Strangling Reason in its Crib

[Pamela Troy]

It looks as though visiting http://www.conservapedia.com">Conservapedia and clicking the “random” button to see what entertaining weirdness pops up has become a way for many liberals to waste time on the Internet. My personal favorite is a passage I found about “http://www.conservapedia.com/Frank_Kafka">Frank Kafka” which had me looking hopefully but in vain for an entry on that great American filmmaker “Franz Capra.” Another, much briefer entry has the writer correctly listed as “http://www.conservapedia.com/Franz_Kafka">Franz Kafka” but both close with the flatly untrue statement that Kafka “suffered from bouts of insanity” late in life.

In a way I’m rooting for Conservapedia. I hope they succeed in clearing out the vandals and prank entries so that it more accurately reflects the status of conservative Internet “scholarship.” Once it does, Consrevapedia promises to offer us all a detailed, birds-eye view of the manner in which the far right deals with reality. Observe what is omitted, what is obfuscated, what is just plain made up, and how it’s all presented, and you get a view of an agenda that many right-wingers would really rather not state outright.

By this, I don’t just mean the expressed agenda of Conservapedia, which is as an ideologically safe resource for homeschooled kids. Its entry on http://www.conservapedia.com/Homeschooling">homeschooling states: “The primary reason for homeschooling is to give the child a better education. A close second in reasons, however, is to avoid the culture of public school and its many adverse effects of hostility to Christianity and parental control, political bias, boredom, confusion, depression, etc.” (Emphasis added.)

Wikipedia, it would seem just doesn’t cut it when it comes to avoiding that “culture of public school,” what with its use of British spelling and CE and BCE instead of AD. There’s quite a long entry on Conservapedia about “http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia">Bias in Wikipedia” and how, among other things, it just doesn’t give enough credit to the role Christianity has played in western society, but the best way to get a handle on what bothers these folks about Wikipedia is to browse through Conservapedia, that “Conservative Encyclopedia You Can Trust.” Do that and you begin to realize that public libraries probably also bother the Hell out of them.

Unlike http://www.wikipedia.org">Wikipedia, public libraries, Encyclopedia Britannica, or pretty much any other general purpose resource, Conservapedia attempts to offer only what people on the right would like their children to know. And judging from the entries, what the far right doesn’t want their homeschooled children to know goes way beyond homosexuality or abortion, or birth control or Cindy Sheehan’s latest statement on the Iraq war.

It’s not something readily apparent in random reads of the site. The page on http://www.conservapedia.com/Sigmund_Freud">Sigmund Freud, for instance, that begins by describing him as “the atheistic father of psychoanalysis” and closes with “Late in life, Freud asked his doctor to kill him, which his doctor did,” is revealing in its terse nastiness but not especially damning as deliberate misinformation. For that, you need to look at how some subjects are covered at length. And while the entries are still a bit sparse, there are a couple of areas where a certain pattern emerges.

The first has to do with a rather glaring omission found in the Conservapedia entries on that ugly Rorschach blot of an era, The Third Reich. The current entry on http://www.conservapedia.com/Adolf_Hitler">Adolf Hitler includes the following sentence:

“He sent millions of Jews to ‘concentration camps’ where they were killed. Gypsies (thousands of them), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and ‘extreme Christians’, political opponents of the Nazis were also killed in the camps.”

Anyone familiar with the history of Germany under Hitler is likely to be struck by the absence of the word “Communists” in the list of those sent to the camps, especially given that Communists were the first group to be outlawed and formally rounded up. As William Shirer puts it in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when he describes the Communist roundup that took place in the wake of the Reichstag fire:

“Thus with one stroke Hitler was able not only to legally gag his opponents and arrest them at his will but, by making the trumped-up Communist threat ‘official,’ as it were, to throw millions of the middle class an the peasantry into a frenzy of fear that unless they voted for National Socialism at the elections a week hence, the Bolsheviks might take over. Some four thousand Communist officials and a great many Social Democrat and liberal leaders were arrested…This was the first experience Germans had with Nazi terror backed up by the government. Truckloads of Storm Troopers roared through the streets all over Germany, breaking into homes, rounding up victims and carting them off to SA barracks, where they were tortured and beaten.”

It’s no accident that Conservapedia omits mention of this. A look at the history of the entry shows that the word “Communists” was inserted into the entry by a contributor on March 1. It was removed on the same day by one of the site’s creators, Andrew Schlafly.

The entry on the “http://www.conservapedia.com/Holocaust">Holocaust” has a similar hole in it, observing only that “in addition to the genocide of six million Jews, many millions of Christians were also exterminated.”

The entry on http://www.conservapedia.com/National_Socialist_German_Workers%E2%80%99_Party">National Socialism? No mention of the persecution of Communists can be found there either, though it does include the astonishing statement that “Once in power the Nazis became anti-Semitic,” as though Hitler’s hatred of the Jews was something that sort of popped unexpectedly into view shortly after he became chancellor.

The http://www.conservapedia.com/World_History_Lecture_Twelve">World History Lecture 12 acknowledges Hitler’s anti-Communism, but that’s about it. The 1933 Reichstag Fire is, incredibly, not mentioned at all.

Then there are the slightly more sophisticated attempts to mislead that consist not just of omission, but of imprecise wording, of sentences and paragraphs so constructed as to give the naïve reader a false impression. The http://www.conservapedia.com/American_History_Lecture_One">First American History Lecture begins with an especially egregious example of this:

“From 1607-1611, the Jamestown settlement lived under socialism, whereby the group shared its food with everyone no matter how much or little he worked. This economic system was a complete failure as no one had any incentive to do any work. John Smith arrived from England and he installed a conservative economic system: ‘don’t work, don’t eat!’ Magically, by 1614 there was suddenly plenty to eat.”

Any student unfamiliar with American history who reads this is left with the impression of Captain John Smith as a laissez-faire libertarian sailing from England in or a little after 1611 to rescue all those fuzzy-headed Jamestown liberals. In fact:

1. http://www.apva.org/history/jsmith.html">Captain John Smith was involved with the Jamestown settlement from the beginning. He was on the boat coming over and was designated a leader in Jamestown shortly after they disembarked. Smith left the colony in 1609 and never returned to it, so his presumed introduction of a “conservative economic system” would have somehow included most of that 1607-11 era of presumed socialism.

2. The near failure of the Virginia Colony, during the “starving time” of 1609-10 had less to do with utopian notions of the community owning the means of production than with a drought (something acknowledged on Conservapedia in a separate, very brief entry on http://www.conservapedia.com/John_Smith">John Smith. hostile Indians, and settlers who were simply unqualified, unprepared, or too exhausted by malnutrition to work in any meaningful way.

3. It was http://www.apva.org/history/timeline.html">tobacco as a cash crop – not the rejection of a presumed allegiance to socialism – that most likely brought the Jamestown colony back to its financial feet.

But the Puritan Massachusetts Bay colony, the writer hastens to assure us, was different from all those hippies at Jamestown, as the following Goofus & Gallant-like passage in the lecture indicates:

“The growing colonies in Massachusetts and Virginia could not have been more different from each other, and it is remarkable they ever joined the same country. Massachusetts was highly religious and motivated by faith. Virginia was marginally religious and motivated by money. Massachusetts did not allow slavery. Virginia welcomed it. Massachusetts grew the Indian crop of corn. Virginia grew the Indian crop of tobacco. Massachusetts settlers made greater efforts to get along with Indians and treat them fairly. Massachusetts attracted new settlers based on religion. Virginia attracted new settlers based on the ‘headright system…’”

Again, any new student reading this passage and accepting it as truth would be surprised to learn that http://www.slavenorth.com/massachusetts.html">Massachusetts was the first slaveholding colony in New England. 17th Century Boston, in fact, had a healthy business in the importation of slaves from the West Indies, shipping slaves to markets in Rhode Island and Connecticut. They were only overtaken in the slave trade by Rhode Island in the 18th century, and it was not until 1783 that slavery came to an end in Massachusetts. In the meantime, Boston slave-owners placed occasional ads about runaway slaves in the local papers like the one James M. Loewen references in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me:

