Michael Moore’s Marxist Narrative of American History, Refuted

A while back, a well-known OPC minister and personal friend of mine posted the following video clip of Michael Moore’s “A Brief History of the United States of America” on his Facebook wall:

Of this video my pastor friend said: “This link was sent to me by a young college student who hesitatingly referred to herself as ‘the only white person in the class’ of a local community college history course.” In order to forward it to the pastor after class, she had found it again on YouTube by word-searching the phrase, “America history cartoon white people suck.” She forwarded it to the pastor because she was offended by it; she wanted advice on how to handle such an anti-White atmosphere as she encountered in class. The pastor likewise floated the video on Facebook for the same reason – because he thought it outrageous.

The resulting commentary which ensued on his Facebook wall was all but unanimous in the opinion that the video represented a gross distortion of American history. That is, until a young Black attendee of the pastor’s church weighed in. Confident in his social superiority, he affirmed the accuracy of the video and issued blanket rebukes to all the Whites who had commented ahead of him. At which point all the candid critics of the video fell silent, or fell in behind the young Black, applauding his courage and the de facto superiority of his ethnic perspective.

The following critique of said video is a tidied-up version of the response I posted in that thread.

First, the Puritan fathers didn’t leave England for “fear of being persecuted.” They left because they were persecuted. Their priority wasn’t to assuage any irrational fear, but rather, to find a land where they might establish a more godly society so that their children would be free to obey God in public life.

Similarly, the Pilgrims didn’t kill the Indians out of irrational fear. Upon arrival in the New World, the Puritans sought to evangelize the Red man, but the reaction of the Red man ranged from indifference to frequent campaigns of genocide. Of the London divines, Gray and Symonds are noted to have viewed the conquest of this continent as a direct parallel to Israel’s conquest of Canaan, to be pursued principally by violence (see Gray’s 1609 sermon, “A Good Speed to Virginia“), but the majority demurred: “Daniel Price, Richard Crakathorpe, George Benson, Robert Tynley, and Richard Eburne held the founding of Virginia a part of the divine plan for the conversion of her benighted people, who were to be raised to ‘civility, and brought to Christ,’ not exterminated.”¹

This was the case not only in Virginia, but also in New England:

[T]here were missionary efforts to convert the Indians of New England to Christianity. As early as 1643 Thomas Mayhew labored for the conversion of the Indians of Martha’s Vineyard Island, and a Narragansett sachem to whom he applied for permission to preach to his tribe replied: “Go make the English good first.”²

These labors on behalf of the Red man were pursued in spite of preceding campaigns of genocide against the Whites:

In 1622 the Indians, under leadership of Opechancanough, Powhatan’s brother and successor, massacred three hundred and fifty of the Virginia colonists, and reduced eighty plantations to eight [only after which] [t]he whites began a terrible war of revenge against the savages.³

Nonetheless, from the beginning, men such as John Eliot spent decades of their lives learning Indian dialects, translating the Bible and the Catechism into Indian languages, and preaching to the Red man in his own tongue. These are not the actions of irrationally fearful men bent on genocide, but the courageous and merciful acts of men seeking to disciple the nations of a heathen race.

Yet the genocide campaigns against the Whites only increased in frequency and intensity:

In 1675 the Wampanoag prince, Metacomet, commonly known as King Philip, the son and successor of the good Massasoit, commenced a war of extermination against the white people of New England . . . and many of the whites were massacred. The whites were soon aroused, and seized their arms, while the savages desolated the English settlements on the Connecticut river . . . the following year (1676) the Indians were subjugated.⁴

One early attestation well contrasts the Christian self-scrutiny of White settlers acting in self-defense over against the Indians of Virginia who were animated by the darkest of motives:

Shortly after the settlement at Jamestown in 1607, a ship from England was sailing up the James River to Jamestown Island bringing settlers and supplies. The passengers and crew observed a canoe, which was being frantically paddled by an Indian woman and seven children, emerging from behind a point of land. Behind the canoe was a ship’s boat, manned by husky White men who were just as furiously rowing their craft which was steadily gaining.

The ship’s boat caught up with the canoe almost under the bow of the ship, and the interested passengers and crew gasped as a sailor in the bow of the ship’s boat leaned over and with his pistol shot the Indian woman. The ship’s boat rammed the fragile canoe and rode up over it, forcing it down into the water and throwing the children into the river. They watched in horror as the sailors used their oars to hold the children under water until they drowned.

