The revisioning of history and the loathing of America..

I was perusing amazon in order to find a good general history of the United States to refresh my knowledge of our nation's past when I came upon Howard Zinn's "A Peoples' History of the United States".

This is a book which has become quite popular on college campus' because it purports to tell the "truth"of the history of the US and not the alleged fictionalized version we had grown up on. The reality is that this book is as poor at telling honest history as the sanitized tomes the left condemns.

The Left with their alleged concern for the Hoi Polloi, embrace this type of revisionist tripe because it tells history how they see it. The left sees United States as a greedy, vindictive, and quite frankly, evil country. I wlll say that there is alot in our history which could lead to such an opinion: slavery, genocide of indians, eugenics, jim crow, abuse of workers by companies, the support of authoritian regimes for the sake of capitalism(such governments provide a stabile business friendly environment) political repression,imperialism, assassinations of political leaders, economic downturns....the United States has had a violent, unjust,
and turbulent past there is no doubt about it.

But is our past any different than that of any powerful nation? No. The truth is that what we have gone through as a nation is what any large and/or powerful country has been through.We are not unique in having a past a past checkered with great acts of evil as well as magnificent achievements worthy of boasting about. We have become what we have because of both to be quite honest.

It is this last part that makes people uncomfortable, I believe. People do not want to acknowledge that in order for an individual or a group of people to become rich and powerful, they will have to do certain things that will cause harm to another persons or peoples. I am not aiming to justify past unjust or inhumane practices, but only to explain the reality as I see it.

People like Howard Zinn say they want to tell the "true" history of this country, but in affect, all they do is emphasis the bad over the good(as opposed to the more traditional books which did the exact opposite) They also have the tendency to make moral judgments of historical figures by applying modern sensibilities to their actions of the past. Pure folly. You simply cannot remove a person from his or her time to judge them based on current ethical standards, and expect to be taken seriously.

Another trait of this kind is to display an inability to comprehend the fact that life sometimes demands tough decisions that look unsavory on their face, but in reality help one achieve their end. The left wing denunciation of the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is particularly offensive in this regard. They condemn the bombing as being unnecessary(a very dubious assertion) and cruel(prehaps, but when one considers what the Japanese did to Americans, Britons, Chinese, Phillippinos, and many other south pacific people, my sympathy is greatly reduced)

The problem with the first accusation is that there was every reason to believe that the Japanese would have defended the home islands with as much, if not more ferocity than they did Okinawa. Each battle the US fought that got closer to Japan became bloodier and bloodier. Add to this fact that the Japanese government was dominated by the military and their Bushido code. They rather die than surrender. It was only when Emperor Hirohito's voice was recorded on record and playerd over loudspeakers that the Japanese finally quit. A last second attempt by rogue Imperial Army officers to impede this transmission was broken up by his palace guard.

Yet, if you read a left wingers version of this event it will portray as the United States bombing Japan as the act of a cruel, sadistic nation bent on inflicting more pain. The reality, of course, makes a mockery of this. The left doesn't want to admit that the invasion itself would have been extremely bloody(even though evidence points to the fact that it would have been) and that other alternatives such as blockading the island would have killed a great number of people as well.Nor will they admit that President Truman had no way of knowing what the Japanese intended to do. In their world he had to be a mind reader

They much rather focus on this extraordinarily violent end to an extraordinarily violent and cruel war, in order to "taint" the general perception that this was a "good" war. The intent of this is to damage the image of the United States and not out of any real concern for morality. (How any truly moral person can select one event out of 6 years of endless acts of inhumanity is beyond me. The whole war was barbaric. That is war.) This is only one of many instances of where they warp history for their own designs.

The left's goal in all this is not to tell the truth, but to offer a partisan version of the truth. They like to think that they are speaking for the masses who did not have a voice, but in actuality they are only speaking for either the embittered and uninformed or persons who think like themselves. American history is a history balanced by the cruelty of slavery with the selflessness
of the underground railground; by the inhumanity of the white man towards the native americans with the natives showing the first europeans how to survive; by the ugly racism of the south with the inspiring words and deeds of Martin Luther King Jr and his compatriots.

American history is a story impacted as much by its villians as its heroes. Without either one, we wouldn't be what we are today. To truly love and revere this country, one must be able to honestly deal with the ugly as wellas the beautiful side of this nation. In order to do that, we must have historians to tell the whole truth and not just one part of it.