think source texts are the only way to find out if something is believable or not—and that can take a long time to check if one is reading a contemporary history textbook. One has to go through the process of checking the sources used by the history book, checking the sources of the source book, and so and so forth until one comes to a true “source” (I forget the proper name for it). It may be an ancient parchment, a journal of a commoner, governmental tax or census records, etc. One historian looking at all these sources may connect the dots differently than the next historian. Really, all I can think of doing is checking history books against history books, as I’m not intellectually equipped to do the research and re-research done by academic historians.

I'm one of those "professional" historians who does rely primarily upon primary source material when doing history. However, a caveat when using primary source material is that the person who left the primary document (particularly if it is a written account) is that they "misremember" or sometimes even lie. For example, I'm currently working on a documentary on the hardships emigrants faced when traversing the Oregon and California Trails in the 19th century. I'm relying primarily upon the diaries emigrants kept, the letters they wrote, or the reminiscences they put down once they settled into their new homes. What is interesting is how, often times, journals kept by different people in the same wagon train will disagree upon or interpret differently the same event.

Even when doing "modern" history with the event captured on film, one will often find different interpretations of what is seen on the film. A great example of this is Rodney King. To the casual observer, it appears that the LAPD was simply beating the hell out of some poor guy. But to hear those officers tell it, the person capturing the video failed to also capture that which preceded that which was captured. This doesn't, IMO, excuse their actions, but it does frame perfectly the idea that objectivity in reporting or writing history is a near impossibility, even when you have what appears to be indisputable video or audio of what was said and/or done. What one is left with, then, is to attempt to find the most primary source material possible & then try to make an objective assessment of the accumulated material. Even that is not perfect, but then again, history is not a perfect science.

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"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

'I'm one of those "professional" historians who does rely primarily upon primary source material when doing history. However, a caveat when using primary source material is that the person who left the primary document (particularly if it is a written account) is that they "misremember" or sometimes even lie. For example, I'm currently working on a documentary on the hardships emigrants faced when traversing the Oregon and California Trails in the 19th century. I'm relying primarily upon the diaries emigrants kept, the letters they wrote, or the reminiscences they put down once they settled into their new homes. What is interesting is how, often times, journals kept by different people in the same wagon train will disagree upon or interpret differently the same event.' Post #61.

Not only do individuals 'misremember', they also outright lie at times.

Hence, objectivity is crucial as is deducing motivations.

In my opinion.

Actually, they did colonize, but their colonies failed. Their archaelogical remains can still be viewed in what is now Newfoundland.

Others who likely made it to the Americas were Africans. How else to explain the Olmec "heads" of Mesoamerica?

This doesn't even touch upon the three waves (at least) of people who colonized the Americas around 10,000 or more years ago via the Bering land bridge. Wouldn't one think that they "discovered" the Western Hemisphere?

It's only been in the last forty years or so that history as taught in most liberal academic departments have strived to write in a post-modern manner. That is, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, et al are now largely trained to a) recognize that they carry too much cultural baggage to ever completely immerse themselves in the "other" and tell truly objective stories, b) attempt to tell a more well-rounded story drawing upon multiple viewpoints & interpretations without editorializing, and c) recognize that stories are always in flux & constantly evolving. This is where (post) modern historians get accused of being "revisionists" or other such vile terms by hate-talkers on AM radio & cable news. (I often say, "well, we wouldn't have had to revise the history had the hacks not gotten it so damn wrong in the first place.")

Footnote: I may not have gotten the definition of "postmodernism" exactly correct. I often slept through my theory classes in grad school.

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"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

Probably the best example of this I can cite is Joseph Loewen's book Lies My Teacher Taught Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. He breaks down how history textbooks for American schools are written, how propaganda is inserted, how "inconvenient truths" are left out. In a nutshell, blame Texas. Texas is the second most populous state in the nation. Textbook manufacturers make a lot of money by selling to Texas schools. Hence, they want to appease curriculum designers in Texas. Therefore, they allow these same curriculum designers to edit said textbooks, so what we wind up with is the "rah, rah, America is #1, my country, right or wrong" version of history.

He also delves into how history came to be taught in American classrooms in the first place. Around the time of WWI (shortly before, if memory serves; I haven't read the book in years), the American Legion lobbied to have "heroic" history taught in schools to imbue schoolchildren with a sense of patriotism. This is why most of us were taught the almost mythological stories of our Founding Fathers (plus the oft-repeated lie that these men were Christians & that they desire a "Christian" nation). If not for the fact that I'm immensely curious & extremely contrarian, I might still be buying the "Washington could not tell a lie" story. . .

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"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

'In a nutshell, blame Texas. Texas is the second most populous state in the nation. Textbook manufacturers make a lot of money by selling to Texas schools. Hence, they want to appease curriculum designers in Texas. Therefore, they allow these same curriculum designers to edit said textbooks, so what we wind up with is the "rah, rah, America is #1, my country, right or wrong" version of history.'- Post #64.

Damn straight!

Although you can still introduce other source material that's more accurate- if the department agrees on it.

At least in our schools.

Actually, most (if not all) sailors of the 15th century were aware of the circumference of the earth. What they did not know was that there was a large landmass between Europe & Asia when one said west.