The incoming ship landed at Jamestown and its passengers disembarked, full of protests and condemnation at the brutal sight they had just witnessed. Then they were told the rest of the story.

The Indians’ god was named Okee, or Kiwassa. He was a mighty and terrible god, a god the Indians feared. He spoke to the Indians in thunder and lightning. Night, blackness, and pain bespoke his presence.

His food was pain. The more the pain, the longer and more excruciating the pain, the more satisfied and happy was Okee. To turn this consuming wrath from themselves, the Indians did all they could to give their god what he wanted, pain, from someone else.

As to a “good” god, there was no such being. If there were, there was no reason to worship or conciliate such a deity, since he would not injure them. This Okee was another matter entirely. He had to be pacified or he would turn on the Indian for the pain he craved.

Once a year, twenty of the handsomest children, aged 10 to 15, were painted white and placed at the foot of a tree. Then, savages armed with clubs formed a narrow corridor through which five men were to pass, carrying off the children. As the braves passed through the corridor with the children in their arms, they were severely beaten by the multitude to elicit pain, but the carriers carefully shielded the children. The children’s turn was to come. The children were then cast into a heap in a valley. The actual things that were done to the children were well-kept secrets, but this much we do know, Okee sucked their blood until they were dead. The god Okee loved pain and sucked blood.⁵

The pain of someone good was better than the pain of someone bad; that of the strong and brave better than that of one weak. But pain of any sort was demanded. Indian women and children were the ones delegated to administer this pain. Their craft was state-of-the-art. They were past-experts at their allotted tasks.

The pain of a White man was, in the eyes of the Indians, better than the pain of an Indian. Therefore, every White settler was eyed as a potential gift to Okee. When fate, trust, cupidity, or stupidity delivered a White captive into Indian hands, he was imprisoned but treated with kindness and well cared for. He was carefully fed, building his strength to withstand the trials to come.

When at last judged to be in his strongest physical condition he was taken to meet Okee. He was bound, usually to a stake in the center of an Indian village. The Indian women and children were released to practice their carefully-learned craft on him. They were masters at their work.

The skin on the prisoner’s face, eyelids, lips, tongue, and private parts was slowly and excruciatingly removed. Splinters the size of toothpicks were inserted into the bare muscle tissue and lighted. With care and patience, a White man could be kept alive sometimes for three excruciating days. Then his entrails, those that would not cause immediate death, were removed.

On rare occasions when tortured prisoners were recaptured while undergoing torture, they always begged for a quick and merciful death – never release. What was left of the man was a ragged screaming bundle of scorched and burnt nerves and flesh – the perfect meal that satisfied Okee best.

The Indian woman and her children executed under the bow of the incoming ship below Jamestown Island had been surprised torturing a White captive in the manner described above. They fled by boat, were caught, and were given a quick, merciful death, something they had not given their victim.

The passengers and crew quickly came to understand that Indians were not sunburned White men. They were savages bred to their way of life for a thousand generations by a god that demanded that different laws be obeyed. The colonists made quick adjustments in their thinking to improve their chances of survival in a strange land, a land made savage by inhabitants as cruel and evil as anything encountered by the children of Israel when they went into the promised land.

The men in the longboat acted as Phineas [Numbers 25:1-12] would have acted.⁶

And the Indians were not exterminated, as Mr. Moore alleges, for that was not the settlers’ objective. In fact, there are far more Indians today than there were then: eminent historian, scholar, and missionary to the Indians R.J. Rushdoony reports that prior to the coming of the White man, “The Indian population was small, perhaps at most 250,­000 to 300,000, and perhaps even less than half that number.”⁷ Compare this with the 2017 census which recorded 4,234,349 Amerindians in the U.S. alone.⁸ Far from a genocide, these figures seem to confirm a massive proliferation of the Indian population under the circumstance of White hegemony. And even if we granted the outrageously inflated estimate of Indian numbers in pre-columbian North America bandied about by leftists — 18 million — we realize that by dealing with the whole of the continent, that figure includes the Aztec empire. But if we count the descendants of those Aztecs in our tally, we are talking about 54 million within U.S. borders alone as of 2013.⁹ And even if it were proven that American Indian populations have dwindled, the presence of smallpox (for which Europeans provided Indians with vaccines) and of intertribal Indian genocide would serve equally well as helpful explanations.

