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Culture and Acculturation
The Importance of Who You Are

How Connected Are You To Your History?

Question: How does one sever a people's roots?

Answer: Destroy its memory. Deny a people the knowledge of who they are and where they came from.

"If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are," I am warning of the eradication of the American memory, that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit."

Ronald Reagan
Farewell Address
to the American People

We at the Osiris Group cannot over emphasize the significance of culture and the role it plays in how black people present themselves to the world at large. How one is acculturated determines one’s values, norms, beliefs and what one will or will not do. It is our belief that practitioners and other helping profession experts must be culturally knowledgeable about how the black psyche has been developed in order to be effective. The following chapter demonstrates this example.

The Death of the West, by Patrick J. Buchanan

How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization

Chapter SEVEN: THE WAR AGAINST THE PAST (excerpt)

"To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots."
-Alexander Solzhenitzyn

In the Middle Ages, Ottoman Turks imposed on Balkan Christians a blood tax-one boy out of every five. Taken from their parents, the boys were raised as strict Muslims to become the fanatic elite soldiers of the sultan, the emissaries, who were then sent back to occupy and oppress the peoples who had borne them. For a modern state the formula for erasing memory was given to us by Orwell in the party slogan of Big Brother, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."3

Destroy the record of a people's past, leave it in ignorance of who its ancestors were and what they did, and one can fill the empty vessels of their souls with a new history, as in 1984. Dishonor or disgrace a nation's heroes, and you can demoralize its people.