his post shall go un-illustrated for reasons that will soon become obvious.  Also to become obvious:  Higher education in America is on a possibly unstoppable downward spiral, with students who couldn’t care less and administrators who are perfectly content with that. From the SacBee:

A student group at the University of California, Davis, plans to show a hardcore pornographic movie in a campus lecture hall Thursday night.

The student run Entertainment Council announced on its Facebook page that it will be showing “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge,” a big-budget porn movie that combines computer-generated special effects with explicit sex scenes.

Student leaders for the group did not immediately return phone calls and e-mail messages.

Of course not. They’re cowards.

The movie has been showing on college campuses around the nation, including at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The company that distributes the movie, Digital Playground, of Van Nuys, has been giving it away for campus screenings.

Company spokesman Christopher Ruth said porn no longer has the stigma it once did, and campuses have been showing the $10 million porn movie for entertainment and educational purposes.

So if child porn someday has no stigma, we should just be cool with that? And even if Ruth’s statement is true, not having the stigma porn once had is not exactly a ringing endorsement.

UC Davis spokesman Andy Fell said the campus does not censor student events, performances or publications and had no plans to cancel the event.

Of course not. To censor something would require having to pretend you have values, and we can’t have that!

oday we turn to the 20th and 21st chapters of Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School), which details the revisionist lies history profs are teaching to our next generation. C-SM presents this in the hope that you’ll buy the book.

Lie #20 - Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK because he was a deranged Marine, not because he was a Communist

Oswald was a troubled former Marine - Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty

I was a bit skeptical that Schweikart had a case here - are history books really teaching this? - but he ran through a half dozen quotes calling Oswald a misfit Marine, a quiet Marine, a deeply disturbed Marine. They all say “former,” but we who understand the military - a demographic that apparently doesn’t include history profs - know there’s no such thing as a former Marine.

Several history books he researched mentioned that he had spent time in the Soviet Union and one actually called him a Marxist, but none called him what he called himself: a Communist. (Noted lefty historian Howard Zinn doesn’t even deal with the JFK assassination and Oswald in A People’s History of the United States.) James Pierson does cover it in his book, Camelot and teh Cultural Revolution:

Pierson notes that “the assassination of a popular president by a communist should ahve generated a revulsion against everything associated with left-wing doctrines. Yet something very close to the opposite happened.” Instead the historians routinely described Oswald as “emotionally unstable -and one whose] actions were never fully explained….”

Not fully explained, of course, unless you take Oswald’s own admission that he was a communist.

Lie #21 - Columbus was responsible for killing millions of Indians

When Hernando Cortes and his Spanish army of fewer than a thousand men stormed into Mexico in 1519, the native population numbered about 22 million. By the end of the century, following a series of devastating epidemics, only 2 million people remained.

Excluding epidemic, such destruction is ridiculous.  A bludnerbuss-armed handful of men simply couldn’t eliminate 20 million people in such a short timeframe - not even if the natives lined themselves up  to be neatly and expeditiously executed.

The problem with these teachings is that assumptions about pre-Columbian populations are just that - assumptions.  There are, of course, no recorded censuses of Aztek, Cherokee, Navejo or any of the other native populations; there are just various guess and extrapolations, some as high as 100 million or more. Writes Schweikart:

Most recent research puts the entire native populations on both continents and the islands ofthe New World at 53 million.  But an interesting trend has been that with each new study, the population estimates fall:  since 1976, the experts have lowered their estimates by four million.  More conservative estimates are that there were a total of (on the high side) 8.5 million for all of North America, and a low estimate of only 1.8 million.  The “European genocide” crowd has more Indians being killed or dying of disease than ever existed in all the New World put together!

The other element in this formula is the baseline:  How many native Americans were dying of disease before Columbus appeared.  Are we to believe that the Americas were a disease-free paradise?  Obviously not; now some anthropologists are positing that epidemics were killing natives by the mass-grave-full before the Spaniards waded ashore.

