Leading up to this Independence Day, much talk among conservatives has been devoted to the latest movie by Dinesh D’Souza, America.  This is from John Fund’s review:

For young people, and young adults who were taught spongy “social studies” rather than true American history, the most valuable parts of the movie might be those in which D’Souza tackles America’s greatest sins: its treatment of Native Americans, slavery, the transfer of half of Mexico to the U.S. after the Mexican War of 1848, and its supposed colonialist behavior. Consider his treatment of those subjects as his direct rebuttal to the works of radical historian Howard Zinn, whose textbooks treating America’s history as one of ceaseless oppression dominate many American high schools and colleges.

One of the folks whom D’Souza brings in to articulate the views of the Left is Noam Chomsky, who (by coincidence) I happened to watch last night on an old episode of Firing Line with William F. Buckley, Jr.:

Buckley makes a related point to the above when he says:

Your difficulty, Mr. Chomsky, in my judgement, is you never know where neatly to begin your historical sequence.  … You start your line of discussion at a moment that is historically useful for you.  The grand fact of the post-war world is that the communist imperialists — by the use of terrorism, by the use of deprivation of freedom — have contributed to the continuing bloodshed, and the sad thing about it is not only the bloodshed, but the fact that this seemed to dispossess you of the power of rational observation.

In order to deprive Americans of the ability to appreciate the accomplishments of their ancestors, or to work in the present to advance the cause of real freedom in the world, the Left obscures the broad historical trends up to and growing from American independence (which is odd, if they consider themselves “progressives”) and pick and choose historical facts (heavily revised) and sequences that are convenient to the story that they’d rather tell.  Naturally, the moral of that story isn’t that individuals should be free, inasmuch as possible, to design the society in which they live, but that the ideology of the Left is the One Truth to which the world ought to be made to conform.