...the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations...

You can't be neutral on a moving train.

History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance--might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.

And always, as a way of drowning class resentment in a flood of slogans for national unity, there was patriotism.

...the Anti-Imperialist League...carried on a long campaign to educate the American public about the horrors of the Philippine war and the evils of imperialism. It was...united in a common moral outrage at what was being done to the Filipinos in the name of freedom. Whatever their differences on other matters, they would all agree with William James's angry statement: 'God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles'.

ATTENTIONANTI-RENTERS! AWAKE! AROUSE! . . . Strike till the last armed foe expires, Strike for your altars and your fires-Strike for the green graves of your sires, God and your happy homes!