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“The one who deals the blow forgets, the one who carries the scar remembers.” Haitian Proverb

            Those were the opening words of one of my favorite books I have ever read, Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan Katz. Such a simple statement, yet one with such poignant meaning. Katz used this proverb to open his book on US imperialism during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The history retold in Gangsters of Capitalism is almost completely forgotten by most people in the United States. For this blog post, I wanted to extrapolate further on how this proverb can help us understand conflict in international relations. What fault lines and discord can be created when two countries remember different chapters of the same history?

            Let’s use a couple of examples from US history as a prism through which we can view this issue. How many Americans reading this are aware of the fact that the US maintained a military occupation of Haiti for nearly twenty years at the beginning of the 20^th century? How many Americans are aware that in 1953 the CIA helped orchestrate a coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran? If I had to guess almost no Americans reading this have any idea about either of these events. Additionally, I doubt most Americans are aware of so many other troubling chapters of American history. We in the United States like to paint a picture of ourselves as the good guys of the world and of history, and any events that contradict or complicate this picture tend to be swept under the rug.

            However, events such as those mentioned above are well remembered outside the United States. Sticking with the example of the coup in Iran, I will be using John Ghazvinian’s excellent book on US Iranian relations American and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present, as a source. An event that is much better remembered in the United States is when employees of the US embassy in Tehran were taken hostage during the Revolution in 1979. The reasons why the employees of the embassy were taken hostage are myriad and complex. But one of those reasons is that many feared that the United States was planning another coup. After twenty-five years many Iranians knew that much of the planning for the 1953 coup was done inside the US embassy. Those who believed that the US wanted to try again were further bolstered by one of those accidents or mistakes that history so often hinges upon. The Shah of Iran had been ill with cancer for some time and leading up to the embassy takeover was in the United States seeking medical treatment. However, the Shah’s poor health was a carefully guarded secret, so many ordinary Iranians thought that this was a ruse. Those who thought the Shah’s health problems were fake believed that the Shah was waiting in the United States until the CIA would bring him back on their coattails following yet another coup. This not entirely unjustified fear led many to believe that taking the embassy was a good way to safeguard Iran and the revolution.

            What might we be able to learn from these events? In my view the hostage crisis of 1979 perfectly illustrates that Haitian proverb used above. Many Americans well remember the hostage crisis and will cry foul about the injustice done to those captured. Americans remember what happened, while at the same time they fail to learn or appreciate the deeper context as to why it happened. They fail to learn reasons why those who captured the embassy felt like it was necessary. We don’t have to support or condone capturing embassies and taking hostages. But learning the greater context of US and Iranian history does give us a more nuanced perspective.

            Imagine something similar to the 1953 coup in Iran was done in the United States. Imagine that sometime in US history a foreign power’s security services, with the blessing of their political leadership, orchestrated a coup that overthrew an elected US president. How would Americans feel if this information became widely known? Would Americans feel angry that the integrity of our elections, and our basic sovereignty, had been violated by a foreign power playing puppet master? Would this event leave a lasting wound on our national psyche? Would politicians be able to use this event to create nationalistic anger whenever they needed more domestic support?

            This is the core of what this piece is about. If nations were people, they would all be pointing accusatory fingers at one another decrying the crimes committed against them, while at the same time everyone ignores the crimes they committed against everyone else. This leads to constant misunderstandings. A nation might be able to successfully close its eyes and ears and ignore parts of its history that it doesn’t want to confront. But even the most powerful nations on earth would be hard pressed to silence criticism everywhere.

            This is a continuation of a point I was trying to make in one of the essays of my book, creating a strictly positive national myth has far-reaching real-world consequences. Reality is complex and nuanced. Part of being a mature adult is being willing to do the work of navigating this complex and nuanced reality. When we refuse to confront this complexity and instead manufacture convenient stories to tell ourselves, we are creating an inherently warped and false reality. This can happen on both a national and a personal level.

            If nations want to better understand one another, then they have to be willing to confront the difficult or dishonorable moments in their own history. When two countries remember entirely different moments of the same history, then they are bound to create impasses in their relations with one another. If a country refuses to see the blows it deals out, someone else will remember for them.