Also, these anti-European historians neglect to mention how efficient the noble savages were at killing themselves - the Azteks alown killed hundreds of t housands in their religious ceremonies (and these may well be the same historians who call Christianity a violent religion!).

Of course, Native Americans died as a result of European settling. But historians have an obligation to do all they can to report the truth, not feed anti-European prejudices.

The Lies They Teach: #19
The Lies They Teach: #16 and #17
The Lies They Teach: #13 - #15
The Lies They Teach #11 And #12
The Lies They Teach: #9 And #10
The Lies They Teach - #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3

oday we turn to the 19th chapter of Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) - which C-SM presents in the hope that you’ll buy the book - especially for any high school or college-age kids in your acquaintance who need to understand how liberal history profs are teaching revisionist lies to pollute the minds of the next generation.

Lie #19 - The Rosenbergs Were Not Spies And Were Wrongfully Executed

Although they were not major spies and the information they revealed was not important, the Rosenbergs were executed, to the consternation of many liberals in the United States and elsewhere. - Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty, American Destiny

Funny. If they weren’t spies and their trial was so tainted, you’d think more people would be consternated by the Rosenbergs’ execution than just liberals. Weren’t we all outrages when O.J. was freed? Didn’t the conviction of border guards Ignacio Ramos Jose Compean raise hackles across political persuasions? Or, as Schweikart puts it,

Has there ever been any Communist, anywhere, who was guilty of anything. Reading liberal historians, it would seem not.

The Rosenberg’s trial established that they provided Soviet intelligence agents with notes and a sketch on the lens device of the Nagasaki bomb, which allowed the USSR to speed its atomic weapons program up by at least five years. What experts? How about the trial judge (a Jew, by the way, so don’t go all “Bigotry!” on me):

I consider your crime worse than murder …. [by] putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 ….

Someone a bit closer to the case than even the judge, Nikita Khrushchev, also weighed in on the value of the Rosenberg’s treason:

According to ex-premier of the USSR Nikita Khrushchev, who quoted his spymaster Vyacheslam Molotov, the Rosenbergs “provided very significant help in accelerating the production of our atom bomb.”

Of course, treason is treason, and it matters not a whit whether the Rosenbergs speeded the Soviet WMD program or not.

Revisionist historians (and some frequent commenters on this site, I presume) have the Venona project to rebut, should they defend the innocence of the Rosenbergs. Venona, a long-running cryptanalysis project focused on the former Soviet intelligence agencies, has confirmed that the Rosenbergs were convicted for much more than merely “being Communists.” Further, it shows that Soviet agents whipped up the defense of the Rosenbergs and the demonstrations against their convictions.

Venona identified Julius, code name “Liberal” [heh]; showed that he was an active spy recruiter; and … [m]ore important, Venona decryptions identified Ethel as equally active in recruiting spies as Julius.

Faced with all this, even previously staunch leftist defenders of the Rosenbergs, like Radosh and Milton, could not deny Julius’ guilt and were left pleading that Ethel’s execution was improper and unfair. But it’s clear from the evidence that at a minimum she was a recruiter of spies for the Soviets, and that she actively supporter her husband’s treasonous work, which makes her guilty of treason as well.

The Lies They Teach: #16 and #17
The Lies They Teach: #13 - #15
The Lies They Teach #11 And #12
The Lies They Teach: #9 And #10
The Lies They Teach - #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3

ere we go, with two more chapters of Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) - which C-SM hopes will lead to you purchasing a copy of the book for yourself and any college-age kids in your acquaintance - and two more lies liberal history profs are teaching to pollute the minds of the next generation.

Lie #16 - Prohibition Was Unpopular From The Beginning And Failed In All Its Objectives

Prohibition … offered another example of reforming zeal channeled into a drive for moral righteousness and conformity . … The Anti-Saloon League [mobilized] Protestant churches behind its single-minded battle to elect “dry” candidates. - George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History

My grandmother was an prohibitionist and a staunchly conservative Methodist, and I thought it positively odd that my great aunt and uncle would lower their kitchen shade so grandmother wouldn’t look across the alley and see them drinking a beer with their Sunday night sausage and sauerkraut.

