Essays on America
Rewriting History
Larry Romanoff
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 — Rewriting History
Chapter 2 — America Rebooted
Chapter 3 — Things Were Different, Then
Chapter 4 — The Propaganda Machine
Chapter 5 — Political Indoctrination
Chapter 6 — If America dissolves…
Chapter 7 — American Dystopia — The Propaganda Mask
and the Utopia Syndrome
Chapter 8 — Captain America – The Man with Two Brains
Chapter 9 — Binary People in an Analogue World
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Rewriting History
I have seldom had much patience or sympathy with much of the historical record that is popularly available and promulgated in the West. It is an axiom that ‘history is written by the victors’, primarily by the Western colonial nations, Israel and Japan, whose versions consist mostly of whitewashed circumstances and fabricated myths intended primarily to disguise brutal and shameful historical truths about people and events. Evidence of this historical revisionism is not difficult to find. Japanese school children watch videos of what appears to be Chinese farmers smiling happily while working in their pretty fields of vegetables, and can be forgiven for believing their government’s tales of having invaded China and Asia only to improve the lives of the peasants. Similarly, English school children are informed that their country was in India not to massacre and colonise and plunder, but, as another author so nicely wrote, “to teach them English, good table manners and double-entry bookkeeping”.
American historians are cut from the same cloth, with their children being taught that America roamed the world only to spread freedom, vanquish tyranny and make the world safe for democracy, with no knowledge of the savage militarism that claimed tens of millions of lives and rendered hundreds of millions to misery. Jewish children are falsely taught that Israel was created and granted to them by the United Nations and that they have been persecuted not for their crimes but from prejudice. Almost none know the truths of their evictions from so many nations. The only nation that has faced the brutal aspects of its history is Germany, having for 70 years been bullied by the hypocritical Americans and the Jews who have conveniently forgotten their own atrocities by mercilessly using Germany as both poster boy and whipping boy for what are mostly their own sins. So many American and other information sources engage in the most blatant and shameless re-writing of historical fact to propagate mythology for the ignorant. Wikipedia has proven itself virtually useless as a reference source due to its Jewish roots and heavy ideological slant, heavy censorship and shameless re-writing of historical accounts. In referring to the end of the Second World War, a Wikipedia entry claims the Morgenthau Plan was “shelved quickly” (it was not), that “the Western Allies did not seek reparations for war damage” (the US looted Germany’s entire knowledge base and confiscated all German IP and patents as so-called “reparations”), and that the US used the Marshall Plan to rebuild German industry (it did no such thing). Astonishing lies that are easily proved false, but the Western media and Internet sites appear to have neither shame nor scruples.
It may be true that every nation resorts to this kind of written historical cleansing of their souls, but it is also true that only the former colonial nations – and the US and Israel – carry these acts to such an extreme, this being largely because only these nations have such an enormous volume of atrocities to bury. The non-aggressive nations, representing most of the world, have mostly been the victims of this multitude of atrocities, with much less to hide and much less reason to lie about their pasts. It is particularly irritating that both the Americans and the Jews harp on accusations of China not having self-immolated in repentance for its historical mistakes while conveniently erasing their own squalid histories from current memory. It is time for the world to demand from these two nations of people a full admission of, and accounting for, their own centuries of brutality against others. It is true that the Japanese and the British also need a forced awakening to the savagery of their own histories, but at least these two nations aren’t so arrogant as to point fingers at others while ignoring their own bitter truths.
The American historian Howard Zinn shared this antipathy for revisionism and made some good attempts to lay bare the fundamental truths of historical events in contrast to most US historians who ‘cherry-picked’ bits of American historical data and surrounded them with flowery fabrications intended at best to deceive. His truths are impossible to ignore, but the treatment of his work in universities serves mostly to undermine and diminish the impact of his work. I will repeat here two brief passages reporting on the same American historical event relating to the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America. Both passages are factually correct, but only the first appears in American history books. It is a quote, but I do not recall the source.
The traditional American version begins this way:
“When Columbus landed in the New World in the 1490s, he found native people who were very primitive with no written language, practiced pagan religious beliefs, and lacked even the rudiments of civilization such as the wheel. They were awed by the sight of the large Spanish ships with men in shining armor and riding horses that had never before been seen in the Western Hemisphere. These native people welcomed the Spaniards who brought Christianity and civilization to their people.”
