History 101 in Florida: Slavery wasn't all that bad - and some dictators weren't either

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a 2024 presidential candidate, is under fire over how the new Florida school curriculum portrays Black history – and particularly slavery. However. there is another problem with DeSantis' highly publicized Civic Literacy Excellence Initiative as well as its kindred House Bill 5: both promote one of modern conservatism’s most pernicious falsehoods – that socialism and communism ultimately mean dictatorship while capitalism means democracy.

The not-very-subtle implication is that policies advocated by liberal Democratic Party politicians will lead to an overbearing government and, ultimately, tyranny.

Yet DeSantis and his conservative allies – including Richard Corcoran, the former state education commissioner who is now New College of Florida's interim president – ignore the following: in the century since the Bolshevik-led communist revolution in Russia, the vast majority of the world’s dictatorships, and often its worst ones, have been capitalist, not communist.

Nazi Germany and fascist Japan, Italy and Spain were all capitalist dictatorships. Dictatorships led by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, António Salazar in Portugal, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and many others – including those in various Gulf oil fiefdoms – all had free-market economies. Yet they were also brutal regimes that were backed by the United States.

It is true, of course, that the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin was one of the most odious criminals in human history, that Mao Zedong perpetrated horrendously destructive chaos on the Chinese people and that the North Korean dynasty is cruel and bizarre – as were the regimes of Mátyás Rákosi and Nicolae Ceaușescu in Hungary and Romania, respectively. In addition, many communist leaders have been strong-fisted dictators, including Cuba’s Castro brothers, East Germany's Erich Honecker, China's Xi Jinping and others.

However, focusing only on communist dictatorships provides students with a very limited view, and it reflects a peculiar American blindness that is most acute in Florida: the inability to see any tyranny in the Western Hemisphere except for leftist Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. This is despite the fact that dozens of rightist regimes in Latin America have arguably been far worse.

For example, as part of the United States' Operation Condor from 1974 to1983, the Argentine military murdered or orchestrated the disappearance of between 20,000 and 30,000 people. Many were drugged, loaded onto aircraft and then tossed out over the Atlantic Ocean. Similar atrocities of an equally high scale were committed by the Pinochet military dictatorship in Chile. These rightist regimes and many similarly blood-soaked ones throughout Latin America were armed, supported and sometimes installed into power by the United States.

House Bill 5, which DeSantis signed into law in 2021, revises Florida’s social studies standards and establishes the “Portraits in Patriotism Act”, requiring the Florida Department of Education to “curate oral history resources which integrate into the civics education curriculum . . . first-person accounts of victims of other nations’ governing philosophies.”How DeSantis and his allies want Florida teachers to define victims as well as which "governing philosophies" they suffered under can be seen on CPALMS, Florida’s official source for education standards information.

Funded by the state Department of Education and the Florida Legislature, CPALMS’ “Portraits in Patriotism” series contains "10 Lessons for K-12 students" – all of them focused on Cuban communism. Not one examines a dictatorship in any non-communist country.

DeSantis pledged to “get politicization out of the curriculum” and Corcoran, as the state's education commissioner, promised Floridians a “well-rounded civics education.” Instead, they helped create a highly politicized and factually distorted curriculum that serves to prevent Florida students from learning crucial history – and also the destructive role America has often played in it.

Glenn Sacks teaches high school social studies in California, and he has also worked in the Miami-Dade school district. He has a master's degree in Latin American studies, and his columns on education have been published nationally.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Ignorance wins and Floridians lose in DeSantis' war on history