June 20, 2012

Rewriting History

I’ve always been a student of history, and I love going places that have sites of historical value. It intrigued me to stand in Ford’s Theater just a few feet from where history changed course as Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. I was also blown away when visiting Italy as I stood in a Pompeii home excavated from the ashes of Mt. Vesuvius and realized that it was buried only 79 years after Christ was crucified, but the windows had glass in them. I didn’t know we had glass that far back. History is learning, and we can all benefit from this type of education.

The problem with history is that it’s subject to the whims of people who sometimes don’t want history remembered and so they bury it. In essence, they try to rewrite history by omitting pieces of it. This bothers me enough that I decided to write this piece about the history of Republicans and Democrats because I’ve seen things in the news lately about each party that isn’t accurate.

I don’t care for either party, they’re both corrupt and unhelpful in solving the real problems of this country, but it strikes me funny how the Democrats have rewritten their own history in order to push negative views away from them and onto Republicans. Mainly, they’re racism. It’s true, the Democratic party is a party of racism and has been since they organized.

I know you’re thinking that this can’t be true; we’ve all been taught that Republicans are racist southerners. Well, get out your history books kids, because the racist South was actually Democratic. It’s true, it was the Democrats who fought to keep slavery during the Civil War. The Republicans wanted to abolish it. In fact, back then the Republican party was known as the party for blacks, and Democrats vowed that they would rather vote for a “yellow dog” than let black loving Republicans into office.

The Republican Party was organized as the anti-slavery party back in 1854 and has always been the party of equality and freedom for African Americans. You never hear about that nowadays.

History is pretty interesting, isn’t it? The Democratic Party has been working for many years to turn their racist past onto the Republicans, and since they control most of the news media they have been able to virtually do that. But they can’t escape from history.

Look at the South during integration. Remember George Wallace? He was the governor of Alabama who swore that his state would not let blacks integrate into white schools, and he made such a racist fuss over it that the National Guard had to be called out to keep order. Well guess what, Wallace was a Democrat. It’s true, Wiki yourself to death it won’t change the facts.

You probably also didn’t know that it wasn’t President Johnson who pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was actually a Republican named Everett Dirksen. He was instrumental not only in this Act, but also civil rights legislation in 1957, ’60, ’65 and ’68. Dirksen wrote the language for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It’s ironic that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had to rely on a Republican to get the Civil Rights Act pushed through because they literally couldn’t rely on their southern Democratic Senators. They all wanted segregation.

Another example is David Duke, the infamous KKK guy who ran for office in Louisiana, and even for President. He was one of the most racist people known in the country at that time, and he was a Democrat. But even though Duke didn’t get elected, some racists did, like Senator Robert Byrd, a southern Democrat who was also a former recruiter for the KKK. I bet you didn’t know that the Klan was actually started in 1866 to be the terrorist arm of the Democrats to terrorize and lynch Republicans as well as blacks. Whaaat?! I know you’re thinking “Wow, this can’t be true, it’s the opposite of everything we hear today!” I agree, it’s hard to swallow, but the real history is there for anyone to look up, and it amazes me that the Republicans have all this history to tell people, but they don’t. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re stupid or if it’s because they don’t know their own history. Either way I don’t care, it’s their party; they can run it however they want.

You’re probably also wondering why African Americans tend to vote for Democrats if that party is so racist. It’s simple, the brutal tactics that Democrats used in the 50’s and 60’s to keep blacks from voting couldn’t continue, so they went a new way and now they use socialism in the form of government handouts. It’s a tactic of control, which even President Obama in his book “Dreams From My Father” describes what he and the Democrats do to poor blacks by using what he describes as “plantation politics.”

Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be a political commentary; it’s about history which I love to study. It’s about how history has been rewritten and obscured for political gain. The historical fact is that how the two main parties are being reported by the media is actually the opposite of what they really stand for; at least that’s what history shows, and I have a problem with people rewriting history.