An Historian Flubs on recent and Civil Rights Era History

My attention was first brought to this via TWITCHY, where they document other errors on top of this one. But I wanted to expand the area a bit the quote was in to show just how racially biased this author is. As a favored lefty professor of mine says… “to be on the side of the angels.”

LEGAL INSSURECTION’S post is an interesting read as well, where he notes:

  • Cooney’s book is virulently anti-white in passages. If I were a parent with a child at UCLA or one who was considering that school as an option, would I really want said child to go to a school where racist screeds are an acceptable form of scholarship?

Here is the fuller quote for those that want the before-and-after sentences:

There can be no better image of the shifting sands beneath our feet than a Black Lives Matter demonstration in St. Louis, Missouri. It passed the marble-clad home of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, two wealthy White lawyers each aiming their precious firearms directly at the crowd: an AR-Is rifle in the arms of Mark, in a pink polo shirt, and a tiny silver handgun held by Patricia, in a striped Hamburglar top. The couple had the weapons cocked and ready to shoot because they believed that the BLM marchers would break into their home, take their things, and do them grave harm. This visualized death threat directed at the protestors was their right, they believed, their privilege to show to society.

Or consider I7-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who used his semi-automatic weapon to kill two Black men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, while waging a glorious race war on behalf of his inherited White power. That’s not to mention the White people who rallied behind him to post his bail. Fear has gripped the patriarchy, and the threat of righteous violence—or the lethal use of it—is the patriarchy’s response.


Kara Cooney, The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Books, 2021), 341.

Here is the other glaring rewriting of history by a historian:

Here is that section — and BTW, no source (FOX NEWS, Kara McKinney, etc), had the page numbers to this section:

If we are to change the patriarchy from within, we’ll have to use dif­ferent tactics from the ones we’ve tried before. Consider the example of the Black Lives Matter movement, whose radical inclusion of all manner of people is the jujitsu move against a more powerful opposition. We all remember that the fight against separate-but-equal segregation — at lunch counters, elementary schools, universities, and public spaces — [<p. 349 | >p. 350] made Rosa Parks a hero when she took a seat in the White section of a public bus and started the Montgomery bus boycott. But the people who led the charge in the I96os were male civil rights activists — Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and John Lewis. In the 1960s, patriarchy combated patriarchy.


Kara Cooney, The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Books, 2021), 349-350.

TWITCHY continues with its refutation:

She could have, you know, just checked Wikipedia before writing the book:

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake‘s order to vacate a row of four seats in the “colored” section in favor of a white passenger, once the “white” section was filled.

Kara McKinney’s point about National Geographic having better editor’s should not be lost on the reader. Here is NAT GEOS PAGE on this historical event:

  • Nonetheless, at one point on the route, a white man had no seat because all the seats in the designated “white” section were taken. So the driver told the riders in the four seats of the first row of the “colored” section to stand, in effect adding another row to the “white” section. The three others obeyed. Parks did not.

…AND…

CHARLIE KIRK reiterates the windfall surely to come to Kyle:

….During an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Rittenhouse said his legal team is in the process of going after individuals who slandered and defamed him in the media.

When Carlson asked Kyle if he planned to hold “liars to account” who defamed him, Rittenhouse responded, “I have really good lawyers who are taking care of that right now.”

“So, I’m hoping one day there will be some, there’ll be accountability for their actions that they did,” Rittenhouse said.

During an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Rittenhouse said his legal team is in the process of going after individuals who slandered and defamed him in the media.

When Carlson asked Kyle if he planned to hold “liars to account” who defamed him, Rittenhouse responded, “I have really good lawyers who are taking care of that right now.”

“So, I’m hoping one day there will be some, there’ll be accountability for their actions that they did,” Rittenhouse said…..

At least she got the “Semi-Automatic” part of the AR-15 correct. Lol.

Larry Elder rips media for playing the race card in Rittenhouse trial

 

Rewriting Lincolnian History (Dinesh D’Souza) UPDATED

Both Google and Wikipedia attempt to hide the fact that Lincoln was a Republican by listing him as a member of the “National Union Party.” Is it true that Lincoln left the Republican Party to join some other party?

Now, I don’t know if this has changed within days… but Wiki is on their history [in this example] pretty well (graphic links to Wiki’s article on Abraham Lincoln, and the text is from their article on The National Union Party):

The National Union Party was the temporary name used by the Republican Party and elements of other parties for the national ticket in the 1864 presidential election that was held during the Civil War. For the most part, state Republican parties did not change their name.[1] The temporary name was used to attract War Democrats and border states, Unconditional Unionists and Unionist Party members who would not vote for the Republican Party. The party nominated incumbent Republican President Abraham Lincoln and for Vice President Democrat Andrew Johnson, who were elected in an electoral landslide.

[1] Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ed. History of U.S. Political Parties: vol II: 1860–1910 (1973) 2:1287.

(WIKI)

Google however doesn’t “CYA” with the “(Republican)” after The National Union Party like Wiki:

And here is a more humorous… although more true look at what our kids are being taught about Lincoln:

What’s Wrong With The 1619 Project? (PragerU)

In August of 2019, the New York Times published The 1619 Project. Its goal is to redefine the American experiment as rooted not in liberty but in slavery. In this video, Wilfred Reilly, Associate Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University, responds to The 1619 Project’s major claims.

Naomi Wolf Realizes Her Book Is #Fakenews (UPDATE)

DAILY CALLER has the story:

A former advisor to Bill Clinton and Al Gore may have set a record for fastest discrediting of a book when a BBC interviewer showed her the central thesis was based on a misreading of legal terminology.

Naomi Wolf’s book, “Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love,” which is not even out for another month, makes the claim that the British government continued to execute people for sodomy long after it was previously thought the practice ended. Wolf looked at records from the Old Bailey and saw the term “death recorded,” a term she realizes in this interview actually refers to cases in which a sentence of death is passed but suspended.

Wolf claims to have found “several dozen executions.” Her research, she claims, “corrects a misapprehension that is in every website that the last man was executed for sodomy in Britain in 1835.”

“I don’t think you’re right about this,” the BBC’s Matthew Sweet replied to her in the interview.

The presenter pointed to the case of Thomas Silver in 1859. Wolf claims in her book that Silver was executed, but he was not. “Death recorded” meant that a judge used judicial discretion to suspend a death sentence, a practice in use since the 1820s.

