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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

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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

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

The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3

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arry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) is continuing to infuriate me, which is a good thing.

I’m providing quick summaries of the lies, but the book is rich in detail and I strongly suggest you read it.

The title is almost self-explanatory. Let me just add that it is a review of college-level history text books. Here are lies four and five:

Lie #4: Harry Truman ordered the atomic bombing of Japan to intimidate the Soviets with “Atomic Diplomacy.”

Truman agreed with [James] Byrnes that use of the bomb would permit them to “out maneuver [sic] Stalin on China,” that is, negate the Yalta concessions in Manchuria and guarantee that Russia would “not get in som much on the kill” of Japan or its occupation. - Arnold Offner, “Another Such Victory,” 1999

The theory that Pres. Truman used the bomb to intimidate the Soviets instead of conquer Japan is a theory, Schweikart shows, that only an academic could concoct.

The revisionists start by revising the estimates of U.S. war deaths that would occur Operation Olympics by first declaring the stated estimates wildly over-estimated - the “casualty myth,” they call it - then conjuring up their own, lower, estimates based on numerous  false assumptions.  They also reject actual documents in Japanese and Soviet archives in favor of their own conclusions - even the Japanese deputy chief of staff of the Japanese Army General Staff, who wrote, “There is nothing we can do about the … atomic bomb.  That nullifies everything.”

Schweikart didn’t go into it, but I believe this lie is fired by elitist fires.  Truman had the misfortune of assuming office, unelected, following the most elite of all elites, FDR.  This haberdasher from the Midwest could not be allowed to do anything right, and liberal elite historians have worked hard to miscast him.

Lie #5: John F. Kennedy was killed by LBJ and a secret team to keep him from getting us out of Vietnam.

This is another of the lies Schweikart includes not so much because it is dwelt on in college texts, but because liberal profs, fearful of being called part of the education establishment, frequently let students go to sources beyond the required text books - books like Barr McClellan’s Blood, Money & Power:  How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K.

I’m sure I don’t have to re-hash this for C-SM’s audience; suffice it to say that Schweikart presents five different JFK myths and quickly dispatches them all in a flood of big facts and juicy details, including good stuff on Jack’s real position on Vietnam vs. the recasting of that position for the benefit of Bobby.

Previous in this series:

The Lies They Teach: #1 - #3

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arry Schweikart’s book, 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) is one infuriating read. It leaves you feeling impotent and frustrated, knowing that the liberals and their revisionist history are doing more to win the next generation than we are. But it’s an important read, so I’ll share quick summaries of the 48 lies here over time. I strongly suggest, however, that you read the book.

The title is almost self-explanatory. Let me just add that it is a review of college-level history text books. Here are lies one through three:

Lie #1: The first presidents intended for the United States to be isolationist.

In his farewell address, [George] Washington urged that the United States stay out of European affairs and make no permanent alliances, a principle that would be a hallmark of American foreign policy for a century and a half. - James West Davidson et. al., Nation of Nations

Of course, Washington spent much of his administration seeking foreign alliances, so any historian should ponder that line from Washington’s final address before drawing such a simplistic conclusion. Schweikart shows that Washington wanted about 25 years of breathing room without hard set alliances so the nation could get strong enough to stand alone, without alliances, if need be. Washington was particularly concerned with alliances entangled by old European prejudices, that he wished to leave to the Old World.

The chapter also deals with the leftist historians’ penchant for turning Jefferson into a pacifist, debunking that theory by reminding us that Jefferson sought, in effect, “an alliance of the willing” to fight the Barbary pirates, and when Europe cowed in fear, he pursued unilateral action. Sound familiar?

Lie #2: The Mexican and Spanish-American wars were imperialist efforts drummed up by “corporate interests.”

Ordering troops to the Rio Grande, into territory inhabited by Mexicans, was clearly a provocation … [The Mexican War] was a war of the American elite against the Mexican elite. - Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

Liberal historians want to look at wars like the Mexican American War and our campaign in the Philippines as proof of our societal racism, because we wage war against brown people.  And when we leave when we’re done, in order to not allow us to be disproved as imperialists, these historians make the case that we left because … you guessed it:  We don’t like brown people.

To make their case, liberal historians “ignored the eagerness with which our foes entered the wars,” Schweikart says.  Mexico’s army was four times larger than ours, and Europe was betting on Mexico as the winner.  Wrong.  We did win, but the books minimize the brilliance of our campaigns, like how Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish flotilla without losing a single man.

Lie #3: FDR knew in advance about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor

Schweikart thoroughly debunks this old myth, but fails to make the case for it actually being taught in college textbooks.  Still, I appreciated the chapter because it revealed the same ugliness we see in the 9/11 Truthers Dingbats:  That for their theory to be correct, hundreds of Americans would have had to conspire, and stay quiet after the fact.

That’s an atrocious view of America, and Pearl Harbor and 9/11 conspiracists are both beneath contempt.