Online Revisionism Is Undermining Fake News and Fake Historiography
As most of my subscribers know by now, I have been a revisionist historian since the age of 16.
I wrote my first term paper on the attack on Pearl Harbor. That was in the fall of 1958. I wrote it for a 12th-grade course on social studies. That got me started. I have never stopped.
I suppose this makes me one of the grand old men of revisionist history. There were very few historians of my generation who became revisionists, and among those who did, most of them did not go into print. They could not find publishers for their books and articles.
I have written two monographs on revisionist history. One of them was on how liberal theologians captured the northern Presbyterian Church in the 1930's: Crossed Fingers. The other is on the capture of the fledgling United States of America by a small group of conspirators who illegally overturned the Constitution of the United States, beginning with a closed, oath-bound meeting in the summer of 1787: Conspiracy in Philadelphia. Hardly anyone cared about the first book. It took me 34 years to write it. As you can imagine, the second book has not gained wide acceptance. I did not expect it to.
To get both of these books into print, I had to self-publish them. There was no way that any book publisher was going to publish either of them. There is no interest in the first one, and the second one was far too hot a potato for even conservative publishers to touch.
As I have written on several occasions, I was warned about this by a fledgling revisionist historian, Tom Thalken. He had an office next to mine at the long-defunct Center for American Studies, which had been the Volker Charities' organization prior to 1963. Thalken was a trained librarian. He later set up the Herbert Hoover library in Iowa. He knew his stuff.
He had been a student of American history under the premier academic revisionist historian of World War I and World War II, Charles C. Tansill, who taught at Georgetown University. Tansill took him aside in the late 1950's and warned him not to pursue a degree in American history. He warned him that if he went public with his views on America's entry into World War II, which were Tansill's views, he would be blackballed professionally for the rest of his career. Thalken took the advice seriously, and he switched majors.
This is why there are virtually no revisionist historians with PhD's. It has been a long-term process of screening out alternative views.
REVISING FDR: THE #1 REVISIONIST CHALLENGE
There is a litmus test for modern American historians. That test is the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. There is a voluminous bibliography of books on Roosevelt, and with few exceptions, all of them are favorable. At one end, there are seemingly neutral books that describe what he did, but do not criticize it in any significant way. At the other end is sheer hagiography. Textbook accounts tend to be hagiographic.
The American conservative movement in the American Libertarian movement will not be complete until there is a comprehensive revisionist enterprise exposing every dark aspect of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. As with all great intellectual projects, one man was supervising, but also as with all great intellectual projects, there must be a division of labor. The following topics would need to be covered in depth in a series of heavily footnoted monographs.
Roosevelt's destruction of the gold coin standard as his first presidential actThere are monographs on some of these issues, but they have never been compiled into a comprehensive multi-volume study of his administration.
His pro-Stalinist foreign-policy
Communist infiltration, beginning with the Department of Agriculture under Henry A. Wallace
His anti-Japan foreign-policy
His awareness of the imminence of Japan's attack
The influence of the Council on Foreign Relations in his administration
The influence of far left ideologues in his administration
The negative economic effects of his administration's alphabet organizations
Wartime propaganda based on lies
His collaboration with Churchill to get America into the war
His pro-Stalin efforts to undermine the British Empire
Texas concentration camps of kidnapped South Americans: Japanese- and German-speaking
A detailed study of the Yalta Conference
There must also be a midsize study that intelligent Americans will read. There must be a popular series of YouTube videos encapsulating the findings in each of these areas.
This would take a lifetime for a single scholar. He would need the cooperation of a number of graduate students unless he was almost as smart as David Gordon, but also willing to write 20 volumes, which Dr. Gordon did not do. (Gordon could have done this in any of a dozen of fields. Maybe more. With no extra reading.)
WWI: THE BIRTH OF MODERN REVISIONISM
The origin of World War I was the great revisionist specialty of the first generation of modern revisionist American historians. It was also the training ground for European historians generally. They all took the same view: the war did not result from the machinations of the German Emperor. It was a joint disaster.
There was virtually no opposition announced publicly during the war in the United States. Anyone who openly opposed it risked going to jail, as happened to Eugene Debs. (Debs was pardoned by Harding shortly after he was inaugurated). The Supreme Court after 1919 upheld convictions of verbal opponents of the war under the Sedition Act of 1918. The reaction was the origin of the modern civil rights movement. Woodrow Wilson was anything but liberal when it came to opposition to his war.
There is a book on this suppression of publishing by the man I regard as the premier revisionist historian in the United States, James J. Martin. As with most of his books, it was published by his publishing house, Ralph Miles Publisher. He never explained who Ralph Miles was. This remains one of the great historical mysteries within the camp of the revisionist Saints. His book had a provocative title: An American Adventure in Bookburning: In the Style of 1918.
