Constructing the historical narrative. How our elites nitpick history to suit their goals.

“It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.”

The quote above from the late great historian E.H. Carr perfectly exemplifies what the ruling class in our society does to manipulate our perception of history.

Barely, if ever, do they straight-up lie about history, even though there are some instances, such as the “mass graves of Indigenous children” in Canada (read “Real Indigenous Report” for further insights).

But they generally keep things pretty factual, though oftentimes exaggerated.

A perfect example of this comes from the Crusades, which have been constantly demonized time and time again by our political establishment. In fact, my elementary school sports team was once called the Crusaders, but they've since changed it to Coyotes so as not to offend the brown students.

The Crusades have routinely been demonized by court historians, the History Channel, Hollywood, and their film Kingdom of Heaven, which Jonathan Riley-Smith called “Osama bin Laden's vision of history.”

One instance of demonization of the Crusades comes from a speech given by Bill Clinton to university students in November of 2001, just two short months after 9/11:

“In the First Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burnt a synagogue with 300 Jews in it and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was a Muslim on the Temple Mount. I can tell you that this story is still being repeated today in the Middle East, and we are still paying for it.”(1)

This retelling of history completely ignores the fact that the First Crusade was initiated when the Seljuk Turks invaded and pillaged the Byzantine Empire, murdering, enslaving, and raping untold thousands of Christians.

Bill Clinton also ignores the fact that prior to the First Crusade, the wars between Christendom and the Islamic world were near one-sided bouts of aggression by Muslims against Christians. The ancient Christian lands of Syria and Egypt, long provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire, were stripped away, with hundreds of churches burned.

The Visigothic Kingdom of Spain was also conquered by the Muslims, where untold numbers of Europeans were also murdered, enslaved, and raped. Notably, during the Umayyad conquest of Spain, the Jews of Toledo opened the gates for the Muslim conquerors and cooperated with them for the first few centuries after the conquest.

The Jews were also the predominant slave traders of this time period. To quote from Henri Pirenne's Muhammad and Charlemagne:

“But their (the Jews) great specialty, as we've already seen, was their trade in slaves. Some of these slaves were sold in the country, but the majority were exported to Spain. We know that at the close of the 9th century, the center of the trade in slaves and eunuchs was Verdun. Our information as to the sale of eunuchs dates from the 10th century, but between 891 and 900 the Miracula S. Bertini speaks of Verdanese negotiators going to Spain. According to Liutprand, this trade was enormously profitable. The trade in slaves was strictly prohibited in 779 and 781, and again in 845. Nevertheless, it continued. Agobard shows that this trade has existed for a long time and was doubtless the continuation of the trade of the Merovingian epoch. He mentions that at the beginning of the 9th century, a man came to Lyons after escaping Cordoba, where he had been sold as a slave by the Jews of León. In this connection, he asserts that people had told him of children whom the Jews had stolen or brought in order to sell them.” (p. 259)

The Jews were also far from innocent people prior to the Islamic conquests, and they cooperated during the last Byzantine-Sasanian war (602-628), with the Zoroastrian Persians and Orchestrated a massacre of the Christian population of Jerusalem.(2)

And in the actions of the Crusaders, I must clarify, the murder of women and children is abominable, no matter who the perpetrators and victims are. But this, unfortunately, was common for the time and practiced by all medieval nations to one extent or another.

Also, to quickly clarify, I am not engaging in whataboutism here. I'm not saying, “Why didn't Bill Clinton talk about the Muslim conquests?” or “Why didn't Bill Clinton talk about the Jewish massacres of Christians?” I simply point out that he only talks about this because it is, in a way, historical mythology for the modern left and the Democratic Party.

Muslims are seen as perpetual victims. They are seen as the so-called religion of peace, as they keep trying to tell us. And they must be portrayed as victims in all instances, particularly victims of Christians, and not the other way around. This, in all honesty, has been the most common relationship between Christians and Muslims through the centuries, with Muslims brutally persecuting Christians, which still continues to this day, to the silence of the Democratic elite.

While the vilification of the Crusades and the silent treatment regarding the Islamic conquests does serve the role of increasing white guilt and the victim mentality among brown immigrants to the West, it doesn't have much practical legal or governmental consequences. But one piece of historiography that certainly does is the mythology around the New Deal.

I, as a Canadian, was taught that it was FDR's New Deal that swiftly ended the Great Depression. But this is untrue. Recovery in the United States took longer than in most nations from the Depression, and they only recovered entirely by 1939, when World War II started, because of war, as I'm sure many of you know, is big business.

I was taught it was due to Herbert Hoover's lack of intervention in the economy and not enough swift action being taken that led to the disastrous effects of the Great Depression. This, of course, is untrue as well.

This can be exemplified by the Depression of 1920. What’s that, my dear readers? You've never heard of the Depression of 1920? How could that possibly be? This depression had a whopping 15% unemployment—nearly as bad as the Great Depression. How could you possibly not hear about this? Oh right, it ended after a brief ten months with zero government intervention by the newly elected Harding administration.(3)

And to clarify for those who aren't well-read into economic matters, a depression is something that needs to happen as the Austrians call it; it is a “boom-bust” system. After a period of rapid growth, you need to have a depression for things to regulate.

