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Feeding the wrong wolf

James von Brunn, 89, died at a federal complex in Butner, North Carolina. He was undergoing mental evaluation before standing trial for the alleged lone-wolf…

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James von Brunn, 89, died at a federal complex in Butner, North Carolina. He was undergoing mental evaluation before standing trial for the alleged lone-wolf murder last June of Steven Jones, 39, a security guard at the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Von Brunn, a Holocaust denier with a history of anti-Semitism and extreme racist views, was wounded by security during the assault at the Museum.

It’s known that Von Brunn was deeply influenced by the 1951 book, “The Iron Curtain over America,” by John T. O‘Beaty, which Von Brunn said, “I learned how Jews had destroyed Europe and were now destroying America.”

The book also claimed Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and Samuel Rosenman, President Franklin Roosevelt’s speechwriter, were part of a communist conspiracy and gave intellectual currency to some of the accusations of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

In the annals of political craziness, O’Beaty will go down near the top, as one who feeds dark impulses like those of von Brunn.  Writer Thomas Frank, recently interviewed by PBS TV commentator Bill Moyers, called this kind of behavior “the demented logic of our politics.”

In that tradition, the red scare was extensively exposed by Don E. Carleton, who wrote “Red Scare: Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism and Their Legacy in Texas” (1985).

Normal people — need I say this? — require facts as the building blocks to determine the truth to ward off ignorance. Deranged interpreters need help for their phobias to sanitize the mind and sometimes, like von Brunn, a psychiatrist.

The Texas State Board of Education, by its actions on Jan. 15, seems to want the state’s school children to take several steps backward and return to a discredited past by deleting some of the people and groups who helped make social progress since the 1950s.

From a long list of proposed changes to the social studies curriculum —that will affect 4.7 million students in history, government, geography and economics — the Republican majority on the board disapproved covering the contributions of the late Senator Edward Kennedy and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, or mention of the Hispanic civil-rights group the League of United Latin American Citizens, one with a longstanding history of successes in Texas.

The board voted to ban the mention of United Farm Workers co-founder and civil rights leader César Chávez, along with other historical Latino leaders, but kept in former state Supreme Court Justice Raúl González for fourth graders.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (who has a law school in Houston named after him) were allowed in. Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative gadfly who has never held a public post but is affiliated with National Rifle Association, the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation, was included.

Meanwhile, former San Antonio mayor and ex-HUD secretary Henry Cisneros, now included in textbooks, was axed.

Board member Don McLeroy proposed an amendment to require coverage of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, saying the current history already has "leftist political periods and events – the populists, the progressives, the New Deal and the Great Society." His proposal was postponed, along with a long list of other items, for the board’s March meeting.

He, however, succeeded in having documents included that conjecture the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s discredited belief that the U.S. government was infiltrated by Communists.

Bill Moyer’s words are appropriate here: A Cherokee Indian tribal elder told his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself. He said, "It is between two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."

The boy took this in for a few minutes and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf won?"

The old man replied, "The one I feed."

[José de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. His 2009 digital book, sponsored by The Ford Foundation, is available free at www.DayNightLifeDeathHope.com. He is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003).  E-mail him at [email protected].] ©2010

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