Zinn’s perspective is strikingly different:
“Columbus and his men went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale (as slaves) by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were “naked as the day they were born”, they showed “no more embarrassment than animals.”
Zinn should also have mentioned that one of Columbus’ first activities was the establishment of brothels in which he prostituted fairly large numbers of of pre-pubescent native girls. From this, we wouldn’t know we were reading about the same history of the same country. But it is actually worse than this because, although Zinn’s books may appear in university courses, American educators typically describe Zinn as a “radical historian” which effectively consigns him to a place on the edge of normality and perhaps even sanity. “Radical” is not a compliment in the English language. One institution acknowledges that Zinn’s writing will “lead to very different conclusions about the same events”, but advises its students that “You do not have to believe (these historical facts), only understand them”. It then continues to degrade the historical truth of its own nation by advising that the class will compare “Zinn’s view” with the “more traditional” view and with “other interpretations” as well.
What can we conclude from this bit of educational treason? First, Zinn is so extreme in his views that his judgment is in doubt and perhaps his sanity as well. Second, students needn’t recognise these historical facts as truths but simply accept that they are one man’s questionable viewpoint among others more favorable. From this, American students are taught to believe that history is not a collection and recording of the facts of past events, but merely an interpretation of situations based on various opinions. So, in a history class in an American university, we will learn some bitter and unpleasant truths of our nation and, with the blessing of our professors, will then discount these truths and trash the man who wrote them. We will then return to our fairy-tale world of American historical mythology, taking comfort in the knowledge that these unpleasant facts are simply one man’s opinion among many others equally as valid, and we can go to bed with our halo intact and our moral superiority still unchallenged. Welcome to America, the land of the non-brainwashed. To ensure continutation of this state of affairs, after Zinn’s death in 2013, many academics and politicians across the US were busy photoshopping Zinn from the world of history and rendering the pages once again blank. As one example of many, the governor of Indiana, a man named Mitch Daniels, gleefully announced that “This terrible anti-American academic [is dead]”, publicly referred to Zinn’s writing as “crap”, then embarked on a frantic attempt to remove Zinn’s work from libraries and classrooms everywhere. He said, “… how do we get rid of [Zinn’s writing] before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?” But of course Zinn’s version wasn’t false. It was true. But it attacked Americans at their weakest point, undermining the mythical Disney cartoon-like narrative that permeates the nation. The reality is that Americans do not want to know the truths of their nation. This false and pathetic mythology is the only adhesive that holds the country together, which is why Zinn’s books are now being banned from schools and libraries in America.
When Harold Pinter accepted his Nobel prize in literature, he so eloquently identified “a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed”, and asked why the crimes of nations like the Soviet Union were so apparently well-known in the West while America’s crimes were barely recorded, much less properly documented or even acknowledged. The US has perhaps the largest catalogue of crimes against humanity in the world’s history, involving genocides and massacres, exports of torture, predation and misery, but all has been met with silence. As Pinter said, “… you wouldn’t know it happened. It never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened”. The history isn’t really hidden, but it is deliberately eradicated from the American consciousness – and from the consciousness of the many victim societies that have suffered exposure to this revisionist American mythology. The Americans are unique in that they forcibly rewrite the history books of many other nations in addition to their own.
This reckless approach to truth is pervasive throughout America, the generations of propaganda and incessantly-promoted historical myths having overwhelmed and blinded even the apparently sincere and honest. In this light, I was disappointed to read an article on American exceptionalism by Harvard Professor Stephen Walt where he falls victim to the same nonsense he criticises. In the article, Walt tells us America was lucky to have been lavishly endowed with natural resources (true) and “even luckier” that the native population “was less advanced and highly susceptible to European diseases”. I’m sure Walt means well, but his statement is obscene in its racist inhumanity. Americans were “lucky” that the nation’s native people had no weapons to defend against their extermination and no medicine to protect them from the deliberate introduction of smallpox that devastated many tribes. The opportunity for, and successful execution of, the longest-lasting genocide in the history of the world is attributed to good luck on the part of the perpetrators. And this is by no means the only flaw in a Harvard education.
