History Uncensored: A Christian Teacher’s Mission to Defend Truth in an Age of Propaganda
March 19, 2025
Welcome to History Uncensored. I’m Jim Palm, a Christian history and English teacher with 30 years of experience. I started this blog to expose historical truths often ignored in modern narratives. Inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm, my missionary years in Sierra Leone, and my love for the U.S. Constitution, I write to defend truth in history, rooted in Christian conviction and firsthand experience.
In 2010, we took our last road trip together as a missionary family, visiting twenty-six states in the two months we were back in the States. One by one, the kids were leaving home. So the summer trip in 2010 should have been our last great trip together, but I spoiled it. I was irascible. When I wasn’t driving, I spent more time staring at the floor-boards than I did at the scenery or talking with my family. What made me so overwrought? I was sorry to see the kids go, of course. Every father is his own Peter Pan when his children grow up. The real reason for my irritability, however, was that my heart was sick, and the sickness was like that of the prophet Daniel, who saw the truth and was sickened by the future. (Daniel 7:15)
Rediscovering America: My Time in the Peace Corps
My love for America and our Constitution goes back to 1978 when I was serving my country in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, West Africa, one of the poorest countries on earth- and one of the most corrupt. Early in my two-year stint I learned that to get anything done in Sierra Leone, you had to pay a bribe.
I had just spent four years at UC Davis, learning what a “terrible” country America was, how greedy we were, how unfeeling, how self-righteous and smug. But when I compared America to what I saw in Sierra Leone, I began to love the United States of America.
I love America because it was founded on principles of freedom for all and justice for all. It was also founded on the truth that all people are sinners, and we cannot be trusted with power. For a republic to thrive, power must be apportioned separately to each of the three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. And even though we all are selfish, we are taught to live according to a righteous, unselfish standard, and we can expect those persons elected to represent us to also live by a righteous standard, or we can vote them out.
What I saw in this small African nation was the complete opposite of the country I loved. Sierra Leone was ruled by a benevolent dictator named ‘Pa” Siaka Stevens, who regularly fixed the elections with the same alacrity that he pruned his parrot’s wings so it couldn’t fly. Stevens’ motto was, “Take care of your own”, a phrase that was written ubiquitously on the school walls in Sierra Leone from Freetown to Kailahun Province.
This motto meant to take care of your own tribe, a political reality that Stevens followed assiduously, bestowing many coveted and powerful positions to those in his tribe. This tribalism was the opposite of America’s meritocracy, where hard work was rewarded and justice could be expected.
Why Animal Farm Still Matters in 2024
I had taught Orwell to my English and history students, and the specter of Animal Farm cast a long shadow over us and over the United States. I have read many of the dystopic diatribes written to warn us about socialism. There’s only one volume of Animal Farm, and it is a scant ninety-seven pages, but there is no other book that so clearly delineates the plague of socialism that is the bane of the modern world.
So, I have decided to write a blog. Its main focus will be on Animal Farm and the truth of that fable. But Animal Farm is more than a fable. It is a satire, an allegory for our modern predicament, but more than anything, it is a roman a clef, a novel in which real persons or actual events are disguised as fiction. Animal Farm is Russia, and Mr. Jones is the Czarist regime. Napoleon is Stalin; the pigs are the ruling communists, and the great hope of the revolution is no hope at all.
In Romans 13, God commands Christians not to resist the government. But God has given the task of Truth-telling to the Church. We follow a long line of other truth-tellers. We are in the circle with the Old Testament prophets, John the Baptist, the apostles, and Jesus Christ Himself. Christians were willing to die for the truth, and the truth spread. Neither the Pharisees nor the Romans could stamp out Christianity, nor can any socialist dictatorship do so today. The truth spread because the disciples of Jesus Christ were willing to give up their lives for the privilege of telling the truth, the truth that Jesus had died for our sins, was buried, rose again on the third day, and has justified us before God. This truth alone gives us more hope than all of socialism’s empty promises.