“I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified here actually happened,” Sweet added.

“That’s a really important thing to investigate,” Wolf replied

Sweet also added that the offense in question hardly makes a good example of same-sex love being criminalized, as it involved a 14 year-old’s “indecent assault” on a six year-old boy……..

Same As Above – Just YouTube

MORE…

Naomi Wolf’S New Book A Complete Misunderstanding | An Author’s Greatest Nightmare Unfolded On Live Radio.

Wow. That’s simply mortifying. It is, I suppose, a peril of being the sort of author that Wolf represents: a talented writer who lights on a topic of interest and then cranks out a book, rather than an expert in a subject that writes within their field.

Her publisher is standing by her in the most bizarre way possible:

The book hits U.S. stands on June 18, according to the Amazon listing. A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt spokesperson offered this statement: “While HMH employs professional editors, copyeditors, and proofreaders for each book project, we rely ultimately on authors for the integrity of their research and fact-checking. Despite this unfortunate error we believe the overall thesis of the book Outrages still holds. We are discussing corrections with the author.”

The entire premise of the book is wrong. Now, it remains true that homosexuals have been treated horribly over a span of centuries, including by the medical community and the legal system. But it’s not true that we were until recently executing people for it in the West….

UPDATE…

PJ-MEDIA has a great story on two fabricating authors, Wolf and Wolff in sheep’s clothing:

Let’s turn our attention for a moment to two authors, Wolf and Wolff. Feminist icon Naomi Wolf is reeling from a nonfiction fiasco that has caused her horrible and very public embarrassment. Irresponsible fictionalizer Michael Wolff is apparently incapable of shame.

What do they have in common? Not much, beyond the fact that they’re both bi-coastal elites who share a loathing for President Donald Trump.

In Wolf’s case, a perfect encapsulation of the PR nightmare befalling her latest work is presented by the Post Millennial’s Libby Emmons in “Naomi Wolf Was Destroyed by Her Research Bias.” While an author is ultimately responsible for fact-checking content, in this case, the “research bias” runs deep. The book started out as a thesis paper, which means it had to have been green-lit by both academia and New York publishing to ever see the light of day. These gatekeepers, steeped in leftist bias, failed to catch the monumental error that serves as the premise of Wolf’s book: the assertion that homosexuals were executed in Victorian England.

As for Wolff, how Trump could have allowed such an individual to plant himself on a couch in the West Wing for an extended period of time in quest of a truth-challenged tell-all is something that heartland Trumpservatives will never understand. Steve Bannon had a lot to do with it, and we all know how that turned out.

Unlike the chattering classes who would see traditionalist, sovereign America overrun and enervated in the name of globalism, Trump’s ardent supporters are not interested in gossipy, inconsequential trash-talk among members of the so-called cultural and managerial elite. Who gives a damn what Omarosa Newman or Rupert Murdoch think of the president or vice versa?  That Mr. Trump has kept promises and keeps trying to keep promises on issues they care about is what matters.

Trump’s base had no use or respect for Wolff’s first anti-Trump effort, Fire and Fury, an admittedly fictionalized, preventable screed that earned for the unverifiable muckraker a place in the earnings stratosphere with authors like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling.

Wolff’s latest, the sure-to-be wildly imagined Siege: Trump Under Fire, has already been called out for bold-faced prevarication by, of all entities, Robert Mueller’s team. Wolff knew he would be denied access to the White House for his “sequel,” (like he should have been the first time) but that didn’t stop him (why should it?) from penning another alleged tome full of cowardly hearsay from a collection of anonymous sources.

Flip the script: an almost-famous conservative author gathers salacious dirt from unnamed sources who claim to have firsthand knowledge that former President Barack Obama had numerous homosexual liaisons while in college, and then puts it in a book.

When asked to back up his reporting, the conservative author says, “I’m not a journalist, and such journalistic strictures do not apply to me. Besides, it seems like it could be true, right?”

That’s Michael Wolff. That’s what he does to earn his multi-million-dollar living…..

(READ IT ALL)

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) Passing From This Hell To The Next

(Updated Today)

Some say that Zinn has such a distorted view on history that it is like if Zinn saying “to you, ‘Would you like to see Versailles?’ and then took you on a tour of a broken shed on the outskirts of the palace grounds. ‘You see, pretty shabby, isn’t it?‘” I think its worse than that. Rather, I like what Harvard University professor Oscar Handlin said in his 1980 review of Zinn’s book when he denounced the “deranged quality of his fairy tale, in which the incidents are made to fit the legend, no matter how intractable the evidence of American history.” That’s better. A bit more of Handlin’s review:“It simply is not true,” Mr. Handlin noted,

that “what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.” It simply is not true that the farmers of the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries avidly desired the importation of black slaves, or that the gap between rich and poor widened in the eighteenth-century colonies. Zinn gulps down as literally true the proven hoax of Polly Baker and the improbable Plough Jogger, and he repeats uncritically the old charge that President Lincoln altered his views to suit his audience. The Geneva assembly of 1954 did not agree on elections in a unified Vietnam; that was simply the hope expressed by the British chairman when the parties concerned could not agree. The United States did not back Batista in 1959; it had ended aid to Cuba and washed its hands of him well before then. “Tet” was not evidence of the unpopularity of the Saigon government, but a resounding rejection of the northern invaders.

One should remember that Columbus and his people were not American Settlers, but part of the Spanish Conquistadors, as D’Souza notes:

The white men who settled America didn’t come as foreign invad­ers; they came as settlers. Unlike the Spanish, who ruled Mexico from afar, the English families who arrived in America left everything behind and staked their lives on the new world. In other words, they came as immigrants. We can say, of course, that immigration doesn’t confer any privileges, and just because you come here to settle doesn’t mean you have a right to the land that is here, but then that logic would also apply to the Indians.

Dinesh D’Souza, America: Imagine a World Without Her (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2014), 98.

Which causes one to ask JUST HOW GOOD is Zinn’s historical “narrative” from his Marxist “red colored glasses”? Reason.com asks the same question, “JUST HOW POOR IS ZINN’S HISTORY?