He claims “The United States never conquered a vast overseas empire or caused millions to die through tyrannical blunders like China’s Great Leap Forward …”. The US never conquered an overseas empire nor caused millions to die? Where has this man been for the past 200 years? Walt’s vaunted America that never caused millions to die, is the same America that exterminated 98% of the more than 20 million natives in his country. How would that fact escape the attention of a Harvard professor? The US colonised and cannibalised nearly half of the known world through the installation of brutal military dictatorships and was directly responsible for at least 10 million deaths, half of those in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia alone (which Walt knowingly understates as only 1 million) and another several million in Indonesia in what was the greatest single slaughter in human history. China’s deaths through famine may have been partly a blunder, but the American extermination of tens of millions on US soil and on other continents were not blunders but the deliberate “pacification” of civilians of which Walt appears to have no knowledge. He then tells us that with its vast military might, the US could have done much worse, and in a truly startling and blind exhibition of Christian jingoism, Walt tells us “Of course, the United States has by far the better claim to virtue than Stalin or his successors.” I fail to see how.
He tells us “The United States has fought numerous wars since 1850 – starting several of them …” The “numerous” part is certainly correct – at about 150 – but starting “several” of those wars? I’m sorry to correct him, but the US started ALL of those wars, not ‘several’, all of which were unprovoked, illegal and unjustified, facts that apparently escape the man’s knowledge. He tells us the US erred in being too willing to “cozy up to dictators”, and in evidence mentions Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. But Mubarak was nothing compared to Battista, the Somozas, Shah Reza Pahlavi and many more who were true pathological killers and to whom the US did not by any stretch of the imagination “cozy up to”, but instead recruited, financed, installed and supported for decades, and planned and participated in the mass killings of millions of civilians, including the notorious CIA death squads. With a single cute phrase, Walt glosses over the litany of dirty and bitter truths of his nation’s history to leave us with the impression that the US was sometimes just a bit too friendly with a few people who weren’t always nice.
Corpse of Aldo Moro discovered on Via Caetani
Walt then proceeds to make a long series of outrageous claims, telling us “the Marshall Plan and NATO played important roles in Europe’s post-World War II success”, which is virtually an outright lie since NATO was intended entirely as a tool of American domination, and the Marshall Plan was created from selfishness rather than generosity. Then in a fit of patronising foolishness he tells us the Europeans deserve “at least as much credit for rebuilding their economies” as does the US. In fact, the Europeans deserve all the credit, not only for their recovery but for resisting American colonisation to the extent they were able.
Walt tells us “The United States has made undeniable contributions to peace and stability in the world over the past century …”, presenting as evidence the Marshall Plan (again) and “the creation and management of the Bretton Woods system”. At this point, we need to wonder what the man is smoking. Where do we find evidence of “peace and stability” created by the US? Vietnam? The Middle East? Central America? Korea? I am not aware of even one example of evidence to support such a claim, but we can produce dozens if not hundreds of cases where the Americans created only instability, war and misery. He claims the US brought a “stabilizing military presence in Europe and the Far East”. Evidenced by what? Europe would have been far more stable without US involvement, and virtually every nation in the Far East suffered only misery and massacres, napalm and Agent Orange. Has Walt never heard of Operation Gladio? This US-sponsored plan that wrought terrorism and slaughter all over Europe was deliberately created and fostered to provoke fear and instability and to enable the installation of US-controllable Right-Wing governments. Where is Walt’s evidence of “stability” in any of this? And finally, it seems to escape Walt’s notice altogether that the US has for decades been widely recognised as the only significant threat to world peace and security.
It is similarly true with his foolish claim about “creating and managing” the Bretton Woods system. Certainly, the Americans had a hand in creating it since it was designed for their benefit, but rather than managing and maintaining the system, it was the Americans who abused it, violated its principles until it could no longer function, then arbitrarily and unilaterally terminated it to the bitter expense and financial instability of all other nations. And after this financial travesty, it was the US FED and its money-printing machine that pushed the entire world into a decade of ruinous inflation during which those foreign-held dollars depreciated by 95%, and which the FED terminated by creating one of the most abrupt and vicious recessions in recent memory. Where was the stability in which Walt so fervently believes? And in a statement that should win a Nobel Prize for Nonsense, Walt claims the US contributed to peace and stability in the world through “its rhetorical support for the core principles of democracy and human rights”. It certainly is true that US support for democracy and human rights, as well as every other principle known to man, has been only “rhetorical” and never real, but Walt is actually telling us that American hypocrisy has been a major contribution to world peace. Where do we go from here?