Underlying the whole issue is the question of whether our settlement of the Americas was an ethical enterprise. Moore’s video implies it was not. His view is in keeping with the zeitgeist, which holds European colonization to be the original sin of mankind.

But think about it – when the White man arrived, he found an open wilderness owned, according to the rarely encountered Indian denizens, by no one; because the Red man had not even the concept of property. Like Bedouins or gypsy rovers, the Indians merely camped in a valley until they exhausted its resources, and then moved on to the next. The Indian’s presence in the land was transitory and rootless, without parcel or boundary. They were vagabond savages absent deed, territorial claim, or legal theory of property. Following Christian law, Europeans merely claimed the vacant, ownerless territory bestowed to them by Providence.

Moore extends our people’s irrational fear to witch hunts, but the facts oppose him here as well. In the first place, there was not one solitary witch burned in America. There were eighteen executions by hanging (one of whom was a minister of note) and one accidental death by peine forte et dure (stone weight), applied to induce a close-lipped defendant to enter a plea of either guilty or not guilty. None of which was due to their becoming irrationally afraid of one another, as Moore alleges. I dare anyone to read Reverends Cotton and Increase Mather’s writing on the subject,¹⁰ or the minutes of the trials without sympathy for the people of Salem. They were living through an event that made The Exorcist look mild by comparison. The eyewitnesses are numbered in the hundreds: judges, learned men, and the most eminent Puritan divines testified that they witnessed genuine xenolalia and fluency in dead languages by possessed children, hands seeming to rove beneath the skin of bewitched persons, telekinesis, multiple voices emanating from one person at a time, and feats of inhuman strength by young girls. Prolonged levitation and even flight were witnessed by large assemblies of people. Even so, Rev. Increase Mather stressed the observance of “Blackstone’s formulation” when he wrote:

“It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned.”¹¹

For all their endeavors to clear people of charges, the fact was that witchcraft was in deed present. So much so that the people of the town had turned a blind eye to soothsayers and renowned families of fortunetellers for generations. By the time of the trials, the court was faced with well-known dynastic covens sometimes three or four generations deep. As The Standard History of the World sums up the intrigues at Salem:

The great English divine, Richard Baxter, pronounced a disbeliever in witchcraft ‘an obdurate Sadducee’ . . . [and] a century later Sir William Blackstone, the eminent legal authority, declared that to deny the existence of witchcraft is to deny divine revelation.¹²

Contrary to Michael Moore’s overall theme of Whites’ mistreating other races, the only convicted person to have been pardoned for her crimes by the Salem court was Tituba, the slave woman from Barbados. The court reasoned that while the White girls whom Tituba coached in witchcraft knew better, Tituba’s African background and ignorance actually made her less culpable. Thus was she spared the penalty suffered by her White counterparts.

We need not justify their every conclusion, but we must reject Mr. Moore’s parody pawned off as history.

Moore briefly, but still clearly, imputes the same mindless fear to the American Revolution. But it wasn’t fear of the British which inspired America to fight for her independence. We fought, as the 1765 Stamp Act stipulated, because the crown proved “deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity”; because the king was systematically depriving us of the free exercise of our God-given rights, self-defense included. So the Declaration of Independence includes an indictment of the crown, besides such things as taxes and admiralty courts, for refusing to defend the colonies from the “merciless Indian Savages.” For all his theological foibles, Jefferson faithfully relayed the Knoxian social theory upon which our republic was founded: “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

Our forebears didn’t pass the second amendment to grant them the ability to keep guns. The right to bear effective arms is the primary right of self-defense written of by all the canons of common law.

The colonists in America held attitudes similar to the English regarding self-defense. First, the founders were committed to maintaining an armed populace. For instance, Patrick Henry stated during the Virginia Convention that “The great object is, that every man be armed.” Richard Henry Lee, a delegate to that convention, wrote that “To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.” George Mason even equated slavery with the confiscating of weapons: “Forty years ago, when the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man . . . to disarm the people.¹³

Consonant with the Catechism, the common law held right to be the child of law: Christian men understood the right of arms therefore as an inverse corollary of the sixth commandment. If we hope to prevent murder, we must defend innocent life effectively.

