Critics of American Heroes Are Ethnocentric and Inconsistent(Tom Ostrom’s Soap Box)

Red Wing history teacher Scott Bender contends Christopher Columbus (and Washington, Lincoln, Jackson) should not be admired. Progressive social scientists usually argue that “cultural relativism” (nonjudgmentalism) should prevail in the teaching of domestic and overseas cultures.

Therefore, it seems like intellectual ethnocentrism, and a violation of Western ex post facto law, to condemn historical figures for not having the same values that evolved later.

Progressives won’t judge contemporary cultures as immoral, so why past cultures? Why the constant denigration of America’s past? The slave owning Framers of the Constitution gave America its subsequent civil liberties.

We are told not to judge Hillary and Bill Clinton’s problematic past: that’s too long ago. Don’t mention lawyer Hillary Clinton was expelled from the Watergate judicial investigating committee for unethical practices. Or that those heroic Democrat solons who interrogated Nixonites were segregationists. Or feminist heroine and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger wanted to limit the births of nonwhite, poor minorities. Don’t criticize contemporary African despots. That’s racism. Criticize Sanger and Hillary: sexism. Or Amer-Indians who committed atrocities.

Historians shoud evaluate the past in terms of the values of those times. Not use the past to teach students to despise their nation and its heroes.

Maybe the Bible should be censored. Slavery and oppression are described there, too.