Left Wing Historical Revisionism

[MH]

Originally Posted by Hottentot

Academics (historians in this case) are human beings who have the same right to be biased as any human beings, as long as they make their arguments coherently based on sources and logic that can be either agreed or argued with. It's more lazy and intellectually dishonest to shout "bias" at anything one possibly disagrees with.

OK good point i agree with that and that's a good start to look at it when talking about honest ones.
Not some ideologically infected academics.

[Hottentot]

Originally Posted by MH

Not some ideologically infected academics.

These are mythical beings. Many people talk about them, but the worst I have met on my academic career have been a few hard liner feminists. Universities at least in here used to be politically charged, but these days not so much. I couldn't honestly tell you what "ideologies" (and I use the term very loosely) even the professors and doctors I know the best here support or whom they vote in the elections.

For all I know, they could be fanatical closet communists or catholics wanting a new inquisition starting from tomorrow or maybe just plain old moon nutsys. What I know about them is that they write interesting papers, have good lectures and are nice to chat with on topics not necessarily related to studying.

[mookiemookie]

OP sounds like a slightly more literate Bubblehead. Grandstanding, ranting and raving about "far left liberals" being the bane of society.

One could easily find many inaccurate and flat out biased accounts of history from military sources. To assign that as strictly the MO of the opposite of whatever political side you agree with is foolish and shows an inherent bias in and of itself.

It's also ignorant of the way the world actually works to look at things in absolutes and in terms of black and white. Dear Leader Dubya said once, (with pride, I might add) "I don't do nuance." To say that the U.S. is the good guy always and forever is just as bad as saying that the U.S. is always evil or the aggressor. Were war crimes committed by the U.S. in the Pacific War? Yes. Desecration of the dead, murdering POWs, killing shipwreck survivors, rape...all of these are documented. Is it enough to label the U.S. as "the aggressor?" No. But being a rational adult means that you have to confront and accept that the ideas you have about something could be wrong, and that the white hat cowboy may not be 100% good.

In short, partisan hacks are dummies.

[joegrundman]

my opinion actually is that a calm discussion of the circumstances leading up to the pacific war would be interesting.

From what little i know of the subject, labels like who is "the aggressor" start becoming irrelevant the more you look into it, and how much further back you wish to go.

but clearly this is not the thread for that discussion

[tater]

Never miss an opportunity to pitch good books

Really good overviews of the Pacific war are H.P. Willmott's books, IMO.
Empires in the Balance: Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies to April 1942

This is Willmott's overview of rationales for fighting, and strategy. Another good one along those lines is Combined Fleet: Decoded by Prados.

These include the larger political picture.

Clearly Japan was in the wrong. While you can argue they felt "forced" into war, they were only forced in the sense that they would not ever stop their atrocities in China willingly. Some will say our colonialism in asia was no better, but they'd be forced to jack up our body count by a couple orders of magnitude to make that claim.

[MH]

Originally Posted by Hottentot

These are mythical beings. Many people talk about them, but the worst I have met on my academic career have been a few hard liner feminists. .

You live in very quiet and hegemonic corner of the world.

[Hottentot]

Originally Posted by MH

You live in very quiet and hegemonic corner of the world.

And often when reading these forums I find myself being very happy for it.

[tater]

An academic in NYC would find himself in a very quiet corner as well, since virtually everyone around him would have identical politics.

People tend to only notice bias contrary to their own. So if you think there is little bias in your particular are of interest, it likely just means you share the same biases.

[joegrundman]

Originally Posted by tater

People tend to only notice bias contrary to their own. So if you think there is little bias in your particular are of interest, it likely just means you share the same biases.

ain't that the truth.

thanks for the book recommendations tater. i will look into them.

I have one on the pacific war written in the 1970s by a BBC journalist called John Costello. The biases are pretty blatant by today's standards, but if you notice them you can work around them. Very interesting nonetheless.

[MH]

Originally Posted by tater

An academic in NYC would find himself in a very quiet corner as well, since virtually everyone around him would have identical politics.

People tend to only notice bias contrary to their own. So if you think there is little bias in your particular are of interest, it likely just means you share the same biases.

[Hottentot]

Originally Posted by tater

People tend to only notice bias contrary to their own. So if you think there is little bias in your particular are of interest, it likely just means you share the same biases.