Part 1:

This is the first post of my new blog, A lot More Questions, with No Answers. For those who have read my book, A lot of Questions, with No Answers? this first blog post and many others will expand upon the questions and themes explored in the book. You could consider this and many future offerings to be post publication addendums, much like the first essay in the book had an addendum to it. This piece will be a continuation of the questions asked in the final essay of the book, Written by the Victor. Before beginning, I want to point out as with everything in life, the issues being raised in this blog are multifaceted, nuanced, and complicated. A short essay or blog post is by no means comprehensive enough to cover every variable or explore every view. As I said in my book, I do not intend the following to be the end of discussion, but the beginning of it.

Recent events in the United States and around the world have left me wishing I knew more about the history of education. More specifically, they have left me wondering how schools and universities cope and then adjust when faced with tumultuous events, particularly tumult in the social or political order. How quickly does educational curriculum dealing with history and politics change in school institutions, and how do these changes effect societies? Can school education systems and the way they portray events have an effect on those events, for good or ill?

            These questions are rather abstract so let me clarify with a quick hypothetical example so this makes more sense. Imagine an early modern absolutist monarchy. There is no universal education in this country. What schools do exist however, are strongly pro-monarchy and preach to their students this heavily biased view. Unfortunately for the monarchy however, a confluence of dozens of factors has created the perfect storm for a revolution to break out. Eventually, the old monarchy is overthrown, and a representative republic is created in the country. One of the many changes the republic institutes is a system of universal education.

            When it comes time to instruct new students about recent events, what would one expect the republican government to do? Unsurprisingly, those who seized power in the revolution want to find every way possible to enshrine their system of values into the nation, so that the republic can become a permanent institution and not just a historical flash in the pan. One obvious way to disseminate propaganda is through the new universal education system. In a nutshell, when it comes time to teach younger generations about the revolution the school curriculum paints the overthrown monarchy with the blackest brush possible, and every teacher is quick to tell all the students that they should be overwhelmed with gratitude toward the republic for freeing them in the glorious revolution.

            Now let us imagine that there are private schools run by a religion that were supportive of the deposed monarchy. Naturally, they have a different opinion about the revolution and the creation of the republic, and they aren’t afraid to voice that opinion loudly to their students. This, among other factors, leads to covert and overt conflict between supporters of the deposed monarchy and the new republican government. This conflict is threatening and continuous enough that republic is finally forced to offer concessions as a way to ratchet down tensions. One of these concessions is an adjustment to the education system. Conflicting sides agree that both public and private schools will implement new curriculum to teach students about the country’s history, a curriculum that is scrupulously neutral.

Part 2:

            This idea, political neutrality in schools, is the subject I want to examine for the rest of the piece. Specifically, I want to examine political neutrality in schools in the United States. What are the benefits and downsides to neutrality and is neutrality even attainable?  

            What are the benefits of political neutrality? These are rather obvious, as a historian might tell you, trying to view events without bias can help one gain a more objective and clear view of events being studied. In addition, a politically neutral stance allows a school system to avoid both public and interpersonal conflicts between staff who might have differing political views. In this way, a school institution can maintain a certain interrelation harmony, even if it merely papers over divisions rather than confronting them.

            I will save discussion on the potential downsides for just a moment, and instead focus on the question, is neutrality even possible? My answer would be no, not entirely, even if there is scrupulous enforcement (which I doubt there often is). I believe the ideal of perfect political and social neutrality dies under the double barrels of overt pressure and innate bias.

            Overt pressure refers to when an institution is faced with insistent prodding to take a non-neutral stance toward some issue. For example, look at the widescale outrage when schools were first racially integrated in the United States, or the protests that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic to masks and social distancing. Both of those examples involve social issues that also became (and remain) hot button political topics. In the case of the pandemic, the issue should have been one entirely in the purview of public health. But how many school boards across the country caved in an eased public health measures when faced with growing political pressure? How many people died because school districts across the country wanted to avoid a political fight rather than listen to the advice of public health experts?