They then answer it:

After hearing of his death, I opened one of his books to a random page (Failure to Quit, p. 118) and was informed that there was “no evidence” that Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya was behind the 1986 bombing of La Belle Discotheque in Berlin. Whatever one thinks of the Reagan administration’s response, it is flat wrong, bordering on dishonest, to argue that the plot wasn’t masterminded in Tripoli. Nor is it correct to write that the American government, which funded the Afghan mujahadeen in the 1980s, “train[ed] Osama bin Laden,” a myth conclusively debunked by Washington Post correspondent Steve Coll in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars.

Of Cuba, the reader of A People’s History is told that upon taking power, “Castro moved to set up a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants.” Castro’s vast network of gulags and the spasm of “revolutionary justice” that sent thousands to prison or the executioners wall is left unmentioned. This is unsurprising, I suppose, when one considers that Zinn recently told an interviewer “you have to admire Cuba for being undaunted by this colossus of the North and holding fast to its ideals and to Socialism….Cuba is one of those places in the world where we can see hope for the future. With its very meager resources Cuba gives free health care and free education to everybody. Cuba supports culture, supports dance and music and theatre.”

There is also no mention of the Khmer Rouge or Pol Pot, though in a misleading digression into the so-called Mayaguez Incident, Zinn mentions that “a revolutionary regime had just taken power” in Cambodia and treated its American prisoners rather well. And it is untrue, as Zinn claims, that President Gerald Ford knew Cambodia had released its American captives in 1975 but still allowed a small Marine invasion simply to show American muscle after the Vietnam humiliation.

A People’s History is full of praise for supposedly forgotten truth-tellers like “Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger, and W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson,” all apologists for Stalinism. (Both Du Bois and Robeson were awarded the Stalin/Lenin Peace Prize by the Kremlin, and both enthusiastically accepted.) There is no accounting of communism’s crimes, though plenty of lamentations that, after the Second World War, “young and old were taught that anti-Communism was heroic.” Indeed, in the comic book version of A People’s History, Zinn writes that the Cold War “would last for over 40 years” but “to keep it going required political and social repression on both sides” (emphasis in original).

Despite conclusive evidence from Russian archives, Zinn suggests the atom spies Morton Sobel and Julius Rosenberg were railroaded with “weak” evidence and their subsequent trials were simply to show “what lay at the end of the line for those the government decided were traitors.” When Sobel confessed his espionage to the The New York Times earlier this year, Zinn told a reporter, “To me it didn’t matter whether they were guilty or not.”

This is a strange sentiment for someone whose job, one assumes, is to mine the historical record in search of historical truth. But Zinn wasn’t, as Schlesinger correctly said, a historian in any traditional sense. Zinn abjured footnotes (there are a number of quotes in A People’s History that I couldn’t verify), his books consist of clip jobs, interviews, and recycled material from A People’s History, and he was more likely to be found protesting on Boston Common than holding office hours at Boston University. But it is clear that those who have praised his work do so because they appreciate his conclusions, while ignoring his shoddy methodology.

This helps explain why few of his acolytes mention the effusive blurbs Zinn provided for David Ray Griffin’s two books of 9/11 conspiracy theories, Debunking 9/11 and The New Pearl Harbor, or why A People’s History uses the work of Holocaust denier David Irving to inflate the civilian death toll at Dresden….

They end this “eulogy” with this thought, “Call him what you will—activist, dissident, left-wing muckraker. Just don’t call him a historian.”

You see, many of  Zinn’s critiques came from the left ~ combined from a few sources:

Much of the criticism of Zinn has come from dissenters on the left. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once remarked that “I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.” Last year, the liberal historian Sean Wilentz referred to the “balefully influential works of Howard Zinn.” …. Socialist historian Michael Kazin judged Zinn’s most famous work “bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions.”

“Virtuous Intentions” is the worst type of tyranny! Many evils on this planet have been done in the name of “good intentions.” CS Lewis says as much in this often used quote:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2002), 292.

Howard is a Marxist/Anarchist, perfectly matched with Shane Claiborne’s view of history.

Even the socialist magazine DISSENT had to say that,

  • Pointing out what’s wrong with Zinn’s passionate tome is not difficult for anyone with a smattering of knowledge about the American past.

They continue to point out that this is merely a “polemic disguised as history.”  EAG.ORG notes this DISSENT article and more:

Generally speaking, “A People’s History of the United States” is an attempt by Zinn to paint the American experience as one of economic and racial oppression of the masses by the privileged white capitalist class.

Those on the left certainly have no problem with that basic premise. But over time they’ve discovered flaws in his work that bother them to no end.

Georgetown University Professor Michael Kazin, co-editor of Dissent Magazine and one-time member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society, offered a blistering analysis of Zinn’s attempts to revise American history. From the Spring 2004 edition of Dissent:

  • Zinn’s big book is quite unworthy of such fame and influence. A People’s History is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions. Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?”

In other words, Zinn’s anti-capitalist version of history is not anti-capitalist enough.

Kazin offers other dismissals of Zinn’s work:

  • “Like most propagandists, he measures individuals according to his own rigid standard of how they should have thought and acted.”
  • “Given his approach to history, Zinn’s angry pages about the global reach of U.S. power are about as surprising as his support for Ralph Nader in 2000.”
  • “The latest edition of the book includes a few paragraphs about the attacks of September 11, and they demonstrate how poorly Zinn’s view of the past equips him to analyze the present.”
  • “Pointing out what’s wrong with Zinn’s passionate tome is not difficult for anyone with a smattering of knowledge about the American past. By why has this polemic disguised as history attracted so many enthusiastic readers?”

Probably because, not long ago, a lot of people who think like Kazin where telling everyone how great Zinn’s books were.

Kazin isn’t the only leftist to offer criticism of Zinn’s “propaganda.” The American Federation of Teachers similarly dismissed “A People’s History” in its Winter 2012-13 American Educator magazine.

  • “I am less concerned here with what Zinn says than his warrant for saying it, less interested in the words that meet the eye than with the book’s interpretive circuitry that doesn’t,” the author of the magazine article wrote.

I especially like the honesty of David Horowitz’s “eulogy.” It is called “SPITTING ON HOWARD ZINN’S GRAVE?