“Ran away from his Master Nathaniel Holbrook of Sherburn, on Wednesday the 19th of Sept. late, an Indian Lad of about 18 Years of Age, named John Pittarne…” (Boston-Weekly Newsletter for October 4, 1739)

Which brings us to the treatment of Indians. The fact that the Puritans made “greater efforts” to get along with native Americans than the Virginia settlers doesn’t really say much for them. A smallpox epidemic had wiped out the native population, leaving only a few weakened survivors who could hardly be expected to put up much resistance to the English settlers. As that model of Christian compassion, Governor John Winthrop put it: “God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection…” (Quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen)

And even though the remaining Indians were quite willing to assist the pilgrims (apparently because they were worried about attacks from a rival tribe), the puritans seem to have had no problem with fracturing the 7th Commandment when it came to appropriating Indian land.

But the puritans were essentially a theocracy, and that plainly appeals to the writer of this lecture, so the religiously intolerant Massachusetts Bay Colony must be presented as a model of probity. With that in mind, the passage on Roger Williams is worth examining:

“Roger Williams was an extraordinary individual of such great faith that found even the Puritans lacking in their treatment of Indians. Williams also disagreed with how the Puritans combined government and religion, and had even executed several Christians based on differences with the Puritan faith.”

These two sentences are masterpieces of bland imprecision. To begin with, Williams’ disagreement with the Puritans had to do with the Puritan disinclination to actually pay Indians for their land, something acknowledged in the separate http://www.conservapedia.com/Roger_Williams">Conservapedia entry on Williams with the rather oblique sentence, “Williams soon fought with them because he felt that ownership of land did not come from the king, but required direct purchase from Indians.”

And the reality of that Puritan combination of religion and government was that Jews, Catholics, and Quakers were usually “warned off” with threats of violence and even death. Quakers in particular came in for a great deal of abuse from those pious folks in Massachusetts. Penalties for Quakers who defied banishment and returned included, for men, the cutting off of an ear for the first offense and the cutting off of the other ear for the second. Female Quakers were to be flogged, probably as Quakeresses Ann Coleman, Mary Tomkins and Alice Ambrose were, their hands lashed to the back of a cart as they were dragged from town to town and whipped. For the third offense, offenders of either sex had their tongues bored through with a hot iron. One William Brend, guilty of holding a Quaker meeting, was put in what we would today call a “stress position,” chained for sixteen hours by his thighs and neck with “no more room betwixt the irons than the lock allowed.” He was also whipped until his back as “black as unto a jelly.” (Quoted in Puritan Oligarchy, by Thomas Wertenbaker.) Four Quakers, Mary Dyer, Marmaduke Stevenson, William Robinson, and William Leddra, were hanged.

All of this is what is contained in that bland phrase “Puritans combined government and religion, and had even executed several Christians based on differences with the Puritan faith.”

What follows in this Conservapedia, lecture, however, moves from the realm of obfuscation to unmitigated gall.

“Rhode Island, under Roger Williams’ direction, separated state government from religion. No mandatory church attendance, and no funding of churches with tax revenues were allowed in Rhode Island. But while Roger Williams was highly moral, others in Rhode Island made it the biggest importer of slaves in all the colonies. So censoring religion may have a price.”

Quite aside from the insanity of describing refraining from penalizing religious dissidents as “censoring religion” this smug statement rests on what can only be described as an outright lie – the claim that Massachusetts did not engage in the slave trade. As I observed, Massachusetts didn’t just engage in slavery – it pioneered the slave trade in New England.