In conclusion, the individual right of self-defense has had an illustrious past. From Moses to Jesus, and from Blackstone to Madison, legal experts have affirmed the exercise of this right. The right of self-defense has also been incorporated into the Declaration of Independence, America’s National Charter. Most importantly, the right of self-defense is part of the law of nature and of nature’s God, which gives it its unalienable status.¹⁴

Contrary to Moore’s presentation, African slavery didn’t arise after the war of Independence, but well prior.¹⁵ And we know there is no causal nor even connotative connection between that trade and the bearing of arms, because the institution of slavery is much more ancient than firearms.

The English crown had arranged trade in rum, sugar, and Blacks out of Barbados for reception at Plymouth colony. They also arranged a lush trade in Irish slaves.¹⁶ The slave trade was conducted out of London and Amsterdam by Jewish merchants, not Pilgrims or Virginians.¹⁷ As the preamble to the Virginia constitution attests, the king “prompt[ed] our Negroes to rise in Arms amongst us, those very negroes whom, by an inhuman use of his negative, he hath refused us permission to exclude by law.” This was likewise testified by Madison, among many others: “This infernal traffic originated in the avarice of British merchants. The British Government constantly checked the attempts of Virginia to put a stop to it.”¹⁸ The state of Virginia was the first governmental body on earth to declare the slave trade illegal,¹⁹ but her various restrictions were vetoed by the king of England.²⁰ The familiar argument of the crown was, ‘Let us stock the plantations plentifully with Africans, not only that they may be good customers for our manufacturers, and producers for our commerce; but that they remain dependent and submissive. An Englishman who emigrates, becomes the bold asserter of popular and colonial rights; but the negro is only fit for bondage.’²¹ And even those Jewish merchants with whom the crown colluded against America didn’t “kidnap” Africans with nets; contrary to the public schools’ silence concerning Blacks’ own culpability in enslaving their kinsmen, these merchants bought them from the African chieftains, as slaves had been the universal currency across Africa from time immemorial. The alternative to sale for most of them was that they would eventually go into the stew pot.

African servitude in America didn’t come without reward for the slaves. They worked the fields seasonally, as is typical of all agrarian workers, and had all Sabbaths off. The rest of the time they were allowed to hire themselves out to neighbors for odd jobs to earn money and build their own estates.²² The Black slaves of the South were better off by every standard of measure than any Black population on earth, and even better off than the White wage-earning populations in America and Europe.²³

And it wasn’t White fear or oppression that inspired the slave revolt. The slaves attacked the Whites because they were still “half-savage blacks . . . some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations removed from cannibalism.”²⁴ The slaves were moreover incited as Unitarian agitators from the North, otherwise known as Carpetbaggers, continued stirring them up to genocide the White populace as they had recently done in Saint-Domingue, now otherwise known as Haiti. As Reverend Thornwell wrote at the time, “The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders – they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In a word, the world is the battleground – Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake.”²⁵

Other than the bands of renegade Blacks dispatched in the wake of Sherman’s genocidal March to the Sea, the “Please don’t kill me, big black man” segue in Mr. Moore’s cartoon is fictional. The only cases where something like that may have happened would have been cases where the very old, the very young, the infirm, and the women suffered. The able-bodied White men were already dead.

After the war’s end, the Black people didn’t “just want to live in peace.” That was the beginning of the Reconstruction era. All those who lived through it attested that violence during “peacetime” Reconstruction was worse than the violence they experienced in wartime. The Blacks (with the approval of the federal government) were intent upon doing to the Southrons what was done to the Whites of Haiti: annihilation. That is when the small bands of remaining able-bodied White men formed units to defend the defenseless women and children. So came the Ku Klux Klan, without which the White population would have been genocided completely.

The NRA was founded by Union military men after the war to foster better White marksmanship in the North and amongst Blacks in the South,²⁶ so as to better punish the Southrons who had proven the superior  marksmen during the war. Moreover, this strategy would also keep more Blacks in the Southern states, so the White regions in the North would not be inundated by Black migration.

