Professor Wilfred Reilly has written a masterful exposé of the massive propaganda masquerading as education in the U.S. schools of today, starting with lie #1, that slavery only existed in America and the West, and that even if it did exist elsewhere and in earlier ages, it was much worse in the Americas.

It’s impressive that Reilly, himself of African descent, takes on this issue, not because he doesn’t despise everything about slavery, but because he wants students to know how horrifically pervasive it was throughout history, practiced by virtually every race in every part of the world. Conquerors enslaved the conquered, and those in power exploited their less fortunate fellow human beings.

The author accedes that Americans today “tend to project our positive values back into the past while thinking that our sins are uniquely bad.” What we fail to understand, he writes, is that “contemporary beliefs about human dignity, inalienable rights, a right to freedom, etc., are the exception, not the norm.” This is because America has remade much of the world in its unparalleled image.

Through meticulous research, Reilly shows that American slavery “was not unprecedented, it was not uniquely brutal, and it did not invent any new oppressive systems.” He writes that, quite literally, “the oldest human legal codes consist in large part of rules governing the care, feeding, and beating of slaves and other ‘human property.’” He argues that the Arab slave trade “was by all accounts as brutal or more so than its Western counterpart,” and that “at least 17 million Africans were sold into Arab slavery....”

We know from the Bible that slavery existed in ancient times, and Reilly reveals how widespread the practice was during the period between 2,500 B.C. “when the earliest legal documents concerning slavery were found, and the conquest of much of the Middle East by Alexander the Great took place in the fourth century B.C.” Reilly notes that one of the very first written human words was “slave.”

The author makes clear that slavery has continued throughout history even to modern times, and that the perception created by academia that “the historical enslavement of non-blacks as somehow mild or ‘not really’ slavery, is contrary to reality. Chattel slavery in the ancient world was brutal for people of all races,” he states ... and later, even native American tribes got in on the act, enslaving members of conquered tribes.

While Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me covers in depth the topic of slavery, Reilly’s revelations about other “liberal lies” are no less fascinating. For example, he exposes the lies about Senator Joseph McCarthy, who attempted to root out Communist operatives in the U.S. at the start of the Cold War. McCarthy and those who agreed with him are positioned as “pathological liars, constructing whole careers out of ‘endless falsehoods’ while pandering to ‘the most ignorant, superstitious, meanest segment’ of heartland America.”

The accepted wisdom is that domestic communism was not a threat to the U.S. in the 1950s. But not so fast, cautions Reilly. He shows that McCarthy’s charges were to a large extent true, and that “data recently obtained from no-longer-Soviet Russia demonstrates that specific individuals long thought to be martyrs of a kind were in fact ‘Communists, Soviet agents, or assets of the KGB’—just as McCarthy had suggested.”

Proof exists today in the form of cable messages released after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and prior to the start of the Ukraine war in 2021, “that a very large number of the prominent Yanks and Brits accused of Soviet espionage during the Cold War were in fact Russian spies.” These cables confirm that at various times Soviet spies worked for the atomic Manhattan Project, in the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), for the State and Treasury Departments, and in the White House.”

Indeed, Reilly writes, “It is no exaggeration to say that Russian espionage during the 1950s and 1960s, far from being some kind of paranoid fairy tale, was a real problem that reached the very highest levels of U.S. and Allied governments. On more than a few occasions, (i.e., Alger Hiss at Yalta), Russian agents sat by the American president’s side and gave him advice.” Yet these sobering revelations are kept from our youth in today’s education system.

Related to the lies about McCarthyism is the lie that “the Vietnam War was unpopular and pointless.” The author weaves into this chapter the related lies of the era, that “hippies were the good guys” and that “the sexual revolution was great for women,” but the section on Vietnam highlights the ongoing lie that the spread of Communism was no threat.