Postwar revisionist historians of World War I understood full well the ancient truth: history is written by the winners. Nevertheless, for a brief period of time, from the early 1920's until the mid-1930's, revisionist historians had the ear of intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. They even had considerable influence within the establishment historical guild. The reaction against the war was so great that even the historiography of the winners could be successfully challenged in the court of public opinion.
The revisionist position began to change in the United States in the early 1930's. As far as I know, there is only one book on this, and it is a monumental book. It did not go down the memory hole. It was not known well enough to deserve such a fate. It sank faster than the Lusitania. Martin wrote it. His career was always on the fringes of the historical profession. His career was a testament to the accuracy of Tansill's warning to Thalkin. His books were mostly self-published or published by obscure conservative publishing houses. His great book is this one: American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931–1941 (1964). It is two volumes.
REVISIONISM EXPLAINED BY REVISIONISTS
Recently, a pair of British revisionist historians wrote an exceptional book on the origins of World War I: Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War. One of them is closer to my age than most revisionist historians. Gerry Docherty did not receive a Ph.D. He taught history in high school for decades. He is now retired. He cannot be fired. He cannot be blackballed. He cannot be silenced. His biography is here.
They have written a long article on revisionism vs. the establishment. It explains in detail how the establishments seek to silence revisionists. You can read it here.
They refer repeatedly to the 1350-page book by Georgetown University historian Caroll Quigley, published by Macmillan in 1966, Tragedy and Hope. Because of demand by conspiracy-minded readers, who fastened on just 2 pages, pp. 936-56, the book went out of print. Macmillan refused to bring it back into print. Quigley complained about this for years. Then he authorized a "pirate" edition. It is online here. Quigley later taught Bill Clinton. Clinton referred to him in his 1992 acceptance speech at the Democrats' national convention. The text is here.
Here is how they begin.
The ‘Fake History’ and ‘Fake News’ pejoratives (like ‘Conspiracy Theory’ before them) have only recently entered common parlance, but the falsification of history and news reporting is as old as history itself. For many a long year, television news channels and newspapers owned or controlled by the Money Power (including the British Broadcasting Corporation), have been feeding us a daily diet of fake information. But in a black is white Orwellian reversal of truth it is the very people spreading falsehood who hurl the ‘fake news’ and ‘fake history’ pejoratives at truth tellers. To maintain control and stem dissent, the ruling elites maliciously misrepresent and question the integrity of alternative media and non-corporate news sources which broadcast genuine news, and the honest revisionist historians who relate historical truths. George Orwell suggested in his ‘war is peace’, ‘freedom is slavery’, ‘ignorance is strength’ thesis that the masses fall for the ruling power’s lies because their critical thinking has been so repressed they will believe any absurdity in contradiction of the plain facts.Orwell famously added: ‘Who controls the past controls the future.’ Fake history is a weapon wielded by ruling elites to exert control over us, for it is knowledge about the past that has the power to shape us as people and develop our comprehension of reality. True history reveals to those who care to learn that democracy is a sham; that we the people are akin to Orwellian proles in Oceania watched over by Big Brother and accepting of anything he cares to tell us or throw at us. Money Power control of the received history is crucially important (more so than control of fake news) because it enables them to keep us in the dark and ensure our ongoing subservience. After almost seventy years Orwell’s observation may appear somewhat clichéd, but it is now more relevant than ever. The highly perceptive author added: ‘The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.’
George Orwell was correct and if humankind is to stand any chance of determining a future without oligarchic totalitarian control, the lies and mythology of our past must be challenged by honest history, hard but necessary truths and historical revision. ‘Revisionism’, according to Joseph Stromberg in an article he wrote about Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, ‘refers to any efforts to revise a faulty exiting historical record or interpretation.’ Professor Barnes, himself one of the greatest revisionists of the 20th century, wrote that revisionism has been most frequently and effectively applied to correcting the historical record relative to wars because ‘truth is always the first war casualty.’ Hold that important statement close. The emotional abuses and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime. Consequently, both the need and the material for correcting historical myths are most evident and profuse in connection with wars.
What makes their book unique is that they were willing to follow the money behind the operations of the foreign policy establishment of Great Britain. What we need are comparable revisionist studies that would also follow the money behind the other European nations foreign policy establishments. It is not good enough to follow the money with just the British and then the American financiers. But at least these two unaccredited revisionists were willing to scratch the surface.
Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope revealed the ambitions of those whose wealth bought real power:…The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.’ [5]Free from any single political interference, this system was controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland; a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Quigley was adamant that ‘Each central bank … sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.’ The power of the central bank in each instance rested largely on its control of the credit and money supply. In the world as a whole the power of the central bankers rested very largely on their control of loans and gold flows.
