BOOKS: The 10 Big Lies About America

THE 10 BIG LIES ABOUT AMERICA: COMBATING DESTRUCTIVE DISTORTIONS ABOUT OUR NATION
By Michael Medved
Crown Forum, $26.95, 280 pages
REVIEWED BY LARRY THORNBERRY

In the 19th century, humorist Josh Billings nailed it when he said, “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.” Right as he was then, ol’ Josh had no idea how much worse the problem would get. In “The Ten Big Lies About America,” Michael Medved gives us the particulars.

Mr. Medved — social critic and author of numerous books, the best known probably being “Right Turns” (2004) and “Hollywood vs. America” (1992) — takes on the distortions and the distorters. Or as some may prefer to phrase it, the lies and the liars.

According to Mr. Medved, the 10 big lies are:

• America was founded in genocide against Native Americas.

• The United States is uniquely guilty for the crime of slavery.

• The Founders intended a secular, not a Christian nation.

• America has always been a multicultural society, strengthened by diversity.

• The power of Big Business hurts the country and oppresses the people.

• Government offers the only remedy for economic downturn and poverty.

• America is an imperialist nation and a constant threat to world peace.

• The two-party system is broken and we urgently need a viable third party.

• There is a war going on against the American middle class.

• America is in the midst of an irreversible moral decline.

Many Americans today believe these whoppers, largely because many on the political and cultural left — concentrated in academe, the media, Hollywood and other precincts of showbiz, the education industry, and left blogosphere, even some pulpits — have been retailing these distortions for decades.

Mr. Medved takes on all these lies. And in this small volume — only 262 pages before readers get to the resources and index — Mr. Medved objectively demonstrates that:

The long conflict between European settlers and the people they encountered in the “New World” was a lot more nuanced than the “policy of genocide” the left alleges based on either a distorted reading of historical events or on no evidence at all. The truth is there were brutalities on both sides, but even more examples of friendship and cooperation between American Indians and European settlers than there were bloody skirmishes. Mr. Medved also shows that a view of “Native Americans” as near saints living peaceful lives in harmony with their neighbors and the environment until Europeans showed up and ruined Eden is a total fiction. Americans Indian tribes fought almost constant wars between themselves before Europeans arrived.

As grotesque and utterly unjustifiable as the institution of slavery was, it was not peculiar to the West or to America. It has existed throughout all of human history on all continents. In fact, it still exists in parts of Africa today. Britain and America, with no help from anyone else, were responsible for bringing it to an end in the West. Mr. Medved in no way apologizes for slavery — as some of the left have falsely claimed — but shows how ubiquitous it has been and how Western Christian values were central in ridding most of the world of this plague.

Clearly, the Founders only meant to prevent the central government from establishing one sect of Christianity as the nation’s official religion, not to drive all traces of religion from the public square. There are constant references to God and Christian principles in our founding documents and in the speeches of the Founders. No one thought it the slightest problem that many states maintained official religions for decades after the First Amendment was adopted.

Mr. Medved is systematic and convincing in deconstructing these three lies, and the other seven as well. This correction of the record is important since no country whose citizens feel terrible about its past, or misunderstand its basic values, can have much hope for a future.

As was often the case, Ronald Reagan made the case convincingly and concisely. Mr. Medved quotes from Mr. Reagan’s farewell address of Jan. 11, 1989:

“We’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important …. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are.”

Just so.

“Most Americans feel instinctive indignation over the false charges against our country,” Mr. Medved says in the introduction to his new book. “But they lack the arguments or information to counteract them.”

Those who read “10 Big Lies” will be well-armed against some vicious slanders about America that need to be put to rest. There’s even some “news you can use” in the chapter on government and the economy. The current debate rages on how big and what kind of a government “stimulus” we need to help bring the current recession to an end. Mr. Medved lays out statistical facts from the Great Depression that suggest how futile it is to expect the government to cure a sick economy.

Consider: In 1931, the middle of the Hoover administration and deep into the Great Depression, the national unemployment rate was 17.4 percent. In 1938, five years into FDR’s administration and after federal spending had tripled, regulation put into overdrive and countless economic experiments from Washington had been visited on the economy, the national unemployment rate was 17.4 percent. At no time during the New Deal decade of the 1930s did unemployment drop below 14 percent.

Mr. Medved presents similar evidence from other of the nation’s economic crises, demonstrating how unproductive government efforts to make things better have been. It’s hard to read Mr. Medved’s analyses and still conclude that the government can improve the economy by “stimulating” or regulating.

• Larry Thornberry is a writer living in Tampa, Fla.