The other day a reporter from NPR called me and asked me for my comments on the death of the lifelong Stalinist and propagandist Howard Zinn. I was a little reluctant because I knew that whatever I said, legions of unscrupulous myrmidons on the left would jump on it and say I had spit on Zinn’s grave. I also knew that while I was interviewed for ten minutes, out of what I said only a 20 second sound-bite would make it onto the air. I don’t begrudge NPR this selection. That’s what their obit was and would have to be, a collection of sound-bites.

Sure enough the bottom-feeders at FAIR pounced on my bite and accused me of spitting on Zinn’s grave. So here’s what I said that was cut from the interview. I’m not putting quotes around it because it’s from memory, but it’s pretty close to some of my remarks and captures the sense of others:  No one should celebrate the death of another human being unless they are child-molesters or murderers.

Howard Zinn lived to a ripe old age (87), and bad human being that he was, I wouldn’t begrudge him an extra few years; he’s done about as much damage as he could.

Howard Zinn was a Stalinist in the years when the Marxist monster was slaughtering millions of innocent people and launching his own ‘final solution’ against the Jews. Put another way, Howard Zinn was helping Stalin to conduct those slaughters and to enslave  all those who had the misfortune to live behind the Iron Curtain.  Howard never had second thoughts about his commitment to leftwing totalitarians and never flagged in his political commitment to freedom’s enemies. In the years since Stalin’s death, Zinn supported every enemy of the United States in every war, and devoted his writing talents to every socialist tyrant including Mao Zedong who killed 70 million Chinese in peacetime because they got in the way of his progressive agendas.

When the Cold War was over and freedom had won — thanks to all the political forces and figures (e.g., Reagan and Thatcher) that Zinn opposed – Zinn continued his malignant course. He supported America’s enemies right to the end including the Islamic Nazis whose first agenda is to finish the job that Hitler started and then to impose a totalitarian theocracy on the infidel world.

Zinn’s wretched tract, A People’s History of the United States, is worthless as history, and it is a national tragedy that so many Americans have fallen under its spell. It is a political cartoon which even the socialist magazine Dissent described as an intellectual fraud, continuing, they add:

Pointing out what’s wrong with Zinn’s passionate tome is not difficult for anyone with a smattering of knowledge about the American past. By why has this polemic disguised as history attracted so many enthusiastic readers?

All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill. Like his partner in crime, Noam Chomsky, Zinn’s life’s work was a pernicious influence on the young and ignorant, with destructive consequences for people everywhere.

Love It!


…one last note…


(First Video) Dennis Prager speaks with Howard Zinn, leading leftist, professor emeritus at Boston University and college campus icon discusses American Indian history. In this gracious interview excerpted herein, some real numbers emerge of what killed most of the Native American population:

  • From the 16th century through the early 20th century, no fewer than 93 confirmed epidemics and pandemics — all of which can be attributed to European contagions — decimated the American Indian population. Native American populations in the American Southwest plummeted by a staggering 90 percent or more.

The entire audio of which the below is only an excerpt can be heard here at AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE UNIVERSITY:

This is a short excerpt from Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary, AMERICA: Imagine a World Without Her.

Some Native American History Revisited:

(Editor’s note: A recent federal bill memorializing as a National Historic Trail what has come to be known as the Cherokee Indian Trail of Tears is based on false history, argues William R. Higginbotham. In this article, the Texas-based writer delves into the historic record and concludes that about 840 Indians not the 4,000 figure commonly accepted died in the 1837-38 trek west; that the government-financed march was conducted by the Indians themselves; and that the phrase “Trail of Tears” was a label that was added 70 years later under questionable circumstances.) The problem with some of our accounts of history is that they have been manipulated to fit conclusions not borne out by facts. Nothing could be more intellectually dishonest. This is about a vivid case in point.

U.S. Timetable According to Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (1589)

1789? 1589? or 1614?

This would mean that the Constitution was signed in 1614, the year Pocahontas married John Rolfe in Jamestown, Virginia. (The Blaze)

 

Via HotAir:

I don’t typically like to give anyone too much grief for what could easily be an innocent mental-to-verbal lapse, but… c’mon, now. Given that she took to the House floor to explicitly argue against the constitutionality of the GOP’s proposed Enforce The Law Act, I must say that her argument might have been a teeny bit more convincing if she was a little more firm in her background knowledge of the actual Constitution. Yikes.

Huh. I didn’t know.

Johnny Depp/Disney vs. History (h/t ~ Brad Thor)

I found this interesting, and it comes via with a h/t to BRAD THOR (novelist) via his TWITTER (a DAILY MAIL article), this adds to the information in my critique of some homework assigned to my oldest son when he was in elementary school, Native American History In Public School (Howard Zinn Refuted): I will also update the below with another article via AMERICAN RENNAISANCE — which is a racist site as far as I can tell. For this I apologize. However, their Native America article I am pulling from is a book review of “Scalp Dance: Indian Warfare on the High Plains, 1865-1879,” by Thomas Goodrich. (I do have the book in my collection.)

  • “There was even an attempt at one point to deny that Indians were warlike. Comanches were incredibly warlike. They swept everyone off the Southern plains. They nearly exterminated the Apaches. And you know, if you look at the Comanches and you look back in history at Goths and Vikings or Mongols or Celts — old Celts are actually a very good parallel.” (PBS)

And, may I say, if it were not for the “warlike” aspect of the Comanche, Spain would have continued North in their conquering of the Americas. So, in a divine “path of history,” America would have been a different place… and the Conquistador culture/venture of the Spaniards then would have made it a history truly worth the ire of the Left.

Another book I recommend (also in my collection), is, “On the border with Crook (Classics of the Old West),” by John G. Bourke.


The truth Johnny Depp wants to hide about the real-life Tontos: How Comanche Indians butchered babies, roasted enemies alive and would ride 1,000 miles to wipe out one family

  • Comanche Indians were responsible for one of the most brutal slaughters in the history of the Wild West
  • However, Johnny Depp wants to play Tonto in a more sympathetic light

The 16-year-old girl’s once-beautiful face was grotesque. She had been disfigured beyond all recognition in the 18 months she had been held captive by the Comanche Indians.

peace-loving Potowatomi tribe

For reasons best know to themselves, the film-makers have changed Tonto’s tribe to Comanche — in the original TV version, he was a member of the comparatively peace-loving Potowatomi tribe.

