by October 26. The reason it could be done done so quickly, of course, was that most of the reforms in the bill had long been on the intelligence community’s wish list, and were waiting in a desk drawer for an opportune moment. Last minute substitutions of the draft language meant that few if any legislators had actually read the law they ultimately passed, which makes it hard to argue with a straight face that they were seriously engaged in “balancing” anything.

It also allowed authorities to obtain a single nationwide search warrant that could be used anywhere. The law also made it easier to wiretap suspects, and it allowed authorities to track e-mail and seize voicemail.

This is a bit weird, because one of the few things the Patriot Act didn’t do was substantially alter the standards for obtaining a wiretap—except that looser FISA warrants could now be obtained in cases where a “significant” rather than “primary” purpose was to acquire foreign intelligence information. The Bush Administration did consider asking Congress to expand wiretap authority, but fearing refusal, decided to simply ignore the law and order the National Security Agency to launch its now-infamous program of warrantless wiretaps. The wording here also, somewhat bizarrely, implies that authorities had no ability to track email or seize voicemail until late 2001. It would be more accurate to say that the act lowered the standard police had to meet to obtain voicemail somewhat, and clarified that certain surveillance tools initially designed for telephone networks could also be used for digital communications, which was more a codification of existing practice than a real change.

To borrow the former president’s famous query: Is our children learning? Maybe—but they don’t seem to be learning much that will prepare them to be critical thinkers about security policy, or good stewards of cherished liberties.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/lies-my-history-teacher-told-me-about-the-war-on-terror/

In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5339-2002Mar22?language=printer