But it isn’t all bad. Walt is not only able but willing to expose America’s dark side. One of his closing comments was this gem: “Finally, any honest accounting of the past half-century must acknowledge the downside of American primacy. The United States has been the major producer of greenhouse gases for most of the last hundred years …”. This foolish statement is supposed to represent America’s darkest sin finally exposed? And yet American readers commenting on the article were quick to acknowledge Walt’s “penetrating insight” in his “historically rich” article, complimenting him on being “one of the most objective persons in the US”. This man is one of the most renowned professors at Harvard University where he teaches international affairs and where he was the Dean of the Department for some years. If this is the level of truth and accuracy – and myopic ideological ignorance – we receive from the best that Harvard has to offer, what is the quality of education at lesser American institutions?
In fact, the problem begins early in American primary and secondary education where the US criminal record is almost never reported, and where virtually all history books massively understate or ignore entirely America’s dark side. The suppression of history is also high on the list of educational content, firmly supported by the US judicial system. Several years ago, the US passed a new law that prohibited courses in ethnic studies that might in any way “portray the US or Americans as invaders, colonisers or oppressors” of the countries of these same ethnic students – for example, students from the Philippines, Vietnam, Mexico or most of Central and South America. The court in fact ruled that American history cannot be taught if it discusses American oppressions or military colonisation, or if it might possibly create “anti-American sentiments or secessionist attitudes”. In other words, history cannot be taught in American schools if it tells the truth. Even worse, in the few cases where atrocities and violations are reported, they are so heavily obfuscated and overwhelmed by delusional irrelevancies and deliberate attempts to utterly confuse the minority of Americans still capable of independent thought. From the earliest days of the settlers arriving in the New World, there has never been any intention to develop anyone’s mind, the settlers demanding their children be taught only those beliefs already rigidly held. Harvard University was never founded to educate anyone. The Puritans established it solely to perpetuate the teachings of their religious sect without the oversight of less radical religions, and to produce more ministers who would further propagandise these primarily heretical religious convictions that permeated society.
John Kozy wrote an excellent article that was published in Global Research, titled Learning without Questioning in America: The Sunday School Syndrome, in which he accurately outlined the fact that the American school system does precisely the opposite of its patriotic claims, which is to cultivate a strong adherence to jingoistic myths and stifle disagreement or dissent. He tells us that most subjects “are taught as if they were comprised of revealed (religious) truths and cannot be questioned”. All the claims of the American educational system fostering creative, imaginative and independent thought, are pure propaganda and myth. In real life, the system is entirely designed to do the opposite. This is what Kozy calls “the Sunday School Syndrome” and which produces “the stubbornness of what are essentially stillborn minds”.
Kozy claims, and again I concur, that American education today is similar to learning Bible verses which are not questioned and by nature are not questionable. In the majority of American homes, and especially in the area known as the “Bible Belt” – the wide swath of America we mockingly refer to as Jesusland – children learn almost everything but the truth. The same unquestioning attitude is applied to all subjects, especially history but including sciences and areas like economics where capitalist “models” are presented as a kind of divine law. Kozy tells us that studying American history is not different than studying the Bible in that critical evaluation is proscribed. Students who ask inconvenient questions are silenced in shame; books that present inconvenient truths are removed from libraries. In America, “independent thought” either follows a prescribed pattern or is condemned. He is 100% correct in his observations. Moreover, this isn’t even a secret. The Republican Party of Texas in 2012 included in its platform the following paragraph: “We oppose the teaching of … critical thinking skills and similar programs … which … have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs”.
There is no part of the teaching of American history that has ever resembled a search for truth, and virtually all of it is infused with the twisted American version of Christianity and a juvenile jingoistic patriotism. Kozy says educators claim that religious minds are the hardest minds to change, and I would agree. Evolution is not taught in most American schools, for example, because a great many Americans take their bible stories literally and believe man was simply created in a flash by God and no evolution has ever occurred. These same people believe, and teach in their schools and churches, that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Roughly half of all Americans believe Jesus will soon return to the earth, the same number that believe the sun revolves around the earth. When we combine this witch-burning Christianity with the political and other propaganda that pollutes not only history but most other academic subjects, we need to ask why any intelligent parent would want to send their child to an American school.