The mainstream take on the Vietnam War, he states, “seems to be that it was an epic tragedy, unpopular at the time and now known to have been fought for amoral and illogical reasons.” But a single paragraph on History.com’s respected “Communism Timeline” provides a sobering perspective:

• Between 1940 and 1979, Communism was established by force or otherwise in Estonia, Latvia, Luthuania, Yugoslavia, Poland, North Korea, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, China, Tibet, North Vietnam, Laos, Guinea, Cuba, Yemen, Kenya, Sudan, Congo, Burma, Angola, Benin, Cape Verde, Kampuchea, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Vietnam, Somalia, Seychelles, Afghanistan, Grenada, Nicaragua, and others.

Reilly’s chapters exposing the lies that native Americans were “peaceful people who spent all day dancing,” and that “European colonialism was —empirically—a no-good, terrible, very bad thing” are equally eye-opening and absorbing. He refutes the lie taught to “almost every American schoolchild at least since the late 1960s that ‘Native Americans were peaceful Gaia worshipping people, killed via intentional genocide by ruthless and land-hungry white settlers,’” noting that “again, reality proves to be considerably more complex.”

Particularly shocking to this reviewer is the revelation that an argument exists claiming “the idea for the U.S. government was ‘adopted’ or stolen directly from Native Americans.” This theory alleges that “Benjamin Franklin said the idea of the federal government, in which certain powers are given to a central government and all other are reserved for the states, was borrowed from the system ... used by the Iroquoian League of Nations.”

The author writes that this “historical myth, which has snowballed in a game of historical ‘telephone’ from one scholar to another—and was officially promoted by the U.S. Senate in 1988—originates in a rather backhanded compliment by Franklin for the league. There’s little evidence that Franklin turned that onetime admiration into inspiration for a grander plan.”

While revisionists teach that Native American tribes were such skilled cultivators that cultural exchanges with them “were at least as important” for the European arrivals as for the tribes themselves, the reality is that large domestic animals, metal tools, and the wheel essentially did not exist in North or South America before 1492, which makes these claims debatable; yet, as the author points out, they are not debated.

But as the author writes, “the realities of history have a way of being brutally insensitive to flowery narratives from any side of the modern political aisle, and most of the Spaniards and others who originally encountered the mighty Native nations saw their lands as far closer to hell than heaven. Instead of being paradisical utopias free of the sins of European civilization, Native societies were just as likely as their Old World equivalents to be plagued by oppression, unjust hierarchies, environmental abuse and waste, and political dissension.”

The author acknowledges that Native Americans introduced Europeans to crops like corn, squash, beans, tomatoes, and potatoes, and that Europeans brought diseases with them against which the native peoples had no immunity, causing many to perish. The Europeans, in turn, were shocked by the level of brutality practiced by the natives. The Aztecs in particular demonstrated an unequaled blood lust for human sacrifice, building “skull towers” that held as many as “130,000 human crania.”

Cannibalism was also practiced by Mesoamerican tribes, and Reilly writes that it “appears to have existed above the Rio Grande as well as below it.” Christian missionaries also documented that cannibalism existed among the tribes they sought to convert, including the Iroquois, who have been described as “sophisticated” and “often quite humane.”

Reilly’s research further sheds light on the truth about the origins and movement of Native American tribes, including the mysterious disappearance of some ancient tribes and the resettlement of others as a result of environmental abuse and civil war. The perception that Native Americans were expelled from their homelands and herded like cattle across the country by ruthless American soldiers disappears in the face of the author’s compelling evidence.

Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me contains so much important and startling information that it should be required reading at the high school and college levels. The effort to distort and rewrite American history in order to further a Marxist worldview has rendered a terrible disservice to generations of Americans. Kudos to this brave professor for his excellent exposé.

To read the entire book, go to Amazon.com OR ThriftBooks.com to order!

The Education Reporter Book Review is a project of America’s Future, Inc. To find out more about America’s Future, visit AmericasFuture.net.

Want to be notified of new Education Reporter content?
Your information will NOT be sold or shared and will ONLY be used to notify you of new content.
Click Here

Return to Home PageEducation Reporter Online - July 2024