Now, she was being offered back to the Texan authorities by Indian chiefs as part of a peace negotiation.

To gasps of horror from the watching crowds, the Indians presented her at the Council House in the ranching town of San Antonio in 1840, the year Queen Victoria married Prince Albert.

‘Her head, arms and face were full of bruises and sores,’ wrote one witness, Mary Maverick. ‘And her nose was actually burnt off to the bone. Both nostrils were wide open and denuded of flesh.’

Once handed over, Matilda Lockhart broke down as she described the horrors she had endured — the rape, the relentless sexual humiliation and the way Comanche squaws had tortured her with fire. It wasn’t just her nose, her thin body was hideously scarred all over with burns.

When she mentioned she thought there were 15 other white captives at the Indians’ camp, all of them being subjected to a similar fate, the Texan lawmakers and officials said they were detaining the Comanche chiefs while they rescued the others.

It was a decision that prompted one of the most brutal slaughters in the history of the Wild West — and showed just how bloodthirsty the Comanche could be in revenge.

S C Gwynne, author of Empire Of The Summer Moon about the rise and fall of the Comanche, says simply: ‘No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.’

He refers to the ‘demonic immorality’ of Comanche attacks on white settlers, the way in which torture, killings and gang-rapes were routine. ‘The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward,’ he explains.

[…..]

For reasons best know to themselves, the film-makers have changed Tonto’s tribe to Comanche — in the original TV version, he was a member of the comparatively peace-loving Potowatomi tribe.

And yet he and his fellow native Americans are presented in the film as saintly victims of a Old West where it is the white settlers — the men who built America — who represent nothing but exploitation, brutality, environmental destruction and genocide.

Depp has said he wanted to play Tonto in order to portray Native Americans in a more sympathetic light. But the Comanche never showed sympathy themselves.

When that Indian delegation to San Antonio realised they were to be detained, they tried to fight their way out with bows and arrows and knives — killing any Texan they could get at. In turn, Texan soldiers opened fire, slaughtering 35 Comanche, injuring many more and taking 29 prisoner.

But the Comanche tribe’s furious response knew no bounds. When the Texans suggested they swap the Comanche prisoners for their captives, the Indians tortured every one of those captives to death instead.

‘One by one, the children and young women were pegged out naked beside the camp fire,’ according to a contemporary account. ‘They were skinned, sliced, and horribly mutilated, and finally burned alive by vengeful women determined to wring the last shriek and convulsion from their agonised bodies. Matilda Lockhart’s six-year-old sister was among these unfortunates who died screaming under the high plains moon.’

Not only were the Comanche specialists in torture, they were also the most ferocious and successful warriors — indeed, they become known as ‘Lords of the Plains’.

[…..]

They terrorised Mexico and brought the expansion of Spanish colonisation of America to a halt. They stole horses to ride and cattle to sell, often in return for firearms.

Other livestock they slaughtered along with babies and the elderly (older women were usually raped before being killed), leaving what one Mexican called ‘a thousand deserts’. When their warriors were killed they felt honour-bound to exact a revenge that involved torture and death.

Settlers in Texas were utterly terrified of the Comanche, who would travel almost a thousand miles to slaughter a single white family.

The historian T R Fehrenbach, author of Comanche: The History Of A People, tells of a raid on an early settler family called the Parkers, who with other families had set up a stockade known as Fort Parker. In 1836, 100 mounted Comanche warriors appeared outside the fort’s walls, one of them waving a white flag to trick the Parkers.

‘Benjamin Parker went outside the gate to parley with the Comanche,’ he says. ‘The people inside the fort saw the riders suddenly surround him and drive their lances into him. Then with loud whoops, mounted warriors dashed for the gate. Silas Parker was cut down before he could bar their entry; horsemen poured inside the walls.’

Survivors described the slaughter: ‘The two Frosts, father and son, died in front of the women; Elder John Parker, his wife ‘Granny’ and others tried to flee. The warriors scattered and rode them down.

‘John Parker was pinned to the ground, he was scalped and his genitals ripped off. Then he was killed. Granny Parker was stripped and fixed to the earth with a lance driven through her flesh. Several warriors raped her while she screamed.

‘Silas Parker’s wife Lucy fled through the gate with her four small children. But the Comanche overtook them near the river. They threw her and the four children over their horses to take them as captives.’

So intimidating was Comanche cruelty, almost all raids by Indians were blamed on them. Texans, Mexicans and other Indians living in the region all developed a particular dread of the full moon — still known as a ‘Comanche Moon’ in Texas — because that was when the Comanche came for cattle, horses and captives.

They were infamous for their inventive tortures, and women were usually in charge of the torture process.

The Comanche roasted captive American and Mexican soldiers to death over open fires. Others were castrated and scalped while alive. The most agonising Comanche tortures included burying captives up to the chin and cutting off their eyelids so their eyes were seared by the burning sun before they starved to death.

Contemporary accounts also describe them staking out male captives spread-eagled and naked over a red-ant bed. Sometimes this was done after excising the victim’s private parts, putting them in his mouth and then sewing his lips together.

One band sewed up captives in untanned leather and left them out in the sun. The green rawhide would slowly shrink and squeeze the prisoner to death.

T R Fehrenbach quotes a Spanish account that has Comanche torturing Tonkawa Indian captives by burning their hands and feet until the nerves in them were destroyed, then amputating these extremities and starting the fire treatment again on the fresh wounds. Scalped alive, the Tonkawas had their tongues torn out to stop the screaming.

[…..]

[…..]

But the Comanche found their match with the Texas Rangers. Brilliantly portrayed in the Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove books, the Rangers began to be recruited in 1823, specifically to fight the Comanche and their allies. They were a tough guerilla force, as merciless as their Comanche opponents.

They also respected them. As one of McMurtry’s Ranger characters wryly tells a man who claims to have seen a thousand-strong band of Comanche: ‘If there’d ever been a thousand Comanche in a band they’d have taken Washington DC.”

The Texas Rangers often fared badly against their enemy until they learned how to fight like them, and until they were given the new Colt revolver.

During the Civil War, when the Rangers left to fight for the Confederacy, the Comanche rolled back the American frontier and white settlements by 100 miles.