Be that as it may, prohibition is now offered up as a precursor to the moral battlegrounds of today - first abortion and drugs, now gay marriage - as history profs have hayseed hicks and ignorant fundamentalists battling the enlightened forces of coolness. It’s also used as an immigration lesson, with prohibition seen as the white majority forcing its will on the (then-white) immigrant populations (those drinking Irish and Italians!). And ultimately, prohibition serves as the foundation of teaching that “you cannot legislate morality.”

Temperance, in fact, was a longstanding thread leading up to prohibition. Abraham Lincoln ran on a “temperance” platform and most states had restrictions on alcohol before prohibition. Why? Because alcohol had become a huge social problem. Prohibition helped quell it, as arrests for public drunkenness and incidents of hospitalization for alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver declined during Prohibition.

Saloons - which often offered up prostitution in addition to booze - were thought by many doctors to be the source of syphilis outbreaks and the Mann Act was passed to stop white slavery that was thriving in the saloons.

So drinking wasn’t just a nice passive pastime; it was a big social problem (as it remains today), leading to wide support for Prohibition not only among conservative Protestants, but among much of America, both urban and rural, lower class and upper.

To Schweikart’s view, Prohibition failed primarily because sufficient enforcement was never funded, and because the media turned against it, followed by … sound familiar? … the intellectual elite in NY and DC. And finally, it was the desire for those lucrative liquor tax revenues during the Depression that ended the social experiment.

I’m not a fan of heavy-handed government policies like Prohibition, but I am a fan of having them taught in the proper context and not misused. If historians used Prohibition as a lesson about America’s strong and ongoing moral fiber, and against over-reaching regulation, that would be fine with me.

#17 - Sacco And Vanzetti Were Innocent And Wrongly Executed

The excesses of the fundamentalists, the xenophones, the Klan, the red-baiters, and the prohibitionists disturbed American intellectuals profoundly. … Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists and Italian immigrants. Their trial was a travesty. Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty, American Destiny.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti may be lost in the mist of time to most readers, so the easiest way to put them into perspective is to consider that the anarchists of the early 20th century were akin to the terrorists of our time. Their act of violence - killing a guard and paymaster in the midst of a robbery - was just another of anarchist actions against America: They had assassinated President William McKinley, had nearly killed a Carnegie Steel exec in his office. They shot people, made bombs, and blew things up, all in the name of bringing down all government.

From the 20s until they were replaced by the Rosenburgs in the 40s, Sacco and Vanzetti were the cause clebre of the American left. Future SCOTUS Felix Frankfuter wrote a book calling for a new trial, socialist author Upton Sinclair took up their cause, and as recently as 1977, then-Governor Michael Dukakis of MA called S&V innocent, saying “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names.” Says Schweikart of that proclamation:

Unfortunately for Dukakis, a firearms panel would meet only a few years later and virtually reattach the disgrace to the names of the two murderers.

But long before recent forensic tests put this issue to rest, a fair jury did the same based on overwhelming evidence that the Left would have you ignore.  Nine eyewitnesses ID’d Sacco as being at the scene; four ID’d Vanzetti.  Both defendants were caught in lies on the witness stand.  Alibi witnesses proved not to be credible.

As recently as 1985, liberals have published books coughing up “new evidence” to show S&V were good guys put down by an evil system.  But the evidence against this view is overwhelming:  Forensic tests have proved Sacco’s revolver fired the shot that killed one of the victims, that defense arguments that bullets were switched are specious, that Sacco was a participant, and separate from these tests, that Vanzetti also was guilty.  This has long been proven to such an extent that even Upton Sinclair admitted as much, saying he was “completely naive about the Sacco-Venzetti case, having accepted the defense propaganda completely.”

But some Leftist profs continue to profess their innocence, and they can no longer be called merely naive.

The Lies They Teach: #13 - #15
The Lies They Teach #11 And #12
The Lies They Teach: #9 And #10
The Lies They Teach - #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3

ur quick summation of Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) - which C-SM hopes will lead to you purchasing a copy of the book for yourself and any college-age kids in your acquaintance - continues with three more lies from this solid review of what liberal history profs are doing to revise the past and pollute the minds of the next generation.

Lie #13 - Thomas Jefferson Favored “Small Government” And Was A Pacifist

“He can with some justice be called a ‘half-way pacifist.’” Reginald C. Stuart, The Half-Way Pacifist

The chapter starts with a recounting of Jefferson as the first president with a preemptive war policy, as displayed by his aggressive approach to the Barbary pirates. While he favored a small navy (a half-way pacifist), he had no problem using Adams’ big navy against Tripoli (an all the way warmonger).

As for small government, it is true Jefferson cut the federal budget from Adams’ final budget of $10 million down to just over $7 million. Those were the days! But by 1805, the Jefferson admin was spending a budget of $12 million. Under him, per-capita income fell and government spending as a share of all national spending increased slightly.

Jefferson also directed Sec. of Treasury Albert Gallatin to develop plans for roads, harbors, navigable rivers and canals - all work that had previously been the business of the private sector. Says Schweikart of this supposedly “small government” president:

It is therefore surprising to see Jefferson order Gallatin to prepare an extensive report to Congress in 1808 in which he concluded, “The General Government can alone remove these obstacles”‘ to improving transportation.

At a time when the entire federal budget was $10 million, Gallatin and Jefferson recommended a $20 million federal spending program on infrastructure. Small government indeed.

Lie #14 - Women Had No Rights In Early America

“The United States had founding mothers … but on the whole our history celebrates only the white founding fathers ….” - Carol Berkin and Mary Beth Norton, Women of Amercia

Schweikart starts his rebuttal with an admission that being a woman in colonial America “was no picnic,” but adds that colonial women enjoyed more rights than English women, and better than today’s women in North Korea or Saudi Arabia.

Colonial inheritance laws allowed women to inherit parts of their husbands’ estates (all if the couples were childless), and lawyers in Colonial America invented the prenuptual, protecting the inheritances of many wealthy young women from nefarious scoundrels.

Many women of the era inherited their husbands’ businesses under these laws, and went on to run them successfully.

Where education was available, “Dame Schools” taught young women and there were examples of truly visionary approaches to education here, such as at the Lowell Mills in MA, where “Lowel Girls” working in the mills received an education at company expense. Our churches also offered women great freedom. Many were warm-up preachers to the main sermon, and many denominations included them in the church’s decision-making leadership.

Schweikart sees the problem feminist revisionists face:

One of the problems feminist historians have faced is that they must simultaneously portray women as victims and heroines: for women to be worthy of study as a separate historical topic, women must have done something exceptional or out of the ordinary. Y et as soon as there were examples of women achievers, it challenged the feminist notion of a rigid “classist/sexist” society that held women back.

Lie #15 - Restrictions On The Right To Vote Kept Voter Participation Low

“The roaring flood of the new democracy was now foaming perilously near the crest.” - Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization

Most early colonies had restrictions on the vote. Not only did voters have to be men and white, they had to either own land or property, or in some cases, have certain levels of wealth. Generally, only somewhere around 60 to 80 percent of white men were qualified to vote.

But this didn’t lead to lower voter registration than we have today. Between 1776 and 1780, turnout of eligible voters in the 13 states was between 48 and 65 percent. Between 1952 and 1960, just 64 percent of adults qualified to vote voted. In 2000, 64 percent of the eligible population registered, of whom 83 percent voted, or about half of all qualified voters.

The “foaming perilously near the crest” quoted above is a reference to historians’ portrayal of the surge of popular democracy during the Jackson years. At this time, Jackson’s foes were portrayed as the Eastern business elite “who grew rich by … government-bestowed privileges,” according to John Murrin et al.’s Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People. But, Schweikart says,

What universally goes unmentioned is that Van Buren’s party system, which produced Jackson’s election, was based on patronage and spoils. Both Jackson’s’ and Van Buren’s administrations greatly expanded the scope and power of the federal government, as well as spending by the government, precisely because they had to reward their supporters with party and government jobs.

