FACES AND PLACES: When it comes to American history, revisionists rule! (08/14/05)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

When it comes to American history, revisionists rule!

A few summers ago I was a Fulbright scholar teaching American history at the National University of Ostroh Academy in Ukraine. We spent much time discussing the Second World War, especially after I discovered that most of the students had little knowledge regarding American involvement in the European theater. They seemed to believe that the Soviet Union had beaten Germany single-handedly.

During one of our sessions, the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came up. "Why did the United States use its atomic weapons against innocent men, women and children, one of the students asked.

"What have you heard?" I asked in return.

"The United States hated the Japanese because they were Asiatics," came the reply. "The bombing was cruel and unnecessary." When I queried the other students about the matter, they seemed to agree with the analysis. We spent the remainder of the period discussing the incident and the circumstances which led up to the bombing.

After reviewing Japanese atrocities against civilians and POWs, - in particular the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March - I walked up to a map of the world, pointed to the South Pacific, and explained how U.S. forces, at great cost of lives and treasure, captured Pacific islands such as Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima (25,851 U.S. casualties, including some 7,000 dead), and Okinawa (38,000 U.S. wounded, some 12,000 dead) on the way to invading the islands of Japan itself. The Japanese were fiercely determined warriors who considered dying in defense of the emperor an honor, I explained. The U.S. firebombed Tokyo incessantly with not even a hint of submission. On the contrary, such bombings tended to strengthen Japanese resolve. Given their experience with Japanese intransigence, America's leadership concluded that invading the Japanese home islands would be even more costly than vanquishing Nazi Germany, a nation which resisted to the bitter end. Estimates of U.S. losses in Japan ran from 500,000 to a million dead and wounded. Faced with few alternatives, President Harry S. Truman elected to drop one atomic bomb and, when the Japanese still didn't talk surrender, a second bomb. Eight days later, Japan surrendered.

I can forgive students in Ukraine for their lack of knowledge. What they knew about Hiroshima and Nagasaki they probably learned from Soviet-educated teachers who were still repeating the party line. What I find particularly appalling, however, is the fact that today, 60 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many American students and history teachers share the Soviet perspective. They perceive the bombing as one more example of America's long record of crimes against humanity.

How can this be? Part of the reason, of course, is the takeover of American universities and public opinion by professors of the Left. The most popular textbook on American campuses today, for example, is A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present, by Prof. Howard Zinn. Self-described as a "social activist," Prof. Zinn eschews the use of footnotes in his book. "I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of social struggle," Zinn declared in 1998 during an interview with Raymond Lotta of the Revolutionary Worker. "I wanted to be part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching."

With some 500,000 copies in print, Prof. Zinn's work is the book of choice among professors of history on American campuses. The text is enthusiastically endorsed by Eric Foner of Columbia University, tenured professor and past president of the American Historical Society. It was Dr. Foner who, as correspondent Bernard Goldberg reminds us, reflected on the 9/11 tragedy as follows: "I'm not sure which is more frightening, the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House."

After describing the Hiroshima bombing in his book, Dr. Zinn claims that American "estimates of invasion losses were not realistic, and seem to have been pulled out of the air to justify bombings which, as their effects became known, horrified more and more people. Japan by August, 1945, was in desperate shape and ready to surrender."

Really? Not according to most reputable historians as well as Mitsuo Fuchido, the Japanese pilot who led the attack on Pearl Harbor. Attending a reception after the war, Mitsuo met Col. Paul Warfield Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. During the conversation which followed, the Japanese pilot said: "You did the right thing to drop the bombs. Japan would have resisted an invasion using every man, woman and child, using sticks and stones if necessary."

Not only are Japanese crimes off limits for Prof. Zinn, the murder of millions under Stalin and his heirs are as well. Describing Mao Tse Tsung, he writes: "China was in the hands of a revolutionary movement, the closest thing in the long history of that ancient country, to a people's government, independent of outside control." Praising a man who murdered or imprisoned thousands of Cubans, Prof. Zinn writes: "In power, Castro moved to set-up a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants." The Sandinistas are portrayed as "a coalition of Marxists, left-wing priests and assorted nationalists, [who] set about to give more land to the peasants and spread education and health care among the poor." The execution of the Rosenbergs who stole U.S. atomic secrets and passed them on to the USSR "was a demonstration to the people of the country...of what lay at the end of the line for those the government decided were traitors."

Today, American youth, whose knowledge of American history is abysmal to begin with, are being brain-washed by the likes of Prof. Zinn and those of his ilk who inhabit our universities. Don't believe me? Ask your children or grandchildren what they know about their American heritage. It won't be pretty!

Myron Kuropas's e-mail address is: [email protected].

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