Education Enabling Cultural Decline

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2016

Trying to have a rational discussion based on facts with a College of Education graduate who uses Common Core teaching methods, how children learn, and the dumbing down of America's education, is like trying to reason with a petulant child who happens to be a member of the Communist Party USA.

They take everything very personal and in a fascistic way, it's their way or the highway. If we don't do it this way, children will be doomed forever. Since 1979 when Jimmy Carter established the College of Education (which alone gobbles up close to $75 billion a year), our children's education has gone down significantly as evidenced by test scores and a shameless lack of general knowledge.

Just because you are able to use technology expertly and know how to look up information does not make you smart, you just know how to use a search engine. What you are able to do with that information is another story. I've had technological savvy students who actually knew very little, were awkward, lacked common sense, and social skills.

On the other hand, I’ve had students who did not care that much for technology, were talented and creative, but were not exactly top scorers on the standardized ACT or SAT tests. Yet these students became quite successful in life.

According to Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education), there are eight intelligence types and we all have some percentage of musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic abilities, weaker in some, stronger in others. It is because of this nature of the human being that we should not box student into testing molds, one size fits all, particularly when public education has a strong component of indoctrination by those who write the textbooks, the curricula, the teaching materials, and the standardized tests.

Teaching to a standard determined by progressive academia is a disservice to the wonderful talent in our schools. Teaching is an art and the fly-by-night teaching methodologies that have come and gone since 1979 prove that they were invented by control freaks that had one goal in mind, a pliant society of busy bees under the guidance of academia in service of the ruling elites who fund their secular ideas and methods.

I’ve heard progressives for decades vociferously demanding the separation of church and state, even though our country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and God and prayer always had a place in the classroom and in government. But now, the same progressive academics are teaching in every grade, through Common Core Standards, indoctrination into Islam, forcing Christianity and prayer out of schools and out of extra-curricular activities. What happened to their cries of separation of church and state?

Patrick Deneen wrote about the loss of our cultural identity in his essay, ”How a generation lost its common culture.”

“My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.” https://thelogcollege.wordpress.com/2016/02/23/how-a-generation-lost-its-common-culture/

As a retired teacher of thirty years, I am certain that the concerted effort to mindlessly indoctrinate students into the progressive PC construct, a political correctness that has constrained everybody’s freedom of speech, turning students into whiny ninnies who need a safe space from their inner real or imagined fears of divergent opinions, and to distort and rewrite history in the vein of Howard Zinn’s very popular textbook that is widely used around the country, has contributed to the decline and loss of cultural identity to such a degree that students are ashamed of their own history, of their nation’s exceptionalism and accomplishments, of their common citizenship, and of their own culture.  

Sadly, these students are busy destroying and replacing their own culture with the culture of other primitive societies they were told in schools to admire and venerate, simple cultures that are invading western civilization with the blessing of the United Nations and regressive western governments. It is baffling to think that these are generations of children and grandchildren of great Americans who conquered space and made flight possible.

The chickens of intolerance and communist social justice have come home to roost on the American campus. Decades of Marxist indoctrination by the vaunted communist academia are finally paying off -- our cultural heritage is replaced by cultural Marxism and by primitive cultures that are deemed superior to ours and worshipped.

Our mis-educated youth, who can barely read or write a complete and coherent paragraph, but their fingers fly on Twitter in hashtags and 140 characters, staring constantly like robotic drones into illuminated smart devices, are now chasing Pokémon-Go.

Young people don’t seem to care if their culture survives or not. If they are given everything free, tiny housing units, Internet, smart devices, food, education, Netflix, pot, and public transportation passes, they will remain on the globalist environmental social justice train forever as anonymous global citizens.

Ionuț Sabău, a Hero for Europeans

Photo: Wikipedia

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 A.D., Europe has been besieged by waves of invasion from tribes of peoples such as Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Angles, Saxons, Lombards, Suebi, Frisii, Jutes, Franks, Huns, Cumans, Avars, Bulgars, Alans, Moors, Mongolians, Khazars, Tatars, Vikings, Normans, to name a few, who brought war and pillage across Europe from 376 to 800 A.D.

These attacks were followed by the bloody incursions and invasions of the Ottoman Empire in various European countries for several centuries in their quest to establish the sought-after Caliphate. The Crusades were the logical Christian reaction to defend their faith, territories, and way of life.

Romanians fought against and pushed back the Turks and their rule for centuries and eventually paid tribute in gold and lost lives to the Ottoman Empire. The most prominent defender of Romanian territory against the Ottoman invasion was the famous Vlad Tepes.

French and Italian scholars viewed this part of history as catastrophic; it followed the destruction of the great Roman civilization which was replaced in the West with a period they termed the “Dark Ages” because it “set Europe back a millennium.” German and English scholars saw this invasion as replacing the “tired, effete, and decadent Mediterranean civilization with a more virile, martial, Nordic one.”  German and Slavic historians used the term ‘migration.’ (Halsall, Guy (2006), "The Barbarian invasions", in Fouracre, Paul, The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500 – c. 700, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-36291-1)

This brings us to the current orchestrated mass invasion of Muslim “refugees” across the senescent continent of Europe which needs an infusion of new and virile blood from the Middle East and north Africa. These single young men of military age are quite willing to install the promised Caliphate across Europe and are not shy in their overt (but media-covered) effort to rape, pillage, and destroy across civilized society.

Secular Europe has a problem with continuing to exist by not having enough babies and is committing willful demographic suicide sped up by the politics of the European Union technocrats who are eager to have global governance under the U.N. umbrella.

It seems that one Romanian young man, Ionuț Sabău, has what it takes to defend his country, his family, and his way of life from the Muslim “refugee” social engineering plan. Non-governmental organizations have been preparing this flood of male humanity (if we can be so kind to men who behave like savages) with money from billionaire donors and socialist governments interested in changing the demographic face of old Europe.

Bill Still reported that “In early January, 28 year-old Ionuț Sabău found out that the Association Freres Romania (an NGO), in partnership with the Ministry for Internal Affairs was planning to make a ‘refugee’ center in the neighborhood of the small town of Ardud, in Satu Mare county.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcMcFmNdFvA

Ionuț Sabău, who had worked and lived in Paris in a prominently Muslim neighborhood, gathered 200 signatures and petitioned the local government to stop the planned settlement; the mayor set up a meeting with the prefect, the representative of the local government.

Ionuț Sabău told the prefect bluntly that he does not agree with this migration in any shape or form based on the simple fact that he wants his family safe from harm; he wants his children to be able to go to school and his wife and children to walk the streets alone safely. This is a small village (5,000 inhabitants) where children are not bussed to school, they walk.

“We don’t care what the law says or what the state says, we do not agree.  We are disposed to use violence and we want everyone to know that.” The prefect responded, “Please don’t talk about doing justice yourself. There are institutions for that.” Sabău rejoined, “I understand, but our children must also grow up in safe and optimal conditions and we don’t want a situation like in Western Europe where people are afraid to let children go to school alone or leave our wives alone in the streets. We don’t want any of that here! Under no circumstance! This is not an issue of defending the Romanian state as a whole, we are simply defending our own families.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5cw-8OT-EWc#t=116

Following the hearing, the Freres Romania Association, an NGO, canceled the project of resettling the Muslim refugees in a Christian country and culture that is totally alien to the Islamic faith and theocratic culture. http://breizatao.com/2016/02/03/roumanie-des-villageois-salues-en-heros-pour-setre-revoltes-contre-un-plan-secret-de-lue-visant-a-installer-des-migrants/

If only the men in the EU countries that have already been invaded and their lives violently disrupted would get half of this man’s courage!

Leaving aside the facts of who caused the Arab Spring and who financed this massive invasion, true war refugees can best be helped in countries that share their own culture and faith and provide safe-haven for their families. If these people are bona fide war refugees, young men of military age should stay in their home-countries and fight the enemy instead of fleeing like cowards and leaving women, children, and old people behind to suffer.

 

America the Broken Beacon?

Cape Meares
Photo: Wikipedia

America used to be the country of freedom where people dreamed of immigrating to if only they could get a passport, a visa, enough money to fly or sail across the ocean, if only the border guards would not arrest them in the U.S. if they had no papers, if only the military guards in their own countries would not shoot them on sight.

Cubans have risked their lives for decades to cross the 90 miles into Florida, fleeing a life of communist dictatorship, and a life of oppression and imprisonment in Castro’s regime, sometimes drowning in makeshift dinghies and other crafts, close to the shores of freedom, a beacon so close to the dirty fog of communism.

The drowning death toll in 2015 of immigrants from Libya, trying to reach the shores of Europe, has climbed to 1,500 according to the Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/19/700-migrants-feared-dead-mediterranean-shipwreck-worst-yet

Other reports describe the murder of African Christian immigrants sailing to Europe on same boats with African Muslims. They were slaughtered by Muslims during the voyage on the Mediterranean. Some survived to tell the gruesome tale when rescued.

If they could only survive all these trials and tribulations and have enough skills necessary to fend for themselves financially, not become a ward of the state the moment they entered this shiny city on the hill, their dreams would come true. Those were the distant dreamers of the 1970s. The Beacon of America was awaiting talent and skills from around the world to contribute to a nation of citizens, not a nation of immigrants with allegiance to their former countries.

Now the President’s Dreamers are the “anchor babies” birthed on American soil by illegal mothers who cross the border, fly in their last month of pregnancy, or visit Disney World; the Dreamers are the illegals bussed or flown in by our administration and fanned across the country overnight because we are not diverse enough; the Dreamers are the Syrian and Somali “war refugees” who are brought in each month and dumped unceremoniously on unsuspecting small towns; the Dreamers are the drug gang members who are allowed into the country, no questions asked; the Dreamers are mostly uneducated, illiterate in their own language, and placed immediately on welfare, an undue burden on Americans who are struggling with unemployment, underemployment, and a bad economy.

It used to be that America wanted the best and the brightest immigrants who were willing to work, to assimilate, and to pledge allegiance to our country, to be useful to society, to make it better. That is no longer the case.

America was a tolerant Christian country full of patriotic Americans who loved their country. We keep hearing from progressives that we are a nation of immigrants. As Mark Levin said, we are not a nation of immigrants; we are a nation of citizens. Now it is on the slippery road of Western Europe which has allowed a deliberate failed multiculturalist policy to destroy many countries that find themselves now overrun by Muslim zealots who have only one scope in mind, to establish a world caliphate and to convert by any means necessary all the infidels to Islamic theology and theocracy.

Unchecked diversity and tolerance is destroying our western culture, replacing it stealthily with Islam and Sharia Law. Look at all the proselytizing for Islam lessons in our high schools across the country and the many chapters devoted to Islam in World History, while Christianity is hardly mentioned in the curriculum. Was it not progressives who demanded for decades the “separation of church and state” and now they have written Common Core textbooks to indoctrinate our children into Islam? The social engineering architects of this Islamic invasion into the U.K. are now coming to the U.S. to repeat their plans of destroying America as well. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249797/Labour-threw-open-doors-mass-migration-secret-plot-make-multicultural-UK.html

If Islam is not the curriculum topic in social studies, English, or history, it is the indoctrination into the green religion of environmentalism, of Gaia, or Mother Earth, masqueraded as climate change. Skeptics are labeled terrorists. America had the best universities in the world where dialog and divergent thoughts and creative minds worked together to make things better for the world. Universities are now bastions of progressive intolerance where free speech and individual thought are stifled and persecuted.

There is nothing like the celebrated murderer and founder Ira Einhorn’s Earth Day to bring out the best and the not-so-brightest celebrants and worshippers of the global environmental movement – pretending to be green on the outside but rotten red on the inside. Just check out the photos of piles of trash they left behind around the National Mall in Washington, D.C. this past weekend.
Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2015
 

The Armenian Genocide

“Around the world, Christians are facing violence, persecution, brutality in a way we have not seen in generations.”  – Rey Flores, “The Wanderer”

A New York Times article published
December 15, 2015

The hypocritical “war on women” movement is deafly silent, no real effort to save the captives, and good men are doing nothing when faced daily with photographs of Christian hostages on their knees, clad in orange jumpsuits, about to be beheaded, when women and girls are kidnapped, raped, genitally mutilated by ISIS, and driven into a life of slavery as forced converts to Islam.