Professor Quigley explained how, in 1924, Reginald McKenna, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer and at the time chairman of the board of the Midland Bank, told its stockholders:
I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money … And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people. [6]It was an extraordinarily frank statement from a man close to the inner circles of the British Establishment. The international bankers on Wall Street were intimately linked to the Rothschilds in London and Paris. They manipulated the political power of the state to create the corrupt Federal Reserve System to gain a monopoly over the money issue through it.
I'm going to reveal some information I have not talked about before. It is well known that Quigley's book became widely known in conservative circles almost immediately after its publication. I remember being told of it in 1966 by Rushdoony. But what is not known is where he found out about it. He learned about it in an obscure but remarkable newsletter, Don Bell Reports.
Bell was a journalist and a good reporter. He had known about the Council on Foreign Relations even before Dan Smoot wrote The Invisible Government (1961). He had an amazing knack of running across obscure books and articles that nobody else had heard of. He then reported on these materials. He could not how he did this. He once told me the story of how he stumbled onto Tragedy and Hope. He was in a bookstore. The book was sitting on the new books table. He picked it up and began looking through it. Remember, the book, with the index, is 1350 pages long. He turned to the section which gained notoriety. He began reading it. He bought it. He took it home. Then he reported on it in his newsletter. That was where Rushdoony heard about it.
Sometime in the early 1980's, I met with Bell at his home in south Florida. I don't remember the date. I had gone there to record a 90-minute interview on his background. He sat down with me and went through the interview. It would have been one of the best interviews I ever sent to my FireStorm Chats subscribers. But, as I left, he took me aside and said that I could not publish any of it. His wife had just told him not to let anybody do it. His wife had crossed the border into dementia. He admitted this to me. She was utterly paranoid. She warned him not to let me release the interview, and I dutifully obeyed. My mistake was this: I did not set aside the cassette in a safe place for publication after his death. I have long since lost that cassette. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I recount this only to make a point: even in the days before the Internet, there were newsletters. This began with Human Events in 1944, and it slowly grew. In the 1960's, newsletters began to take off. There were lots of little conservative newsletters, many of them focusing on gold and silver, but some of them focusing on revisionist history. Among these, Don Bell Reports was the best on the Right.
THE ESTABLISHMENT'S INDEX AND INQUISITION
The "newspaper of record" in any nation is the agreed-upon secondary source for other reporters around the nation. In Great Britain, it is the Times. In the United States, it is The New York Times. The leverage that the Times has had in American journalism for 70 years is well known. It set the limits of propriety. Example: no newspaper would touch Daniel Ellsberg's "Pentagon papers" until The New York Times decided to post them. The Times has published the story of how it got this journalistic coup. Read it here. The Times for decades was dominant because it published a comprehensive index of all of its articles at the end of each year. This index was in libraries around the country. In major libraries, you could get the Times on microfilm. That meant that historians who didn't have the money to go to cities to read archived newspapers around the country or to go to the Library of Congress, relied on the Times's index and its rolls of microfilms. Reporters did the same for background stories.
The World Wide Web has changed this forever. We no longer need a centralized index. Google provides this. This really has democratized reporting. It has also democratized the writing of history. Today, an amateur historian, meaning an unpaid historian, can become an expert in almost any field by simply studying secondary sources and primary sources that are posted on the Web.
Google News always features stories that its algorithm assembles. Always at the top of the headline/links to stories are The New York Times and The Washington Post. Fox News will usually get a link. The TV news services get links: CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, and the BBC. A few local newspapers get links. So, the algorithm does shape opinion. But hundreds of millions of people use Google's search engine who have never heard of Google News.
I do not go as far as the two British revisionists go. They are contemptuous of all academic history.
In the words of Professor Hillel Ticktin, academic economics, is ‘useless – utterly useless’. So too in any objective sense is academic history. Its value resides only in supporting the present-day elites who pay the piper and own the pipes.
I have always been an academic historian to be useful. You want to get the mainline story. In most cases, on most topics, there is no establishment story. The establishment doesn't care one way or the other. Most historical monographs are irrelevant to the big picture, but a good monograph has footnotes. So, if you read enough of them, you start getting a large collection of footnotes. Rushdoony had an immense library, and he read, underlined, and indexed 200 to 300 books a year. He had a good memory. He was able to use the footnotes to track down all sorts of stories that had not been reported in textbooks. Some of these were revisionist stories, or at least they had revisionist implications.
You have to do an enormous amount of work, and you have to have a good memory. There are aids. There is Evernote. You can store your own footnotes. You can store other people's footnotes. The democratization of historiography is taking place more rapidly today than at any time in history. Bright, dedicated researchers can find all sorts of things. The problem is this: there is so much to read and absorb. There is so much to memorize. There is so much to put into a narrative.