"Eratosthenes (ca. 276-192 B.C.) was a Greek scholar in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, the great center of learning of the Mediterranean world in the days of the ascendancy of the Roman Empire. He is credited with having applied simple geometric reasoning to obtain an excellent estimate of the earth's circumference. His derived value appears to have been within 10% of today's accepted value, but more importantly his reasoning was clear and correct."

(From SKYWATCH PROJECT: DETERMINING THE EARTH'S CIRCUMFERENCE)

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"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

Obviously, this person is either an appeaser of fascist ideology or part of its machine. Apparently, he never heard of Prescott Bush. . .

The definition of the word:

Fascism is a radical political ideology that combines elements of socialism, corporatism, authoritarianism, nationalism, militarism, anti-liberalism and anti-communism.

I think any casual, objective observer of this current administration & its enabling Congress will find massive doses of each of the words separated by commas above.

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"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

Vine DeLoria, Jr. (RIP) was perhaps the first & best. . .

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"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

This is where our attitude originates about how America "can do no wrong". It's scary.

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Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

- George Orwell, 1984

Prescott Bush was a Connecticutt Senator and grandfather of GW.
He was not a fascist. He did incur legal difficulty at the beginning of
WW2 for which he may have avoided due punishment. This had to do
with investors he represented who held German bonds. He may have
passed over the line in trading with the enemy in efforts to keep his
investors from losing every cent they had put into the bonds.

Even if he was a fascist, he was only one man, and no reflection
on anyone else, or on events taking place now 5o years after his
death, wouldn't you think?




No they would not. There have been no authoritarianism at all.
The electorate has voted the ruling party out of its majority,
and there is a vocal, unmolested opposition eveywhere in the
country, no less so under the present administration than any other.

I agree the government has been too socialistic, but this goes back
to the Democratic Party's "Great Society" of the 1960s, if not before.

I am not sure what "corporatism" might be. Business does the best it
can with what it has got, Democrat or Republican. Sometimes it does
very well, and I think perhaps too well, but this has been a problem
for both parties and all administrations.

The need for war in Iraq is legitimately debatable (although
not the one in Afghanistan). It was the result not of militarism,
but from the percieved threat from a man who had already
started two wars, and who was showing every sign of hiding
something from UN weapon inspectors, as the inspectors said
themselves.

Anti-communism is a mainstream US political conviction going back
to the 18th century, held to by all major parties and elected officials.

I am not sure what "anti-liberalism" would mean today. Let me know,
and I will comment.

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From the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord, deliver us.

Here is but one example for you. On October 20, 1942, the US Alien Property Custodian, under the "Trading With the Enemy Act," seized the shares of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), of which Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder. The largest shareholder was E. Roland Harriman. (Bush was also the managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, a leading Wall Street investment firm.)

The UBC was established to send American capital to Germany to finance the reorganization of its industry under the Nazis. Their leading German partner was the notorious Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, who wrote a book admitting much of this called "I Paid Hitler."

Among the companies financed was the Silesian-American Corporation, which was also managed by Prescott Bush, and by his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, who supplied Dub-a-Ya with his name. The company was vital in supplying coal to the Nazi war industry. It too was seized as a Nazi-front on November 17, 1942. The largest company Bush's UBC helped finance was the German Steel Trust, responsible for between one-third and one-half of Nazi iron and explosives.

Prescott Bush was also a director of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, (this one owned largely by Roland's brother, Averell Harriman), which owned about a third of the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, the rest owned by Friedrich Flick, (a member of Himmler's "Circle of Friends" who donated to the S.S.).

What is interesting about the history of the Bush family are the connections; Avril Harriman, Allen Dulles, the Rockefellers (the start of the oil connection), James Baker III, Gulf Oil, Pennzoil, Osama bin Laden…on and on it goes. It looks like this’ll have to be part one of an on-going series on the Bush dynasty and their dirty dealings. Nazism was but a form of fascism. And fascism, like all ideologies, comes in degrees. It is readily evident that the current administration version of fascism is something called neoconservatism.

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"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

Corporatism is the blending of government and business. Ever heard of the K Street project? Lobbyists writing legislation, pay to play, etc. I rest my case.

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"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

You'll get no argument from me regarding the invasion of Afghanistan save that I feel the administration woefully underfunded & undermanned the mission there, thus far dooming it to failure. The "need" for going into Iraq was non-existent. The "reasons" you listed above have all been disproven. Military intervention in Iraq is what it is----the use of armed force to benefit American businesses; nothing more, nothing less. That is the definition of militarism.

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"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

I agree. In a 1981 publicaton (I would to find the link at some point), I noticed more in-depth forms of facsism that were eerily adopted over the Nixon, Regan, Bush Sr/Jr administrations. Oddly enough, all Republican.

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Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

- George Orwell, 1984

Let's make a list & then check to see if the Bush administration meets the criteria:

1.) Powerful and Continuing Nationalism: Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2.) Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights: Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3.) Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause: The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4.) Supremacy of the Military: Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5.) Rampant Sexism: The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

6.) Controlled Mass Media: Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7.) Obsession with National Security: Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses

8.) Religion and Government are Intertwined: Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9.) Corporate Power is Protected: The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10.) Labor Power is Suppressed: Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11.) Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts: Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

12.) Obsession with Crime and Punishment: Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations

13.) Rampant Cronyism and Corruption: Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections: Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Does any of this sound familiar?

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"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson