November 14th 2008
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
Continuing with Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) here are the next two lies Schweikart lists in his review of what liberal revisionist history profs are doing to despoil the proud history of our nation.
Lie #6: Richard Nixon Expanded the Vietnam War
[I]n April 1970, Nixon sent American forces on a sweek through Cambodia … A seeming Escalatino of fighting, this move electrified the anti-war movement.” – Irwin Unger, These United States
A brief history of Vietnam: Kennedy put the first troops in, and there were probably about 25,000 American troops in Southeast Asia, primarily Vietnam, when he was assassinated. In 1969, when Lyndon Johnson left office after deciding not to run for a second term, there were 553,000. That is an expansion.
By 1971, Nixon had cut the number of troops down to 200,000, and down to 155,000 in 1972. At this time, 65 percent of Americans approved of the way Nixon was handling the war – way up from Johnson’s ratings, which forced him not to consider a second term. By 1973, Nixon had withdrawn all but about 50,000 troops.
Still, in American text books on Vietnam, it is Nixon how is the villain of the war, not Johnson and certainly not Kennedy, who, Schweikart points out, “receives almost no blame or criticism for his actions, while the man who extracted us – in line with, supposedly, the wishes of the liberals – is routinely portrayed as though he started, rather than ended, the conflict.
Lie #7: The “Peace Movement” Activists Were Not Dupes of the KGB
During 1983, the antiwar and nuclear disarmament movements, in exlipse since the end of the Vietnam War, revived explosively. … [T]here were demonstrations in major cities to protest the arms race adn demand a “nuclear freeze.” – Irwin Unger, These United States
This is the most fascinating chapter in the book thus far. Personally, this was the point where I began to see the leftists, with whom I had previously affiliated, as dangerous loons, so the chapter illuminates that gut decision – which leads to the second thing that makes it fascinating: It is based in large part on KGB documents smuggled out of Russia by a KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin.
Mitrokhin’s documents show the KGB worked to spread rumors that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for “the military industrial complex,” that the AIDs virus was invented in Fort Detrick MD and spread by us to third world countries, and that they invested heavily in funding the left to discourage further development of American nuclear campability.
This money – including $2 million to the Communist Party here, 5 million deutsch marks annually from East Germany’s Stasi to the German Peace Union and $50 million a year to the World Peace Council – may explain why the left was so quick to attack America while leading the totalitarian Brezhnev regime uncriticized.
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
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November 18th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Comments
November 14th, 2008 at 10:49 am
I have been reading “Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies” by Greg Jackson….Just to learn all the lies I had believed over the years. Have you read it?
If you have it… is response to claim #4 true? pg34-39 of chapter 2.
I will try to go over all your post read on this subject so I will be caught up.
November 14th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Sorry – don’t have that book. Anyone else?
November 14th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
That book, “Conservative Comebacks,” is really wrought with problematic oversimplifications and shoddy analysis. Taking just one example, Gregg Jackson addresses the Establishment Clause and freedom of religion clause that immediately follows it. Now there are literally thousands and thousands of pages of cases, commentary, law review articles, etc. on the left and right that deal with this issue, and the Supreme Court of the US (the most important authority) has also addressed the balance of these two clauses through a variety of precedential rulings. For Jackson to argue that because the founders did not use the exact expression “separation of church and state” means that there was no intent to separate the two is really rather silly. First, it means that the latter clause swallows up the former one, rendering it redundant–an unlikely possibility given the care involved in drafting the document. Second, the founders did speak about concerns over undue religious influence of government (e.g., prohibition against a religious test for office), which means that while not using the term separation of church and state, they clearly meant exactly that idea. The exact balance of these two was a topic of ardent discussion at the country’s birth and remains so today, but there is no black and white right answer, merely shades of grey. Jackson’s “analysis” is way too simplified to actually help anyone understand the nuances of this very complicated issue. Based on a cursory reading of his other “responses,” I have to say that this is a pervasive problem throughout the book. True conservative intellectuals, like Buckley, would view these in much the same way that a Harvard or Yale Law School professor would view the watered-down Nutshell series quality of legal analysis. What is much more effective is reading the works of great conservative thinkers, from Burke and de Tocqueville through to Buckley and von Hayek. If you haven’t read them, as well as the great liberal thinkers (and there are many of them, from Bentham and Mill through Durkheim and Dewey to Keynes, Rawls, Dworkin and Galbraith), then you are really cheating yourself out of lot of wonderful ideas and fantastic debates that have been ongoing for centuries. You’re also liable to get killed in a debate with a truly well educated person…
November 15th, 2008 at 2:21 am
Like I said, I haven’t read the book. I do know that the concept of separation of church and state was born out of the strong desire to not have a state-mandated religion, and was spawned out of the desire to attract the Baptist vote. Baptists were concerned their religion would be declared illegal by the state; Jefferson said the government should not e granted such powers.
This has been grossly distorted by secularists into a position that is unsubstantiated by the Federalist Papers or by Jefferson’s letter: that there should be no religion in the public square. The position is completely counter to the Founding Fathers, who spoke of democracy’s need for religion, for they feared that without the moral base and commitment to others they saw as a gift of religion to society, democracy would fail.
November 16th, 2008 at 10:12 am
The gross distortion is the one maintained and repeatedly chanted by the right: that America is a Christian nation. Clearly, the founding fathers ardently defended the Establishment Clause to keep the government neutral vis-a-vis religion in the public square, which is why the Senate in 1797 ratified a treaty with Tripoli that stated: “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” Of course private citizens are allowed to practice their religion freely in the public square, but the government is not in order to maintain its lack of a religious character. By the way, the founding fathers understood that religion has caused more wars than anything else (e.g., War of the Roses and Hundred Years War in Europe) and that government non-neutrality had often led to religious persecution of minorities (e.g., of the Mormons in the US)and had, in fact, led to the arrival of America’s first colonists. Jefferson’s concern was much greater than winning Baptist votes. As for the requirement of religion to have a moral society, the founding fathers may not have been aware of the high points of civilization achieved by China and Japan without Abrahamic religions or, for that matter, organized religion of any kind; however, the founding fathers were aware of the great civilizations of Greece and Rome, whose thinkers were also not proponents of Abrahamic or any other organized religion. We likely would have a happier world if people gave up religion for rationality, as great minds have known for millenia (from Epicurus to Franklin).