It really is the task faced by Michelangelo to get the statue of David. He had to chip away all the marble that didn't belong. That's the story of every academic discipline and art. This is how we develop a sense of understanding. It takes a lifetime of research. It takes the division of intellectual labor. But the tools today to discover and develop alternative historical accounts are historically unprecedented. The ability of any establishment to maintain control of the narrative rests on the laziness of the listeners and the laziness of people with alternative narratives to document and tell coherently.
MODELS, PAST AND PRESENT
For several decades, extremists on the far Right and the far Left worked as revisionist historians who kept up with fake news. I have mentioned commentators on the Right. On the Left, there was the indefatigable Mae Brussell. Her materials are online. She was astounding in her ability to dig up untold stories.
The king of all fake news exposers was I. F. Stone. Izzy Stone was a leftist. His exposés of the federal government were legendary. He had a secret that few people used, but lots of people had access to: the Government Printing Office. Wikipedia reports.
The journalistic professionalism and integrity of I. F. Stone derived from his intellectual willingness to scour and devour public documents, to bury himself in The Congressional Record, to study the transcripts of obscure congressional committee hearings, debates and reports. He prospected for news nuggets — published as boxed paragraphs in his weekly newsletter — such as contradictions in the line of official policy, examples of bureaucratic mendacity and political obscurantism. Stone especially sought evidence of the U.S. government's legalistic incursions against the civil liberties and the civil and political rights of American citizens.
We could use a dozen people who do this with GPO publications. This is doable technically. We need the division of labor. We need thousands of online, decentralized, self-funded projects: "Stones into bread."
The two WWI revisionists tell us to follow the money. That is good advice. But, when doing research, there is another important rule: follow the footnotes. Read Wikipedia. Then start clicking through the footnotes. Probably half of them are dead, but at least you know where to start. That is the tremendous advantage of Wikipedia. The article does the initial spadework to save you a lot of time. You don't need The New York Times index.
We have an operational model of what can be done. It has been around longer than revisionist history has been around. That is the historiography of the American Civil War. Unpaid historians have done yeoman service for over a century in exploring local archives, local newspapers, memoirs, and statistical materials published by state and local governments. There is a large market for monographs on the Civil War. The historiography of the Civil War is immense. There is nothing else to match it in United States historiography, and I doubt that anything matches it outside the United States. Unpaid historians are taken seriously by specialists in the American Civil War.
There were 10,400 battles in the war, and there seem to be three books on each of the battles. Of course, none of the books agree with each other. But that is not because of the establishment. That is because people don't agree with each other. People who decide to tell their version of the story of a particular incident, person, or movement do so because they are unhappy with most other writers who have attempted to tell the story. Most historians are inherently revisionist historians. They don't like the other guys' stories.
Today, the Internet makes it possible for every man to be a revisionist historian. Not many people have enough time on their hands to do this, but hundreds of thousands of people do, and I recommend that they do. They could start with local history. They could start on anything that interests them. They should read 50 to 100 volumes on the topic. That gets their feet wet. That may take five years. Then they start following the footnotes. They look for the anomalies. There will always be anomalies. We are not omniscient. We cannot connect all of the dots. We can only understand a handful of the dots compared to the infinite number of dots available to connect.
I think there is a market for books on America's wars. That is why I would recommend to any historian with a newly issued Ph.D. to get a job anywhere, even teaching high school history, and begin studying America's wars. They should ignore the battles. Here is how each monograph on each war should be structured:
The origins of the war
The financing of the war
The revocation of civil liberties during the war
The negative wartime changes that became permanent
These days, there are a lot of people online who are doing this, but the one I think has the largest market and the most cogent presentations is James Corbett. His Corbett Report site is very good on America's modern wars.
CONCLUSION
Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem about the strategy to deal with the writing of history. I recommend it.
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.I let them rest from nine till five,
For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,
For they are hungry men.
But different folk have different views;
I know a person small
She keeps ten million serving-men,
Who get no rest at all!
She sends em abroad on her own affairs,
From the second she opens her eyes
One million Hows, Two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys!
We need a lot of small women just like the ones he described. I was trained by such a woman in the late 1950's. She shaped my life. She was an inveterate collector of the Congressional Record. She had boxes full of newspaper clippings. She used the 5W's and the H to reconstruct her favorite topics. There were dozens of these ladies all over Southern California. They talk to each other. They shared clippings even before Xerox machines were common. I realized at age 16 that it could be done.
It's a lot easier to get the clippings and store them and retrieve them today than it was in 1957. There are a lot more people out there who are willing to do this grunt work.
The establishment wins by default, but when crises come, establishments always lose legitimacy. Then there is a scramble to find new sources of legitimacy. Each system of legitimacy requires a small army of journalists and historians to push the party line. The number of paid journalists is declining, and it will continue to decline. This opens up tremendous opportunities for unpaid journalists and unpaid followers of the footnotes.