Even after the Rangers came back and the U.S. Army joined the campaigns against Comanche raiders, Texas lost an average of 200 settlers a year until the Red River War of 1874, where the full might of the Army — and the destruction of great buffalo herds on which they depended — ended Commanche depredations.

Interestingly the Comanche, though hostile to all competing tribes and people they came across, had no sense of race. They supplemented their numbers with young American or Mexican captives, who could become full-fledged members of the tribe if they had warrior potential and could survive initiation rites.

Weaker captives might be sold to Mexican traders as slaves, but more often were slaughtered. But despite the cruelty, some of the young captives who were subsequently ransomed found themselves unable to adapt to settled ‘civilised life and ran away to rejoin their brothers.

One of the great chiefs, Quanah, was the son of the white captive Cynthia Ann Parker. His father was killed in a raid by Texas Rangers that resulted in her being rescued from the tribe. She never adjusted to life back in civilisation and starved herself to death.

Quanah surrendered to the Army in 1874. He adapted well to life in a reservation, and indeed the Comanche, rather amazingly, become one of the most economically successful and best assimilated tribes.

As a result, the main Comanche reservation was closed in 1901, and Comanche soldiers served in the U.S. Army with distinction in the World Wars. Even today they are among the most prosperous native Americans, with a reputation for education.

By casting the cruelest, most aggressive tribe of Indians as mere saps and victims of oppression, Johnny Depp’s Lone Ranger perpetuates the patronising and ignorant cartoon of the ‘noble savage’.

Not only is it a travesty of  the truth, it does no favours to the Indians Depp is so keen to support.

…READ MORE…

‘The Merciless Indian Savages’

….Col. William Collins commanded men who faced the Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux. Of these tribes, he wrote: “War with somebody . . . is the natural state of an Indian people. Every tribe has some hereditary enemies with whom it is always at war . . . It is by war that they obtain wealth, position and influence with the tribe.”

What modern accounts of the “noble” Indian warrior commonly leave out is his manner of making war, and it is the eye-witness and contemporary records that both enrich Mr. Goodrich’s book and make it sometimes painful to read. Military historian John Keegan has written that “there is a cruelty in the warfare of some pre-Columbian peoples of North and Central America that has no parallel elsewhere in the world,” but it would seem that this barbarity continued well into the 19th century.

Col. Henry Carrington wrote: “The great real fact is, that these Indians take alive when possible, and slowly torture.” Enemy dead who could not be tortured were horribly mutilated. This is how Col. Carrington describes the battlefield where, on December 21, 1866, 80 American troops were annihilated by a combined force of Sioux and Cheyenne under Chief Red Cloud:

Eyes torn out and laid on the rocks; noses cut off; ears cut off; chins hewn off; teeth chopped out; . . . brains taken out and placed on rocks with other members of the body; entrails taken out and exposed; hands cut off; feet cut off; arms taken out from sockets; private parts severed and indecently placed on the person; . . . skulls severed in every form, from chin to crown; muscles of calves, thighs, stomach, breast, back, arms and cheek taken out. Punctures upon every sensitive part of the body, even to the soles of the feet and palms of the hand. All this only approximates the whole truth.

A few of the soldiers had managed to kill themselves before being captured. Many — probably most — were taken alive and tortured to death. This was the potential fate of every soldier on the Plains, and it is hardly surprising that it was standard practice to “save the last bullet for yourself.”

The aftermath of the Little Bighorn massacre was entirely typical. Private Jacob Adams wrote:

The men . . . were . . . scalped and horribly mutilated. Some . . . were decapitated, while many bodies were lacking feet . . . As I walked over the field I saw many unfortunate dead who had been propped into a sitting position and used as targets by bowmen who had proceeded to stick them full of steel-headed arrows . . . Some bodies were set up on their knees and elbows and their hind parts had been shot full of arrows.

Most of the bodies were naked, and many had been elaborately savaged. Isaiah Dorman, an interpreter, and the only black in Custer’s party, was treated with particular contempt. A witness wrote:

Isaiah lay with his breast full of arrows and an iron picket pin thrust through his testicles into the ground, pinning him down . . . Dorman’s penis was cut off and stuffed in his mouth, which was regarded among the Indians as the deepest insult possible . . . His body had been ripped open, and a coffee pot and cup which he carried with him were filled with his blood. What devilish purpose the Indians had in catching his blood I do not know.

Major Marcus Reno, who had ridden with Custer, wrote of a scene he found in the Indian village near the battleground:

One ghastly find was near the center of the field where three teepee poles were standing upright in the ground in the form of a triangle. On top of each were inverted camp kettles, while below them on the grass were the heads of three men . . . The three heads were placed within the triangle, facing each other in a horrible sightless stare.

Whites who observed Indians at their grisly work described them as expert butchers of human meat. A drummer named James Lockwood wrote of the deaths of two soldiers outside Julesburg, Colorado: “In less time than it takes to read this, they were stripped of their clothing, mutilated in a manner which would emasculate them, if alive, and their scalps torn from their heads.”

Far more gratifying than mutilating the dead was torturing the living. This was the ultimate aim of Indian warfare and was considered a religious act. Col. Richard Dodge left this by no means exceptional account of the fate of one captive:

He was stripped of his clothing, laid on his back on the ground and his arms and legs, stretched to the utmost, were fastened by thongs to pins driven into the ground. In this state he was not only helpless, but almost motionless. All this time the Indians pleasantly talked to him. It was all a kind of joke. Then a small fire was built near one of his feet. When that was so cooked as to have little sensation, another fire was built near the other foot; then the legs and arms and body of the whole person was crisped. Finally a small fire was built on the naked breast and kept up until life was extinct.

It is worth noting that Indians did not single out whites for cruelty; they treated them just as they did other Indians. Mr. Goodrich quotes a Crow chief explaining to General George Crook his hatred for the Sioux:

They hunt upon our mountains. They fish in our streams. They have stolen our horses. They have murdered our squaws, our children . . . We want back our lands. We want their women for our slaves, to work for us as our women have had to work for them. We want their horses for our young men, and their mules for our squaws. The Sioux have trampled upon our hearts. We shall spit upon their scalps.