Anybody who has read about the Third Reich knows that the banning of the Communist party and the arrest of Communist leaders was an early and important legal move in Hitler’s thorough destruction of civil liberties. Anybody who has done research on the life of Captain John Smith knows that he left Jamestown in 1609. Anybody who has read up on the Puritans and Massachusetts Bay Colony knows that Puritans enslaved both Indians and Africans and that the brutality the Puritans exhibited towards Quakers shocked even King Charles II who, after learning of the executions, ordered that Quakers arrested in New England be sent back to England for trial. (Puritan Oligarchy, Thomas Wertenbaker, 1947)

And yet this site, which claims as its mission the education of young people, includes entries and passages that are plainly intended to leave out this important information, soft-pedal it, or even give inexperienced readers the opposite impression. It’s unclear to me whether the lecture I’ve cited was written by Mr. Schlafley or by some of his students, whether it’s a collection of lies deliberately offered by an instructor, or a collection of lies repeated by the young people who have been lied to. The operative word remains “lies.”

To what purpose? Why would references to the persecution of Communists in Hitler’s Germany be deliberately excised? Why would John Smith’s involvement with Jamestown be falsely painted as a parable on the free market? Why would the site promote the lie that the Puritans rejected slavery, and use that as a platform from which to imply that the religious freedom practiced by Roger Williams was responsible for Rhode Island’s involvement in the slave trade?

The simplest answer is that Conservapedia’s intent is not to educate as most of us define the word. It is to sell a specific political viewpoint that combines free market economics and rabid anti-Communism with the rejection of our traditional separation of church and state. And if that viewpoint can only be offered at the expense of the truth, so be it.

The falsehoods peppered throughout the site are bad enough, but the lectures and many of the entries not only encourage, but practically demand careless and incurious reading. Attempting to apply logic, for instance, to a passage that denounces as false the statement that Roger Williams’ concept of separation of church and state “became a cornerstone of the American Constitution in 1787” on the grounds that “http://www.conservapedia.com/American_History_Lecture_One">Roger Williams was long dead by 1787"” is just an exercise in frustration. Doctrine, not reality, is the highest priority at Conservapedia, and the result is frequently a style of writing in which words are treated like so many bits of gravel, not chosen for precision’s sake but gathered up by handfuls and tossed carelessly at a target.

The student “taught” in this manner will quickly figure out what teachers and parents want him or her to conclude and go along accordingly, learning over time to ignore those niggling contradictions inevitable in such a biased approach. This brand of homeschooling can thus provide a sort of early inoculation against reason, ensuring that a student will reach college age with so little grasp of either tolerance or logical consistency that when they finally do get exposed to the non-conservative world, it is harder for them to listen to or examine carefully any statement that contradicts what they have been trained to believe.

Of course, there are plenty of graduates from both public and private schools who went through twelve years of education dutifully completing assignments and filling out exams and emerged with the same inability to understand nuance or debate rationally. Those aren’t the students the far right wing worries about. It’s the bright kids who bother them, the ones who ask a lot of questions, who are interested enough in ideas to actually think about how ideas work, how they relate to reality, how one assesses them and argues them. These children can’t be trusted to reach the conclusions the far right wants in an environment where they’re exposed to other students with liberal grandfathers who fought bravely in WWII, or where teachers might mention things like the McCarthy era or Martin Luther King Jr.’s support for Affirmative Action. It’s these children who “need” homeschooling.

I don’t know whether Conservapdedia is going to last as long or grow as big as Wikipedia has. In a way, I hope it does because I do look forward to seeing how it handles subjects like The Niemoller Statement, Schwerner Chaney and Goodman, Kent State, Watergate, Joe McCarthy, Christian Reconstructionism, Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, The Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy,” the plays of Arthur Miller, and other uncomfortable nuggets from history, sociology, current events, and literature.

And if the editors and contributors to Conservapedia just leave these things out, no matter. Those omissions will tell the rest of us all we need to know.

[meegbear]

1. Excellent write-up!

:party: WELCOME TO DU!! :party:

[pepperbear]

2. pam, this is alarming, but you rock! n/t

[sharp_stick]

3. Well Done

Very interesting write up. And welcome to DU.

[librechik]

4. welcome, Pamela

I'm always gratified by the quality of the writing here. Stick around, you'll fit right in!

:hi: