The heart of revisionist history is this: the textbook version of the story is wrong.
It may be wrong for simply technical reasons. Maybe certain documents have been suppressed, or lost, or ignored. Maybe the event is far more complex than the textbooks indicate. But in some matters, especially those regarding banking, war, and government spending, the textbook story has been deliberately written by court historians. The court historians have deliberately suppressed information, because the information points to the conspiratorial origins of the event. It is crucial for establishment historians to be able to dismiss such investigations as conspiracy history, as if conspiracies did not exist in history, and as if they did not control events in the past.
So, the revisionist historian should begin with this question: what aspects of a particular event could not possibly have taken place? This leads to the next question: what questions have the historical guild deliberately refused to ask? Why?
Almost any war in the history of the United States is eligible for revisionist history. I have said before that what we need is a multi-volume study of America's wars. Each volume would examine one war. It would answer three questions:
1. How did the United States get into the war?
2. How was the war paid for?
3. What were the social and economic results of the war?
It is not a radical thesis to argue that the financing of a war and the outcome of a war changes society more than almost any other non-military events. War is well understood as a device for radical social change. But only rarely do conventional historians examine in minute detail the way in which a war was financed. In virtually all cases, it was financed by debt. This debt burden changed the postwar society. This is readily admitted with respect to the French and Indian War (1755-63), which George Washington personally started, and the post-war attempt by the British government to tax American colonists, especially newspaper owners and lawyers: the Stamp Act. A century ago, the Left-wing historian Charles Beard wrote his history of the origins of the United States Constitution in terms of the attempt of majority of the attendees at the Constitutional Convention to get the federal government to take over the debts of the states. But that interpretation fell out of favor in the late 1950's. Only recently has it been reconsidered.
One of the problems in discussing such things as the assassination of President Kennedy or 9/11 is this: there is no popular thesis to replace the government's official interpretation. It's a Pareto problem. Even when Americans say they don't believe the government's version, they don't know what version to believe. So, the government's version wins by default.
In my opinion, the most egregious example of the professional historical guild is its suppressing of evidence of the many pre-Columbus visits to the Western hemisphere by explorers and traders, both across the Pacific and across the Atlantic. The evidence keeps piling up that there were such visits, and yet the historical guild has been successful in suppressing all such stories, with the possible exception of visits to Newfoundland by the Vikings. The academic community has been successful in destroying the careers of any historian who has attempted to argue that Columbus was last.
Let me give you an example. I think it is beyond question that the Cherokee nation had roots in Western Europe. There is a 2012 book on this by Donald Yates: Old World Roots of the Cherokee: How DNA, Ancient Alphabets and Religion Explain the Origins of America's Largest Indian Nation. Needless to say, it was not published by a university press. Also needless to say, the author is not employed by a university. The book is remarkable in its documentation. It has a large bibliography and a lot of footnotes. It draws upon materials that have been completely unknown to the academic community.
In my course on American history for the Ron Paul Curriculum, I begin with a consideration of facts that don't fit in. There are dozens of these facts. Actually, there are thousands of these facts. You can teach an entire year's course on these facts. But then you would have to teach about the suppression of these facts, a suppression which goes back at least two centuries.
The great historiographical question is not this: why did it take so long for Europeans to discover the Western Hemisphere? The question is this: why was the knowledge of this hemisphere forgotten for 1,000 years -- or maybe 700 years -- by Europeans?
My teaching strategy is this: I am not going to be able to answer the second question. I am merely going to point out to students the importance of the question and the evidence behind the question. I assume that students are always interested in suppressed information. A lot of Americans are interested in suppressed information. The Internet has made it possible for millions of Americans to begin to investigate thousands of these questions. Of course, most of the questions are never known by the vast majority of people who search the Web. But enough of them are searching, so that the government now has an enormous difficulty in dismissing all of these rival theories as conspiracy theories. There is simply too much evidence available on the web, especially visible evidence.
If I were going to teach a course on 9/11, I would begin with this question: where did the plane that flew over Western Pennsylvania crash? One thing can be seen without question: it did not crash in a single location. There were no debris parts available for investigation at the supposed crash site. There never were any such parts. Yet this story has been suppressed. Another question is this: what happened to the orange boxes in each of the four planes? Not one of them has ever been officially recovered, or the information in those recorders made available to the public. Then there is the famous question, visible for all to see: why did Building 7 collapse? Nothing hit it.
Start with what is visibly impossible according to the official accounts. Then work backwards, if you have enough time.
My approach is to start with the anomalies, and then challenge the students to do their own research on any of them that piques their interest. Let them figure out an explanation. Let them investigate facts that simply do not appear in any high school textbook or college textbook. Let them figure out that certain facts have been suppressed, initially actively suppressed, and then forgotten by the guild. Let them figure out that the historical guild controls the flow of information so as to favor historical interpretations that governments have promoted from the beginning. This is especially true regarding the origins of wars and their financing.
It is not necessary to answer every question regarding the origins of a particular event. It is only necessary to point out that certain events took place that the textbooks do not admit took place. Alternatively, it is only necessary to point out anomalies that that are ignored in the official versions of the events. The goal is to raise suspicions on the part of students regarding textbook explanations, which are invariably government explanations.
My advice regarding revisionist history is this: begin with those events that cannot possibly have taken place in the way to the official explanation said they took place. You don't have to have a comprehensive theory regarding how they took place. You simply have to have sufficient evidence to point out that the official explanation cannot possibly be true. You start with what cannot be true, and then you work back to what might be true.
If, along the way, you can provide evidence that individuals who initially called into question the official version wound up dead under suspicious circumstances, this also is an advantage. With respect to the Kennedy assassination, the death of Dorothy Kilgallen is the obvious example. She died immediately after her detailed interview with Jack Ruby. Here was a celebrity and well-known reporter whose death somehow created little interest on the part of other reporters. Yet I have known about it for half a century. It is easily investigated on the Web. For four decades, it wasn't.
Then you go to Mae Brussell, whose remarkable articles are online. For decades, only the hard core knew about her -- mainly on the Left.
In my view, it is unwise to teach history in terms of a textbook. You can use a textbook to find out the official explanations, or to get certain publicly available details, but anyone who relies on a historical textbook to explain history has already surrendered the truth.
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