As this passage indicates, Indians did not restrict their slaughter to combatants; many white homesteaders were killed without regard to sex or age. Capt. Henry Palmer left this terrible account of the aftermath of a raid:

We found the bodies of three little children who had been taken by the heels by the Indians and swung around against the log cabin, beating their heads to a jelly. Found the hired girl some fifteen rods from the ranch staked out on the prairie, tied by her hands and feet, naked, body full of arrows and horribly mangled.

Mr. Goodrich devotes an entire chapter to women’s narratives of captivity. Its title is “A Fate Worse Than Death,” and he does not use this antique expression ironically. A captive in an Indian camp was fair game for any kind of degradation:

She was led from her tent and every remnant of clothing torn from her body. A child that she was holding to her breast was wrenched from her arms and she was knocked to the ground. In this nude condition the demons gathered round her and while some held her down by standing on her wrists and their claws clutched in her hair, others outraged her person. Not less than thirty repeated the horrible deed.

Of two white women rescued by the 7th Cavalry in 1869 it was recorded: “At first they had been sold back and forth among the bucks for fifteen ponies each, but their last owners had only paid two.” One victim “appeared to be 50 years old, although she was less than 25.” She had not only been repeatedly raped but had received constant beatings from jealous squaws.

Indians delighted in trophy-taking, and prized some trophies over others. Catherine German wrote of the death of her sister:

Some time passed while the Indians were parleying; they seemed to make a choice between Joanna and myself . . . The Indians removed our bonnets to see if we had long hair . . . My hair was short . . . Joanna was sitting on a box that had been taken from our wagon . . . We heard the report of a rifle and when we looked again, our beloved sister, Joanna, was dead. The Indians then scalped their long-haired victim . . . This all happened within a very short time, and before any of us could realize it, our once happy family life was forever ended.

Contemporary accounts show that the lot of an Indian woman was not much better than that of a white captive. Lieutenant James Steele wrote: “She is beaten, abused, reviled, driven like any other beast of burden . . . She is bought and sold; wife, mother, and pack animal, joined in one hideous and hopeless whole.”….

 

Anti-American/Anti-Military Tax-Payer Funded Revisionist History (WWII)

 

Two Must see posts on this issue (besides the ones below):

American Thinker has this post on the event that should enrage the normal person. It is entitled, Ripping the USA: Revising History Dismally

It happened in July. A group of 25 selected professor historians met in Hawaii at a workshop sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). They were to present and hear scholarly papers on the history of these United States in World War II. It was to be a high-level intellectual rendering of that war receding now into history.

It turned out to be a largely left-liberal diatribe about our nation’s sinful past. It was partisan as hell and, worst of all, an awkward attempt to rewrite history to make America out to be the world’s worst villain and all-around Bad Guy. Some speaker/presenters, presumably sticklers for historical accuracy, even made the USA out to be the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Yes, you read that correctly.

[….]

One of the 25 scholars invited was Professor Penelope A. Blake of Rock Valley College in Rockford, Illinois. Daughter of two World War II veterans, she had looked forward to this conference owing to her deep interest and scholarship in World War II history. Instead, she left the scholars’ conference incensed, ready to “do something” to remedy its patently absurd wrongs done to American history.

Instead of honest, fact-based analyses, Dr. Blake found a partisan howling, an agenda “driven by overt political bias and a blatant anti-American agenda,” reports Scott Johnson of Powerline,…

[….]

What a travesty of the Left. Here is the Powerline list-o’-stuff from there investigative post on this:

1. The U.S. military and its veterans constitute an imperialistic, oppressive force which has created and perpetuated its own mythology of liberation and heroism, insisting on a “pristine collective memory” of the war. The authors/presenters equate this to Japan’s almost total amnesia and denial about its own war atrocities (Fujitani, White, Yoneyama, 9, 23). One presenter specifically wrote about turning down a job offer when he realized that his office would overlook a fleet of U.S. Naval warships, “the symbol of American power and the symbol of our [Hawaiians’] dispossession…I decided they could not pay me enough” (Osorio 5). Later he claimed that electric and oil companies were at the root of WWII, and that the U.S. developed a naval base at Pearl Harbor to ensure that its own coasts would not be attacked (9, 13).

2. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor should be seen from the perspective of Japan being a victim of western oppression (one speaker likened the attack to 9-11, saying that the U.S. could be seen as “both victim and aggressor” in both attacks); that American “imperial expansion” forced Japan’s hand: “For the Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western Imperialism” (Yoneyama 335-336); and the Pearl Harbor attack could be seen as a “pre-emptive strike.” (No mention of the main reason for the Pearl Harbor attack: the U.S. had cut off Japan’s oil supply in order to stop the wholesale slaughter of Chinese civilians at the hands of the Japanese military.) Another author argued that the Japanese attack was no more “infamous” or “sneaky” than American actions in Korea or Vietnam (Rosenberg 31-32).

3. War memorials, such as the Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery (where many WWII dead are buried, including those executed by the Japanese on Wake Island and the beloved American journalist Ernie Pyle), are symbols of military aggression and brutality “that pacify death, sanitize war and enable future wars to be fought” (Ferguson and Turnbull, 1). One author stated that the memorials represent American propaganda, “the right to alter a story” (Camacho 201).

The appellants—fifteen former “comfort women” (six South Koreans, Four Chinese, three Filipinos, and one Taiwanese) — were forcibly abducted from their homes and coerced into serving as sex slaves for the Japanese military before and during World War II. The women allege that they endured rape, torture and other degrading treatment under a system of human trafficking and slavery. Between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese Imperial Forces abducted an estimated 200,000 young women—some as young as 12—from Asian countries to serve as sex slaves, or “comfort women,” for more than 2 million Japanese soldiers and officers.

4. The U.S. military has repeatedly committed rapes and other violent crimes throughout its past through the present day. Cited here was the handful of cases of attacks by Marines in Okinawa (Fujitani, et al, 13ff). (What was not cited were the mass-murders, rapes, mutilations of hundreds of thousands of Chinese at the hands of the Japanese throughout the 1930s and 40s. This issue is a perfect example of the numerous instances of assertions made without balance or historical context.) Another author stated that the segregation in place within our military and our “occupation” of Germany after the war was comparable to Nazism (‘we were as capable of as much evil as the Germans”) even though the author admits, with some incredulity, that he “saw no genuine torture, despite all the [American] arrogance, xenophobia and insensitivity.” He attributes American kindness towards conquered Germans to our “wealth and power” which allowed us to “forego the extreme kinds of barbarism” (Davis 586). Another author/presenter compared the temporary relocation camps erected by Americans during the war to Nazi extermination camps (Camacho 206). (This is perhaps the most outrageous, offensive and blatantly false statement I have ever read in a supposedly scholarly work).