The Lies They Teach #11 And #12
The Lies They Teach: #9 and #10
The Lies They Teach - #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3

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et’s return now to Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School), with two more lies from this solid review of what liberal history profs are doing to revise the past and pollute the minds of the next generation.

Lie #11 - No Terrorists or Weapons of Mass Destruction were Hiding in Iraq

A systematic search found no active production facilities or stockpiles for chemical, nuclear, or biological weapons of mass destruction, refuting one of the basic justifications for the war. - David Goldfield et al., The American Journey

Did the failure to find “active” WMD evidence in Iraq really refute one of Bush’s three justifications for the war? Ever heard of a murder conviction that came without a murder weapon or a body? Of course you have, but David Goldfield et al. would rather ignore the complex and hang on the simplistic - as would many of his colleagues.

First, the lib revisionists need to deal with who else was involved in the WMD “deception” - the French, British, Spanish, Australian, Japanese, German, Israeli intelligence services, the Egyptian and Russian presidents, the king of Jordan, and the United Nations Security Council, all of whom stated that Hussein had or was pursuing weapons of mass destruction.

Then, of course, you’d have to overlook his gassing of the Kurds, which led Hans Blix of the UN to state Hussein had 6,500 WMDs. And there were Saddam’s two sons in law, who during their brief defection testified about Iraqi WMD programs. They were executed upon their foolish return to Iraq. (So foolish that I’ll go ahead and accept that their testimony may be discounted since they were obviously idiots.)

Then there’s little niggles like this:

In 2003, a UN weapons inspector confidently stated that Ira had an ongoing nuclear program, and that he knew personally of uranium reporcessing at a facility six miles from Tarmiya. A twenty-gallon barrel found in northern Ira tested positive for Sarin, and another tested positive for mustard gas.

And Goldfield et al. conveniently ignore the tape recordings found of Hussein discussing his WMD program, and the need to hustle the evidence out of Iraq prior to an invasion - and the 56 “sorties” ‘of commercial jetliners, their seats removed, between Iraq and Syria prior to the war.

As for terrorists in Iraq, Schweikart runs through the same sort of sources - our own State Dept., evidence found in Iraq, respected publications like Janes and less respected news sources like CBS, etc. - to prove that Hussein was supporting terrorists in general and al-Qaeda in particular.

There’s plenty more in this chapter; real, hard evidence, as opposed to cute “Bush Lied, People Died” sloganeering.

Lie #12 - The Founders Envisioned a “Wall of Separation” Between Church and State, Keeping Religious Influence out of Government

The Founding Fathers did not intend to establish the United Sttes of America as a Christian nation [and] the assertion that the United States … was founded as a “Christian Nation” is itself a myth. - Mark Weldon “Whitten, The Myth of Christian America

I found myself using my Kindle’s highlighting function multiple times on every page of this chapter because its stuffed full of rebuttal of the vapid claims of the separation of church and state fanatics. If, for example, America’s founding fathers didn’t see America as a Christian nation, how come the colony’s own constitutions saw it as one. Here’s Virginia’s:

We, greatly commending, and graciously accepting of, their Deisres for the Furtherance of so noble a Work … in propagating the Christian Religion to such People [native Americans] as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true knowledge and Worship of God [establish the colony of Virginia.

The Charter of New England (1620) stated that the main objective of the colony was "the enlightenment of the Chrisitan religion, to the Glory of God Almighty."

Why, if America was not a Christian nation, did some colonies have statutes requiring attendance at church? (The sort of thing correctly precluded by a proper interpretation of separation of church and state.)

In 1812, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment allowed Christianity to "receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and freedom of religious worship." In 1892, SCOTUS found unanimously:

Our laws and institutions necessarily are based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind ... [In] this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian. … This is a Christian nation.

And it remains one to this day, if you check any national polling or any compilation by government or religious organizations.

The Chapter also delves into Jefferson’s letter, which is the basis of fraudulent interpretations of separation of church and state, effectively dismissing the arguments as misinterpretations or outright frauds.

The Lies They Teach: #9 and #10
The Lies They Teach - #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3

his week’s non-Watcher’s Council winner in the Watcher of Weasel’s weekly running of the blogs underscored the points I’ve been making in my “The Lies They Teach” series based on Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School.

Writing in American Thinker, Paul Kengor details How the Academic Left Elected Obama.  In the piece, Kengor details the youth vote:

MSNBC’s exit polling, which is consistent with other exit polling, showed that voters aged 18-29, who made up nearly one in five voters — or about 25 million ballots — went for Obama by more than two to one: 66 to 32 percent. Those voters alone well exceeded Obama’s overall popular vote advantage, which was roughly eight million.

These voting bands of Obama youth are largely parallel with the kids who are in college today, released by their parents into the tutelage of professors who can’t be trusted with American history or culture.  To illuminate the point, Kengor writes:

I’m reminded of the statement from the late atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who said that the job of professors like him was “to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own” and “escape the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”

To these liberal profs, Obama was the realization of a dream they have taught could never be attained in racist, classist, white-dominated America.

Thus, when the university community was presented with Barack Obama, a charismatic, impressive, seemingly excellent Democratic presidential candidate — who happened to be African-American — the reaction was nearly reverential, bordering on idolatry. The good senator’s bracing radical associations — enough to deny any other American a security clearance — and which were not coincidental to a man ranked the most leftist member of the most leftist Senate in U.S. history, didn’t matter to the academic world. Quite the contrary, those who dared to point out these associations — FoxNews, talk-radio, the McCain-Palin ticket — were deemed loathsome Neanderthals deserving of being burned in effigy from the nearest dorm.

Today’s college kids were born after Reagan confronted Communism and ended the Cold War. They have no experience with the Soviet threat and have been taught little or nothing about the horrors of Stalin, the Gulag and life under the Soviet thumb. Instead, they’ve been taught about the evils of anti-Communist crusaders in the U.S.  Kengor points out that McCain’s heroic suffering as a POW didn’t resonate with students who had been taught Vietnam was a war of American imperialist aggression, and that Sarah Palin stood opposed to the false teachings they had received about separation of church and state.

This is no longer child’s play.  Liberal indoctrination on college campuses has achieved its ultimate goal of electing an American president.  We must see that this is the zenith of that movement, and it progresses no further.

Elsewhere in the Watcher’s Winners, on the Watcher’s Council side of the slate, Joshuapundit won with a clear and helpful analysis of the challenges that face Obama’s Afghanistan policy in The Afghanistan Blues.

You can see all the winners, plus some nifty commentary, at Watcher of Weasels.

nward through Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) we go,with two more lies from this solid review of what liberal history profs are doing to revise the past and pollute the minds of the next generation.

Lie #9 - Michael Gorbachev, Not Ronald Reagan, Was Responsible for Ending the Cold War

Gorbachev’s revorm policies led not only to the collapse of the Soviet empire but also to the breakup of the Soviet Union itself. - James West Davidson et al., Nation of Nations

This is one of the lies that appals me the most, since I remember the incidents in such detail, it having been one of the most riveting times of my life - but living memories or not, liberal profs hate Reagan for his successes and his enduring popularity and are doing all they can to strip away his greatness.

First, let’s dispense with the notion that Gorbachev willingly put a stop to Russian imperialism, which is a part of this myth. Schweikart reminds us that Gorby kept Soviet forces in Afghanistan until their losses were no longer supportable, then unhappily pulled them out. He also tried to pull off Cuba II, the Soviet-supported Cuban take-over of Grenada, which Reagan put a quick end to.

This chapter is the most fascinating so far, describing the National Security Decision Directives issued by the Reagan administration starting in 1982 that spelled out how the US would bankrupt the USSR: attacking Soviet expansionism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, limiting sources of cash (like delaying the gas and oil pipeline to W. Europe), and limiting high-tech exports the Soviets desperately needed because they couldn’t come close to matching our technology.

“You have declared war on us, economic war,” said Gorby’s precessor, Leonid Brezhnev. Part of that war was NSA’s “Farewell Dossier,” a collection of punches using the Soviet’s never-ending efforts to steal our technology by sending fake technologies their way - including one that trashed their pipeline for a time.

Schweikart concludes:

As president, the Gipper played the [arms race] card. Across the board, using American banks and bullets, money and missiles, tehcnology and diplomacy, the United States put a full-court press on the Soviet Union. The best tha tcan be said for Garbachev was that he was open to defeat.

Lie #10 - September 11 Was Not the Work of Terrorists: It Was a Government Conspiracy

Don’t ask me to tell you want happened on 9/11. All I know is that the official account of the buildings’ collapse is improbable. - Paul Craig Roberts, Gullible Americans

This is another pre-emptive chapter in the book. Schweikart was unable to find a quote from an existing textbook for the beginning of the chapter, but as I said earlier, profs do allow and encourage outside reading - often from a prof-chosen list - so he feels compelled to attack these lunatic conspiracies as well.

C-SM readers don’t need a rehash of the disgusting and fantabulous arguments proffered by the 9/11 Truthers Dingbats, but like me, they might need a reminder of what our Sec of State-apparent did on the floor of the Senate:

In May 2002, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton waved a copy of that day’s edition of the New York Post with the headline, BUSH KNEW.  The story claimed the president had been given a briefing warning of impending terrorist attacks.  “The presidnet knew what?” she asked. “My constituents would like to know the answer to that and many other questions.

Questions like what, Hillary?  That steel doesn’t melt at those temperatures? (It loses tensile strength and bends.) That thousands of pounds of explosives were packed into the building by the CIA or Mosad?  That the missing passengers of the four planes have all been quietly, willingly secreted away to some unfindable destination, where they’ve stayed mum for seven years out of fervid love of George W. Bush?

Hillary just might look good in a tinfoil hat.

The Lies They Teach - #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3

C

ontinuing 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 and pollute the minds of the next generation with their drivel.

Lie #8 - Ronald Reagan Knew “Star Wars” Wouldn’t Work but Wanted to Provoke a War with Russia

Nicknamed “Star Wars” after a popular science fiction film, it spent billions of dollars trying to establish a space-based defense system. Most scientists contended that the project was as fantastic as the movie. - James West Davidson et al., Nation of Nations

Despite the flip dismissal of SDI technology by the Left, when Reagan announced the program in 1983, most of the technologies needed were in place, Schweikart says. The Left should have loved it because they hated the Cold War strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction which SDI sought to deconstruct - but because it came from Reagan and was directed at the Soviets, no such normalcy was evidenced.

Recently released National Security Council docs from 1982 lay out a U.S. goal of not just containing the Soviets, but reversing their expansion, with tapping out USSR military spending as one of several tactics to be employed. The strategy cunningly used the Soviet’s great respect for our technology so that “you leverage their perceptions dramatically” through technology investments.

Contrary to the Davidson quote above, it was the media not the scientists who pegged the Star Wars moniker on the program. The Soviets, fearful of our computer technology, certainly didn’t see the system as fantasy - and subsequent tests (carried out within Reagan’s original 20-year timeframe) proved that ultimately it was anything but Hollywood scriptwriting. Schweikart provides these quotes;

Inside the Kremlin, the top Soviet generals were terrified. They knew SDI had the potential to work. Nikolai Leonov said “it underlined still more our technological backwardness.” Gen. Makhmud Gareev, the deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff, agreed, saying it was “beyond our power” to compete with the Americans technologically. In 1981, a Soviet arms negotiator said, “Oh, you Americans! … You are going to make us spend and spend to keep up and our lousy standard of living will go down and down and in the end you will win.”

And we did. And not soon after, during the first Gulf War, Patriot Missiles shot incoming Scuds out of the air, and in 1992, space-based interceptors - real Star Wars stuff - were successfully tested, just 10 years, not 20, after Reagan’s speech. By 2008, an SDI antimissile missile shot a falling satellite to smithereens - but no one’s revising the textbooks yet.

The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3

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

The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3