The objective of the Klan wasn’t “shooting and lynching black people,” but protecting their families from those bent on murder, pillage, and general mayhem, be they white, black, or anything in between. The racial statistics on lynching reveal that one out of every four persons lynched in American history were White. In many states, no Blacks were lynched at all, only Whites. Which proves that lynching was not a racial policy per se, but a means of redress for serious crimes in a time when the federal government had resolved itself on war against America and, to that end, unleashed a horde of savages against non-combatant women and children. Lynching, then, was the last resort of a besieged people to preserve the judicious administration of justice. Any racial disparities emerged from the disparity of the races committing the crimes, not from some irrational goal of the lynchers to target Blacks irrespective of guilt.

Besides being notoriously uncivil, the civil rights movement was not about rights – at least not directly. It was about granting Blacks government-created privileges to deprive Whites of the exercise of their God-given rights (otherwise known as “unalienable rights”) of free association and property. Blackstone’s comprehensive commentary on the law offers no definition for the term “civil rights” but rather uses it to define “private wrongs.”²⁷ Which is to say that the canons of common law conceived of no public or governmental application of the concept. But in the context of American history, everyone recognizes the phrase “civil rights” as particularly bearing upon the African people in our midst. The entire design of that movement was, following the precedent set in the War Between the States, top-down: civil rights were asserted by the federal government against the sovereign states and the people’s God-given rights. That’s why all the amendments to the Constitution prior to the war were constraints on federal power, but all after the war did the opposite, constraining the states and the people. The advent of civil rights was the abolition of actual Rights in favor of arbitrary privilege. In keeping with that inversion of law and ethics, civil rights proponents use the terms “White privilege” or “White supremacy” as euphemisms for all the God-given rights long aforehand recognized as necessary consequents of Christian Law.

It may seem impolitic now after decades of Marxist social programming, but Blacks and Whites having reserved seating on public transportation actually mitigated friction and lessened violence. Truly, if we want a view into how benign assigned seating is, we need only reflect on the like phenomena of handicapped parking, gender-specific restrooms, the girls’ choir, VIP passes, groomsmen, captain’s quarters, judge’s chambers, family businesses, seats of honor, and so on. Far from the devil multicultists portray it as, discrimination is an essential part of our every institution, without which Christian society cannot function nor even exist. And Red Rosa Parks didn’t take it upon herself to do what she did, but was proven to be a communist agent of the infamous Highlander Folk School acting under orders to stir up unrest and violence against Whites.²⁸

Albeit, the video does tell the truth, if mockingly, about White flight to the suburbs: after the color line fell, we left the cities because it wasn’t safe for our women or our children to be surrounded by Blacks. I realize Leftists like Moore would be scandalized to hear anyone state that fact openly, but it remains a fact nonetheless. It still isn’t safe for Whites to live cheek by jowl with Blacks. Federal crime statistics confirm it – the levels of violence visited upon Whites living in close proximity to Blacks is statistically witnessed nowhere else for us but in theaters of open warfare.

The thesis of Mr. Moore’s cartoon is that Whites are uniquely depraved, paranoid, and violent because we remove our children from the likelihood of rape, murder, and mayhem. On such premises, we should rather just move to Compton. But Michael Moore doesn’t do that. He lives in an all-White, gated community with bodyguards. Because it’s safe.

This underlying issue of “fear” is the framework upon which Mr. Moore lays his narrative. That is, he portrays our unalienable rights of self-defense, property, association, and self-determination to be psychosis. As is the prerogative of every cultural Marxist, he smears all Christian ethics by way of pathology. Make no mistake: he is inveighing not only against the White man, but against his Occidental worldview: Christianity.

Of course, this invocation of “fear” as a shameful pathology is only ever attributed to the White man. When other peoples are described as living in fear, theirs is never portrayed as neurotic or baseless. Their fear is ever presumed credible and warranted; but astoundingly, the fear expressed by non-Whites is categorically laid at the feet of Whites too! Isn’t that Mr. Moore’s point, after all – that informed and intelligent people (non-Whites) have every justification to fear Whites? But Whites fear everything without justification?

This is the definition of hypocrisy.

Mr. Moore clearly feels no compunction about lying in the service of that hypocrisy. But this too has long been the patent tactic of Marxism: for the Marxist, words are not a vehicle to convey truth, only to further the agenda.

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