5. Those misguided members of the WWII generation on islands like Guam and Saipan who feel gratitude to the Americans for saving them from the Japanese are blinded by propaganda supporting “the image of a compassionate America” or by their own advanced age. One author/presenter questioned whether the Americans had saved anyone from anything (Camacho 177, 209), arguing that the Americans could be seen as easily and justifiably as “conquerors and invaders” (199).

6. It was “the practice” of the U.S. military in WWII to desecrate and disrespect the bodies of dead Japanese (Camacho 186). (Knowing this to be absolutely false, I challenged the speaker/author, who then admitted that this was not the “practice” of our military. Still, the word remains in his publication. As he obviously knew this to be false, I can only assume that his objective was not scholarship but anti-military propaganda.)

7. Conservatives and veterans in the U.S. have had an undue and corrupt influence on how WWII is remembered, for example, successfully lobbying to remove from the Smithsonian Enola Gay exhibit images of the destruction caused by the atom bomb and the revisionist portrayal of the Japanese as victims in the war (Yoneyama). (What the presenter and author, Ms. Yoneyama, failed to explain was why all representations of Japan’s murderous rampages throughout China and the Philippines were removed from the exhibit as well…surely not at the request of American veterans or conservatives. When I challenged Ms. Yoneyama to explain this issue, a tense exchange ensued, but I finally established that Japanese influences had also played a role in “shaping” the exhibit. This never would have been mentioned had I not demanded the speaker address this distortion in her presentation. Ms. Yoneyama clearly intended to present a one-sided attack on those who wanted the exhibit to emphasize the many reasons why the atom bombs were necessary.) Ms. Yoneyama concluded her essay with a parting shot at the veterans, whom she mockingly labels “martyrs of their sacred war,” and “conservative elites” who objected to the Smithsonian’s revisionist history: “the Smithsonian debate ended in the defeat of those who sought critical rethinking, as well as the defeat of those who questioned the self-evident…, and the victory of those who felt threatened by obfuscation of the contours of conventional knowledge” (emphasis mine, 329,339). The author’s elitist dismissal of those who questioned the Enola Gay exhibit is representative of the perspectives and tone of much of the conference, as illustrated by the following point.

8. Conservatives are reactionary nationalists (no distinction was made between nationalism and patriotism), pro-military “tea baggers” who are incapable of “critical thinking.” Comments were made about “people who watch Fox News” not caring if the news “is accurate or not” (Yoneyama, Lecture). The end result of this deprecation within the conference room was to discourage debate and create an atmosphere of intolerance to opposing views, in direct violation of the stated objectives of the NEH. Several participants told me privately that they considered me “brave” for speaking up, thus begging the question: At a conference supposedly committed to openness and tolerance of all views, why should it take bravery to speak one’s mind?

9. Relating to the above, even members of the NEH review board are not immune to “reactionary” pro-military views. One essay recounts how an earlier attempt to receive funding for a similar conference was denied because some NEH reviewers thought the “program lacked diversity and balance among points of view”….and that the organizers possessed “a very specific, ‘politically correct’ agenda,” noting that “bias is dangerously threatening throughout.” The authors of the essay dismissed and denigrated these NEH reviewers with the same elitist attitude they exhibited towards the “Fox News” viewers: “Clearly this reviewer was unable to comprehend our understanding” of the conference objectives (in other words, he/she is stupid), and “what he or she really desired was the inclusion of defenders of American nationalism and militarism” (Fujitani, et al, 24).

10. Veterans’ memories of their own experiences in the war are suspect and influenced by media and their own self-delusion (Rosenberg, 18, 24). Therefore, it is the role of academics to “correct” their history. As one organizer commented, this will be more easily accomplished once the WWII generation has passed away. Another wrote, “America’s nostalgic war memories are beginning to fray around the edges” (White, 267).

11. War memorials like the Arizona Memorial should be recast as “peace memorials,” sensitive to all viewers from all countries, especially the many visitors from Japan. The conference dedicated significant time to the discussion of whether or not a Japanese memorial in honor of victims of the atom bombs should be erected at the Arizona Memorial site, in order to pacify Japanese visitors who may be offended by the “racism” [anti-Japanese] of the Arizona Memorial. To this end, the conference organizers discussed a revised film (1992) shown to visitors to the Arizona Memorial which removed some of the earlier (1980) film’s “Japan-bashing” and warnings about the need for the American military to remain prepared in the future. The new film, which emphasizes the reasons (justifications?) for the Japanese bombings of Pearl Harbor, includes fewer battle scenes and “transforms the triumphant feelings of victory with a more mournful reflection of losses inflicted by war” (White 285), thus sending a more pacifist, anti-war message and offering a perspective which makes people “less angry” after viewing the film (the author acknowledges that this has worked well, except for “older citizens” who are outraged by the “revisionist” sympathy towards the Japanese) (287). The new, more “inclusive” film features visual images of both American and Japanese dead, Japanese Buddhist monks visiting the memorial, and a culminating text which reads “Mourn the dead” as opposed to “Mourn American dead” or “Mourn our dead” so that “it represented the U.S. and Japanese” (emphasis mine, 288). The memorial’s superintendent, Donald Magee, summed up the tone of the new film: “We don’t take sides….here at Pearl Harbor we don’t condemn the Japanese” (292). Based on the author’s description, I refused to attend a viewing of the film, in protest of its appeasement of treachery and attempts to revise historical fact.

The American Legion has a list of some of the presenters. (This post should be read.) I am sure you can contact these professors through emails found on their schools websites.

The presenters were:

Emily Rosenberg, Professor of History, University of California, Irvine

Yujin Yaguchi, Professor of American Studies, University of Tokyo

Warren Nishimoto, Director of the University of Hawai‘i Center for Oral History

Jonathan Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, Professor of Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai‘i

Lisa Yoneyama, Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at UC San Diego

Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Professor of Pacific and Asian History, Australian National University

Yuma Totani, Assistant Professor of History, University of Hawai‘i