Something that most economists and politicians of the era were well aware of, which is why Warren Harding didn't intervene during the recession of 1920, something which Austrian economist Benjamin Anderson called the “last free market recession.”

We were, in fact, very close to it becoming the first statist recession. Harding's Secretary of Commerce was Herbert Hoover, who was pestering President Harding for the entirety of the 1920 depression to intervene in the economy—something that Harding was eventually convinced of right when the depression ended.

Before I go any further, the two main political parties in the United States at this point in time were far from being ideological monoliths. Within both parties, there were progressives and conservatives, internationalists and isolationists. This is exemplified by 1924 third-party presidential candidate Robert Marion La Follette, who was a long-term Republican senator from Wisconsin. He would go on to found a revitalization of the Progressive Party. His running mate for the 1924 presidential campaign was former Democrat and soon-to-be Democrat again after the election, Senator Burton K. Wheeler.

Warren G. Harding and his VP Calvin Coolidge were both from the thermally conservative wing of the Republican Party, while Hoover was from the holdout progressive faction of Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, both of whom were staunch interventionists in the economy.

When Hoover took the presidency in 1929, the recession first followed. His biographers say, “President Hoover was the first President in our history to offer Federal leadership in mobilizing the economic resources of the people.”(4) He attempted mass mobilization of all government agencies, notably the Federal Reserve, in an attempt to “help” the people. Exemplifying this, I will now quote from Murray Rothbard's revisionist 1963 economic history book, America's Great Depression:

“With Hoover’s views, we would not expect him to delay in sponsoring public works and unemployment relief as aids in curing depressions. On November 23, Hoover sent a telegram to all the governors, urging cooperative expansion of all state public works programs. The governors, including Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York, heartily pledged their cooperation, and on November 24, the Department of Commerce established a definite organization to join with the states in public works programs. Hoover and Mellon also proposed to Congress an increase in the Federal Buildings program of over $400 million, and on December 3, the Department of Commerce established a Division of Public Construction to spur public works planning. Hoover himself granted more subsidies to ship construction through the federal Shipping Board and asked for a further $175 million appropriation for public works. By the end of the year, Professor J.M. Clark of Columbia University was already hailing President Hoover’s 'great experiment in constructive industrial statesmanship of a promising and novel sort.'” (pp. 216-217)

And to clarify for those who don't know, $400 million in 1929 would equate to over $7.5 billion in 2025 US dollars, so a lot of money.

Rothbard in his 1963 book goes into very great detail—and I do mean very great detail—about all of the ways Hoover intervened in the economy and did a great deal to further the negative effects of depression and economic stagnation.

But despite this and other extensive evidence of interventionism in the economy, it is still the common view that Herbert Hoover was a laissez-faire president who didn't do much in terms of efforts to stop the depression. It is also viewed by most people that it was FDR's New Deal that eventually put an end to the depression, both of which are an absolute load of BS.

The reason this historical mythology is believed, and more importantly pushed down our throats by the education system, is that it justifies further government intervention in the economy, further government overreach, and monopolization over industries.

This particular historical narrative is pushed down our throats. The government has a near monopoly on the average person's perception of history. Most people don't read history books or watch documentaries. The average person's perception of history comes entirely from elementary and high school. Most elementary and high schools within the modern day are, unfortunately, public schools.

To summarize my views and to close off this essay, I would like to say this: The government controls the historical narrative to make people think a certain way about history. It makes people think a certain way about human behavior. They don't teach us in public schools about the Armenian genocide because it is politically inconvenient with modern sensibilities, and it powers the social basis of our ruling class.

The victims of the Armenian Genocide were Christian. The perpetrators of it were Turkish Muslims. Muslims are one of our elites' favorite new imported classes that benefit their rule. Muslims, more often than not, live off government subsidies and vote for left-wing political parties. And to make sure the current majority of our population don't rebel against their imported bioweapons, they spin the narrative that Muslims are victims, that Muslims are a peaceful, tolerant people, and that by importing them, we're actually making the country a better place.

If public schools were to accurately teach Islamic history to the masses, a singular Muslim immigrant would be met with protests the nation had never seen before.

If public schools were to accurately teach people about economic history and the failures of government policies, tax evasion would be a far more common occurrence.

If public schools were to accurately teach the masses African history, parents would be far less likely to accept their children dating Africans.

I could go on like this all day, but I believe I have demonstrated my point. There are far, far more examples of the government nitpicking history to suit their narrative. If you would like me to discuss more of them in length in a another essay, please let me know.

Anyway, this was Dark Age Sage, and see you all in the next one.

Citations.

(1) Multiculturalism and the politics of guilt PP. 62

(2) Antiochus Strategos' Account of the Sack of Jerusalem in A.D. 614. PP. 508

(3) Business cycles and depressions: an encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing. pp. 151–153.

(4) Hoover, Memoirs of HerbertHoover (New York: MacMillan, 1937), vol. 3, pp. 29