One year later, the Clarion Project says, “ #BringBackOurGirls” are still sex slaves to Boko Haram, sold into slavery for 2,000 rials each, about $12. www.clarionproject.org/bring-back-our-girls-one-year-later-still-slaves-boko-haram

The Christian genocide continues unabated. ISIS is demanding $100,000 per hostage, for the 250-300 Assyrians who were captured in the Hasaka province. http://www.cbn.com/world/2015/ISIS-Demands-30-Million-to-Release-Christians?

The Pope spoke about the Armenian genocide during Mass in the Armenian Catholic rite at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  Church leaders and the Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan were in attendance. He spoke about humanity witnessing “three massive and unprecedented tragedies” in the 20^th century.  “The first, which is widely considered, ‘the first genocide of the 20^th century,’ struck your own Armenian people,” he said. The Nazi Holocaust and Stalin’s mass killings were followed by other genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi, and Bosnia.

As Christians, it is our duty and responsibility to keep alive the memories of those killed, the Pope said. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” Pope Francis continued.

BBC News reported on April 12, 2015 that Turkey was angry with Pope Francis’ description of the mass killings of Armenians under Ottoman rule in WWI as “genocide.”  Turkey plays down the genocide as smaller numbers of deaths resulting from the WWI clashes in which ethnic Turks have also suffered.  Most Western scholars regard the 1.5 million Armenians civilians, who were deliberately deported between 1915-1916 to desert regions where they succumbed to starvation and thirst, as genocide. “Thousands also died in massacres.” Countries like Belgium, Canada, Argentina, France, Italy, Russia, and Uruguay recognize the mass killings of Armenians as genocide. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32272604

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered condolences in 2014 for the first time to the grandchildren of all the Armenians who were massacred in 1915. This year marks a century since the atrocities were committed, and,  until all countries recognize that the genocide had occurred, it is an incomplete mourning exacerbated by the denial stories to this day. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/23/turkey-erdogan-condolences-armenian-massacre

Why were Armenians massacred by the Turks? To understand the reason, you must understand who the Armenians were, how, and why they lived under the Ottoman Empire, and their status as non-Muslims, “non-believers,” and second-class citizens.

Armenians are ancient people who lived in Anatolia some 2500 years ago. They had their own distinctive alphabet and culture. There are 6 to 7 million Armenians today, half living in the Republic of Armenia, while the rest are scattered in the U.S., Russia, France, Lebanon, and Syria.

In the year 301 A.D., the King of Armenia was the first ruler to adopt Christianity as the official state religion, even before the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Captured by the Ottoman Empire in the 15^th century, Armenia was absorbed into the Islamic Ottoman Empire, along with a large swath of European lands. As subject of the Sultan, Armenians had less freedom, had to pay higher taxes, were discriminated against, and were not allowed to serve in the military.

Armenian intellectuals killed
en masse on April 24, 1915

Unhappy with the second-class citizen status, by the end of the 1800s, Armenians demanded equality. In the 1890s the Bloody Sultan who was presiding over a weak government, used massacres as a way to maintain law and order.  In 1894-1896 200,000 Armenians were killed during the Hamidian massacres under the rule of Abdul Hamid II, a foreshadowing of what was to come in 1915. http://www.armenian-genocide.org/hamidian.html

When the Young Turks forced the Sultan out in 1908, Armenians were allowed to serve in the military. In 1912-1913 the Christian regions of Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria gained their independence from the Ottoman Empire.

According to Vahaken Dadrian, Director of the Genocidal Research at Zoryan Institute, as quoted on a film aired on PBS, http://asbarez.com/133128/acclaimed-armenian-genocide-documentary-to-air-on-pbs/

“For the first time in recent history, the glorious Ottoman army suffered a major military defeat at the hands of their former subject-nations, Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbs,” losing in two weeks 75 percent of their former European territories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vahakn_Dadrian

The despair borne by such a loss in the Balkans gave rise to a deep hatred against Christians, inflamed by Ottoman refugees’ stories, refugees thrown out of Christian lands, turning angry Turks against their indigenous Christian population, the Armenians – “Revenge, revenge, revenge, there is no other word.”

Ambassador Henry Morgenthau published in 1918 his personal account of the Armenian genocide. Chapter 24, The Murder of a Nation, describes in grizzly detail how Armenian men, who were formerly soldiers and cavalrymen in the Turkish army, were stripped of their arms and transformed into road workers and “pack animals.” Carrying heavy loads onto their backs, these men were whipped and bayonetted by the Turks into the Caucasus Mountains, sometimes waist-deep through snow. 

“They had to spend practically all their time in the open, sleeping on the bare ground. … They were given only scraps of food; if they fell sick they were left where they had dropped,” while the Turks robbed them of their possessions and their clothes. “Squads of 50-100 men were taken in groups of four, marched to a secluded spot a short distance from the village,” they were stripped naked and shot, having been forced to dig their own graves.

Morgenthau describes the fate of an entire Armenian regiment sent to Diarbekir. Agents notified Kurdish tribesmen to attack and kill these weak and starved soldiers “that they might gain that merit in Allah’s eyes that comes from killing a Christian.”

Ambassador Morgenthau explained how “throughout the Turkish Empire a systematic attempt was made to kill all able-bodied men, not only for the purpose of removing all males who might propagate a new generation of Armenians, but for the purpose of rendering the weaker part of the population an easy prey.”

When thousands failed to turn in weapons, the Turks ransacked churches, desecrated altars, marched the naked men and women through the streets, letting them be whipped by angry Turkish mobs. Those imprisoned who did not manage to flee into the woods and caves were subjected to the “bastinado” torture, the beating of the soles of the feet until they burst and had to be amputated.

Crucifixion, pulling of fingernails, of hairs, of eyebrows, tearing of flesh with red-hot pincers, and then pouring hot oil into the wounds were some of the barbaric methods of torture drawn from the records of the Spanish Inquisition.

Torture was just the beginning of the Armenian atrocities. What was to come was the actual destruction of “an entire Armenian race” by deporting it to the south and southeastern part of the Ottoman Empire, the Syrian desert and the Mesopotamian valley. Morgenthau said, “The Central Government now announced its intention of gathering the two million or more Armenians living in the several sections of the empire and transporting them to this desolate and inhospitable region.” They knew they would die on the way of thirst, starvation, or murdered by “Mohammedan desert tribes.”

The deportations took place through the spring and summer of 1915. The entire Armenian population of villages were ordered to appear in the main square, sometimes with little time to prepare, their homes and possessions confiscated for “safekeeping” and then divided among Turks. Once the deported Armenians had traveled several hours, they were attacked and killed in secluded valleys by Turkish peasants with clubs, hammers, axes, scythes, spades, and saws.

The “caravans of despair” originated in thousands of cities and villages in the Ottoman Empire.  Ambassador Morgenthau described how village after village and town after town were emptied of its Armenian population and, in six months, “about  1.2 million people started on this journey to the Syrian desert.” He believed it absurd that the Turkish government claimed to deport Armenians to “new homes,” the real intent was extermination. He concludes, “The details in questions were furnished to me directly by the American Consul in Aleppo, and are now on file in the State Department at Washington.” (Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story:  A Personal Account of the Armenian Genocide, Henry Morgenthau, Cosimo Classics, New York, 2010)

Henry Morgenthau Sr. (1856-1946) “details how Turkey fell under the influence of Germany and how this led to the Armenian Genocide. In a trial run of the extermination of the Jews, the Germans orchestrated the murder and exile of the Armenians from Turkey, with ‘Turkey for the Turks’ as a rallying cry. The similarities to the Holocaust are chilling.”

Also chilling is the recent discovery made by Stefan Petke of the Technical University of Berlin who uncovered rare WWII footage that documents the existence of Muslim units (The Free Arab Legion) in the Nazi army who were used as ‘working soldiers’ because they “were a complete failure in the battlefields of Tunisia in 1943.” http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4645922,00.html

The pogrom against Christianity continues to this day.

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2015