It is an unfortunate fact of life that historical works which question officially established orthodoxy are only accidentally published by major book producers. In our era of political correctness, more realistically known as craven and servilely compliant behavior, the vast majority of works found on the shelves of national bookstores are written by authors who wish to have their work published and therefore slavishly follow the dictums set forth by those who control an increasingly consolidated American print media.
The average national chain book outlet is packed with a plethora of large-print bodice rippers and glossy photo books dealing with geography, old aircraft, doll collecting, dead movie stars and appealing baby animals. The history sections of these literary soup kitchens are crammed with reprints of entirely safe subjects, almost all of which are so bland and innocuous as to be nothing more than literary custard. The frantic determination of publishers and retailers not to offend anyone under any circumstances has resulted in a profound lack of progress in uncovering and bringing important historical truths to a mass audience.
Even after the fall of world communism from the world stage, there are few books published critical of its practice and practitioners. There are two reasons for this regrettable fact. First, most academics, who have the easiest entree into the offices of publishers, are liberals with amazingly similar worldviews and none of whom are hostile to the theories of Messers Marx and Engels. Second, the universal dedication to the theory of political correctness has ushered in an age of quivering cowardliness by the publishers themselves. Terrified lest they might offend any political or religious entity that might voice objections to what the entity could personally consider an offending subject, they print bland books which recycle old, safe themes by writers who have a vested interest in keeping the historical status quo entirely secure.
A writer, for example, who has firmly endorsed the view that President Roosevelt had no prior knowledge of the impending Japanese air attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, would view any refutation of his pet thesis as tantamount to treason and would expend a great deal of effort to either deny the revisionistic arguments or to attack the author of them.
Bookshelves bulge with tales of the worker¹s paradise created by Stalin, but there are almost no references to the bloodbaths he initiated. Next to those titles are huge stacks of the latest monthly book on the holocaust, next to an even larger stack of books dealing with the psychopathic cruelty of all Germans in general. These books only sell to a very limited audience but their appearance in large numbers gives the false impression that such titles have wide general interest and an even wider sales range.
Further complicating the search for historical truth is that books concerning the latter two subjects are guaranteed to find an eagerly sympathetic audience with most American and British book reviewers and editors. Works containing more realistic depictions of the holocaust are ignored and their authors victimized by smear campaigns, should the books have any degree of accuracy, or total silence if their thesis cannot be refuted.
Much of this response is not due to ideology of the critics but rather, to the entirely acceptable premise that no commercial venture tolerates anything that would minimize its profits.
While orthodox views of wars from the American Revolution to the Gulf War are regularly lavished with high praise in publications such as the New York Times, critical examinations of those events usually go begging for attention.
One recent book, a winner of many in-house prizes, was purported to be an account of a Jewish child from the Baltic region who spent his formative years in a series of Nazi death camps. After laurels were heaped upon the book and its author, it was discovered that the writer was not Jewish, had never been in a camp of any kind and was far too young to have participated in the hecatombs of the Second World War. The book was published and extensively promoted in the United States even though those facts had come to light before it was first published in Europe .
The journey to historical truth is a long and exhausting one, and writers searching for truth are further handicapped because it takes a great deal of time and effort to research and write such books. Genuinely serious historians who do not write to an idea, take on a task which is far more complicated, and because of the political correctness factor, are far less likely to be accepted by a mainstream publisher than the generally ideological and plagiarized fictions which are inaccurately called history by their writers and publishers.
While there is still great interest in the Second World War in general, and Hitler in particular, the historical playing field is so tilted that there is but one direction for writers to run. The steady, and seemingly unstoppable, downhill course has encouraged and rewarded sophistry at the expense of facts and truth.
However, there very often is too much of a bad thing and the boy who persisted in shouting about non-existent wolves was eventually eaten by them. And every few years, even though it seems to be by accident rather than design, the search for historical truths wins a hearing in the public arena. “The Bell Curve,” published in 1994, contained convincing detail that empirically proved class structure and IQ test scores are intimately linked. Somehow, it broke through the protective screens and highly negative criticisms of knee-jerk liberal reviewers, and reached the higher rungs of the national best-seller lists.
However, it was quickly followed by several rapidly prepared works of a more politically acceptable view which claimed it is actually not IQ which matters but “emotional intelligence,” or more graphically “street smarts” which is really the important factor in sociological and economic development. This specious and predictably dimwitted argument entirely missed the point the authors of “The Bell Curve” made, namely there is indeed a well-documented and proven connection between class and intelligence. Socially correct writers have a standing aversion to inconvenient facts and lack the courage to critically examine their own prejudices.
A best-selling work by British author Colin Simpson about the sinking of the Lusitania in 1914, correctly attributed the rapid sinking of the passenger liner, containing many neutral Americans, to the explosion of her cargo of a quarter million pounds of illegal explosives. The book was greeted by outrage in official England and a book in response was hastily cobbled together by two Stanford University instructors. The authors claimed that the sinking was due entirely to Teutonic barbarity and coal dust. This defense was necessary because the orthodox point of view was that Churchill would never have indulged in such terrible behavior as to permit the loading of a quarter million pounds of high explosives onto a passenger ship and knowingly permit her to sail into an area where German U-Boats were known to be operating, and to compound this by ordering her escorts withdrawn. But the facts, as stubborn and inconvenient as they often are, show he did.
It is an established fact that at least 80% of the American public believes that the assassination of President Kennedy was the result of a conspiracy of some type and not the aberrated actions of the lone gunman so frantically supported by officialdom and the so-called mainstream media.
In 1993, Gerald Posner authored “Case Closed.” In this work, he slavishly presented and promoted, in toto, the official government version of Kennedy¹s assassination as accomplished and immutable fact. Unlike the large number of books chronicling various conspiracy theories, Posner¹s book received high and frequent praise from the media because he trumpeted the version of events agreed upon by the government and the print media. Fortunately for historical accuracy, the effort sold very badly.
Posner followed this disaster with another book, again setting forth and supporting the official version, on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Like the Kennedy work, it too was trumpeted by the media as being the brilliant final word on a painful subject and like the Kennedy book, it too sold badly.
In general, it might be said with some accuracy that unautographed copies of officially approved and sponsored history books are considered rare in the used book market.
In spite of, or more likely because of, constant assaults by writers acting as unofficial governmental public relations outlets on their intelligence, the American public has grown to distrust their government and the media, and its public-relations firm.
In the very rare occurrence when a controversial book that deals with official misconduct or disastrous error is published by a mainstream printing house, it is never quite believed until officially denied by Washington officials. The axiom is that the higher the level of the deniers, the greater the degree of belief.
Canadian writer James Bacque wrote “Other Losses” in which he made an excellent case for the complicity of Gen. Eisenhower in the death by disease, starvation and neglect of tens of thousands of German prisoners of war. His book was followed by a work by Stephen Ambrose, a fierce and well-paid defender of the Allied Supreme Commander. Ambrose tried to refute Bacque¹s thesis, but did so by editing a tome of great moral outrage, almost as if he was trying to defend himself from the accusations, rather than searching for historical truth.
The facts, which are available in numerous official archives, tend to strongly support Bacque¹s basic thesis, if not every detail of it, and it must be of some satisfaction to the author and those who hunger for historical truth that his book sold out far more quickly than his critic¹s works did.
The law of vested interest is often paramount in the production and marketing of historical works.
