THE RIGHT AND WRONG WAY TO REMEMBER – OVERNIGHT:  I don't have to review for our alert readership all the fine remembrances of 9-11 that we have just seen and heard.  For the most part, Americans behaved well on the solemn day, with the exhibitions of poor taste kept reasonably under control.

But we're becoming increasingly aware of things that aren't under control, especially our inept, pro-leftist, often deceptive educational system.  Too many youngsters are being taught terrible things about 9/11, and it is hard to see a bright future for our country if this continues.  The takeover of much of American education by Marxists and other left-wing creatures came quietly, took decades, and is ongoing.  The intent is quite obviously to destroy the America we love.  From the Federalist: 

The 20th anniversary of 9/11 looms large in the wake of the catastrophe in Afghanistan. Much has changed in these past two decades. At the time, the Taliban were no more to us than a remote band of bearded fanatics in baggy shalwars and tunics.

Not any more. Enabled now by the feckless cruelty of a cretinous administration, the Taliban have triumphed over the United States. They did it as easily as if this nation were made of the same sandstone as the Bamiyan Buddhas they pulverized in March 2001.

Radical change occurred in the blink of an eye. Catapulted to global stature, the Taliban now have a defense minister. They are poised for access to the international monetary system. And you can follow them on Twitter.

One thing has not changed. Still intact but more anti-American than ever is the American education system. This is the behemoth that will school the children of the tens of thousands of largely unvetted Afghan nationals who filled flights out of Kabul.

Thought of that sent me hunting through notebooks and journals for comments jotted down about some of the events marking the ten-year anniversary of 9/11. One series of notes applies here. It was a log of observations made at the exhibition “9/11: Through Young Eyes” at Manhattan’s DC Moore Gallery in September 2011.

The exhibition was a collaborative series of 31 narrative collages by then-eighth graders at the progressive Calhoun School on New York’s Upper West Side. They were toddlers in 2001, too young for any recollections of their own. Their interpretation of the day was an exercise in political mythology that illustrated what they had been taught.

A quarter of the panels—a full eight—preened themselves on the sly implication that America is just one more rogue state. There were no references to al-Qaeda or enemy assault. Instead, cartoon Marines head to Afghanistan. Bombs drop on Afghanistan. A soldier lectures on “bad” Arabs. Americans start “using the flag as a symbol of war.”

One panel growled: “War was glorified and commercialized.” Such wording hardly came unprompted from the mouths of babes who seem never to have heard the word jihad. In context, the censure applied not to fanatics who shout “Allahu Akbar” in bloody ecstasy but to Americans.

That and similarly weighted captions sacrificed historical understanding to bien pensant avoidance of the obvious. Viewers were expected to applaud the program for its enlightened refusal to see evil anywhere but at home.

It was here in this country that “mosques were burned” and “Muslims were dehumanized.” And “some Arab-Americans were even murdered.” In a perverse inversion of selective sympathy, the tragic splendor of victimhood accrued to Muslims, not to annihilated New Yorkers.

And finally...

Childhood innocence is a powerful political tool. By now those youngsters are grown up. They have graduated from college, entered professions, begun corporate careers, and become voters. Some are teachers. They bring with them into adult life the attitudes they have been carefully taught.

There is more than a single cause for the ruin of a nation. Still, historical ignorance and its harvest of disbelief in the rightness of this country—generated in classrooms—is a powerful destroyer.

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  We've been told many times that civilizations don't die, they commit suicide.  From the determination we showed on September 11, 2021, down to to the humiliation we've suffered in the last four weeks, our suicidal route would appear pretty obvious. 

September 11,  2021