True. I would just hope that the years in university have taught me to recognize my own biases, write them down to the readers of my texts to evaluate on their own, and to look at each research text I'm reading without thinking if I agree with it or not, but by thinking how it's written.

I would hope I wouldn't start blaming the bias of the writers at any point, but instead conclude on more scientific merits if their research is good or not. Likewise I would hope I could just shrug and chuckle the next time someone calls me a Soviet symphatizer because I didn't use 35 pages of the 40 page seminar thesis to tell how evil the Soviet cinema system was. (Not referring to this thread, as it hasn't happened here.)

I would hope that is what separates me, a future professional of history, from the countless of people thinking they are experts in history because they can read. For history is a difficult science, because it makes everyone an expert. Everyone who can read can also read history. They are usually even free to go and study the original sources themselves. They can do most of the things professionals can, but that doesn't make them professionals.

As a professor in my university so well summarized it: "It's very difficult to debate with commoners [poor translation by me, but he didn't mean it as an insult], because they know so much."

OP sounds like a slightly more literate Bubblehead.

You mean he might know what "allegation" means and at what point the word can no longer be used?
perhaps patch should take bubbles place in lawskool
But on the literacy level maybe that deserves some exploration, could it be that patch has taken the usual historical take on the co-prosperity enterprise and got to the words "racist" and "conservative" and hit a mental block?

@tater, you are just showing your bias there.

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by tater

Never miss an opportunity to pitch good books

Really good overviews of the Pacific war are H.P. Willmott's books, IMO.
Empires in the Balance: Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies to April 1942

This is Willmott's overview of rationales for fighting, and strategy. Another good one along those lines is Combined Fleet: Decoded by Prados.

Don't forget Eagle Against the Sun by Ronald Spector.

[August]

Phillippine Diary, 1939-1945 by Steven Mellnik
Corregidor: The Rock Force Assault by EM Flanagan
With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa by EB Sledge

[CCIP]

I don't know, I tend to think of "Left wing academia" in the same way I think of the "Liberal media" - in the sense that it's something that the opposition always points to as a ridiculous source of bias, and yet when you look at it neutrally, you see that there's plenty of extremes on both sides, and that this is where a lot of the slogans and threads like this come out of. They don't come out of nowhere, after all. Working in academia, I have met many rather conservative people, including several fields of study (literature, philosophy, humanities/liberal arts) where Christian scholars at least a very large and vocal minority, and certainly a number of fields (business, public affairs, politics) where I have seen an overwhelmingly market-liberal majority whose social views often approach neoconservatism. Unlike some people, I've learned to not only live with but also appreciate their views, as long as they're not jerks about them and have the courtesy to follow norms of academic debate. And oh, there are plenty of jerks in academia, of any political persuasion, don't get me wrong on that. But that's pretty true of the rest of the world as well.

The idea that academia is some sort of spawning ground for communism and anti-patriotic feelings is pretty ludicrous though. It's just that to some people's narrow views, any questioning of their nation's and culture's inherent "rightness" constitutes betrayal, and apparently engaging in critical pitching of alternatives (and their refutation or reconsideration) is no better than treason. Such people have usually been given slogans by politicians who fear academia's acceptance of open debate and rejection of 'sacred cows', and have swallowed them up whole, without reflecting on the reality of things. Because after all, it's easier to live in a "patriotic" mindset than to be able to take criticism and stand up to it not with slogans, but with evidence, reason and respect for etiquette. There is no reason that the suggestion that Japan is the victim of aggression should make you angry - unless you were directly and mockingly approached by someone who screamed that repeatedly in your face and ran away. If you know it's false, then it shouldn't make you angry, because you should be able to give a substantiated, polite, logical response without resorting to ALL CAPS and attacking red herrings like Wikipedia and that mythical left-winger in California. The idea that America is "an evil empire" shouldn't make you angry, unless you are actually afraid that it's true. For everything else, there are critical methods and etiquette that can guide one through a discussion without compromising anyone's core values, accepting preposterous ideas, or resorting to personal attacks, slogans, and rhetorical fallacies. It is however woefully apparent that some people have no clue about critical methods and etiquette, but are walking encyclopedias of preposterous ideas (either their own or attributed to fictitious opposition), personal attacks, political slogans, and rhetorical fallacies. THAT, my friends, is what really makes me worried about the education system - far more so than the supposed encroachment of revisionism.