            The second and more insidious way that any potential neutrality is undermined is through every person’s own innate biases. I’ll give a quick example of what I mean. I once overheard a conversation between two public school teachers discussing a social studies unit that was upcoming concerning different religions of the past. The teachers weren’t sure how well their young students would understand the subject matter, which is fair. But what one teacher said next perfectly encapsulates the issue of bias. I’m paraphrasing but this teacher’s point was basically: “How do we make it clear to our students that this is what people believed in the past because they didn’t know any better” (this was said in a strongly Protestant Christian area of the US). The obvious implication being that people of the past were wrong in their religious beliefs (especially in relation to polytheistic religions). For me the very notion that one can know definitively that their religion is the correct one opens up a whole philosophical can of worms, and if readers are interested the idea of the “correct religion” is the subject of the first essay of my book. Even ignoring that, however, imagine that a teacher with this mindset has several students that are polytheistic Hindus. How might this bias of seeing past polytheistic religions as wrong affect the way they teach and the way they talk about the subject? What effects could this have on their polytheistic students? How scrupulously can a person mitigate their own unconscious biases (especially if they are blissfully unaware of these biases)?

            Let us move on to the question set aside earlier, what are the potential downsides of trying to maintain a neutral stance towards politics and social issues in a school setting? My argument would be that at a certain point “neutrality” can easily become “refusing to speak out against injustice.” Anyone watching contemporary events in the United States has certainly noticed that our democratic republic is facing threats from the far-right that could topple democracy in the US. Far-right political organizations and sentiments have been growing in power and influence in other countries around the world as well, potentially calling the whole concept of western liberal democracy into question. Should US public schools remain out of this fight for representative government? It would certainly be much easier. But would that make it right or just?

            Once again, we need to return to an earlier idea, are school curriculums neutral in the first place? Countries throughout history have had their own set of national myths to tell themselves how great they are, and they hold up certain values that they believe represent their society or culture. As I mentioned in the hypothetical above, when nations have compulsory public education, they expend a lot of effort trying to instill these national myths and values in the minds of younger generations. The US is no different. The US education system mythologizes the founding fathers to such an extent that they become one-dimensional caricatures representing certain national values, like liberty and justice for all. This isn’t a neutral position; this sort of mythmaking clearly supports one set of political ideals over any other. Now how much the reality actual fits the one-dimensional myths and propaganda is beside the point. If US public schools assert that the revolutionary war and democracy and the founding fathers and everything else are laudable and righteous, that is a political stance. What happens when a neo-fascist movement gains popularity in the United States? Should this just be ignored as if it isn’t happening, should public schools remain “neutral?” Will US schools ignore the fact that they have been pushing politically charged propaganda this whole time? Do US schools and the people who work in them actually support the ideals of freedom and democracy?

What if US democracy falls to an authoritarian coup, how long before public schools pivot to a new “neutral” stance that says that democracy is overrated anyway and aren’t we happy that it was gotten rid of by our new authoritarian overlords. This line of inquiry leads us to ask just how strong the average person’s principles and convictions really are. Is the average person like a strong tree, rooted firmly enough that they can withstand powerful storms or choking droughts, or are most people like a leaf on the wind, blowing here and there to wherever the wind takes them? That could be the subject of future discussion.

Hello everyone, this is the first post for my new blog. I’m excited to be doing some more active writing, but I am also a total novice when it comes to creating a blog and managing a website, so I hope everyone will bear with me as I figure things out.

For the first post of my blog, I thought I would start with something simple. The website sheperd.com just posted their listing for my book today, and I wanted to share it. Sheperd.com is a great website, each listing allows authors to talk about the books they wrote, while at the same time they support other books in their genre, or books that inspired them to write in the first place. I am excited to see my book mentioned on their website, and I hope you enjoy reading this listing as much as I enjoyed writing it.

If there is any news about my book I will post it here. Also, the first piece I have written for this blog is ready, and I plan to publish it by the end of November. The plan is to post a small essay, probably a few pages long, as a short but hopefully engaging food for thought once a month.

https://shepherd.com/best-books/thinking-about-history-and-how-we-understand-it

just to show how the content will present on the blog page

place your post content here, and be sure to hit “publish” when you’re ready for the content to be live on your blog page.