One typical case is the Sand Creek Massacre. Briefly, this was an event where white Americans descended on a group of about 200 natives, mostly women and children, and executed atrocities in the finest tradition of white colonialists anywhere. According to eyewitnesses, all natives were killed and scalped, including suckling infants two or three months old. The women and children all had their heads smashed in, while babies were beaten with rifle butts until their brains were spattered everywhere. Men used their knives to cut and rip open all the women, including pregnant women, while they were still alive, then all the bodies were mutilated. The Americans cut out and saved the fetuses from the pregnant women, and removed not only the natives’ scalps but cut out the genital flesh and pubic hair of all the women, as well as all male genitalia, especially the mens’ testicles to be used as tobacco pouches. The dead fetuses and other trophies were displayed later in many American towns where delighted citizens were regaled with endless stories of these atrocities. So it doesn’t go unsaid, this was only one of thousands of similar events.
American scholars, writing of this event in one of the nation’s most respected intellectual journals, ignored altogether the facts of this moral outrage and instead carried on an earnest discussion as to whether the native women massacred and mutilated in this travesty should be regarded as victims or as “enemy combatants” who were therefore deserving of their fate. Their intention was simply to create a false focus that would deflect attention from the main facts, with “experts” taking both sides of the issue and overwhelming it with irrelevancies. When a nation’s leading intellectuals are so morally deformed, what hope is there for the children in elementary and secondary schools? It is standard in America that even historical facts so firmly established as to defy dispute, are still regularly challenged by irrelevancies, all of which serves to trivialise the atrocities and preclude any condemnation. Many American atrocities that are almost unimaginable in their savagery, are deliberately twisted, confused and challenged on spurious grounds so as to make conclusions almost impossible. Then the matter is quietly laid to rest on a dark shelf to be quickly forgotten while Americans sleep secure in their nation’s moral superiority.
Thanksgiving is a holiday primarily celebrated in the US and Canada but similar mid-autumn celebrations have been common across many cultures even if containing no overt link with religion. American history books contain a wide variety of tales purporting to represent either the first such celebration or one of the typical feasts. In most cases, children are taught that the American settlers and one or more of the various groups of native aboriginals came together in peace and fellowship to celebrate and give thanks for the year’s harvest. The fact that not so long after these original celebrations the same New Americans began an extermination campaign against these same native brothers, created some difficulties with the elementary school curriculum, in which (white) American children are often asked to explain “why the natives appeared to change their attitude toward the settlers”. But of course, this is just a clever way to blame the victims for their own misfortune. If the natives did “change their attitude” toward the White settlers, it was only because they discovered themselves being exterminated by the God-loving Christians.
The truth of “The First Thanksgiving”, if we can identify one such event as representative, is rather less harmonious than the mythical narrative in the schoolbooks. Here is one typical celebration reported by a responsible eyewitness, which occurred in 1637 when a group of White settlers trapped about 700 natives, mostly women, children and the elderly, at the Mystic River near what is now Boston. The Governor of the area, a Mr. William Bradford, wrote in his diary the following graphic description: “To see them frying in the fire, and the streams of their blood quenching the same, and the stench was horrible; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice and they Gave Praise Thereof to God”. This was the first actual Thanksgiving in America. (Judith Moriarty)
There were many more similar events, not to thank God for the harvest but to celebrate murderous victories over the natives. A US Governor Joseph Dudley declared in 1704 a “General Thanksgiving for God’s infinite goodness to extend His favors in defeating the expeditions of the (natives) against us, and the good success given us against them, by delivering so many of them into our hands”. Another thankful Christian wrote, “It pleased God to visite these Indeans with a great sickness, and such a mortalitie that of a 1000 and a half of them dyed, and many of them did rott above ground for want of burial.” During some of these multi-ethnic Thanksgiving feasts in New York City, residents cut the heads off natives and made sport of kicking them through the streets of Manhattan like soccer balls. In the end, so many American towns created so many of these “thanksgiving” festivals that finally President George Washington created a schedule for these feasts and declared a single national holiday for this purpose of thanking America’s god for the chance to kill so many natives.
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