Lou Coatney, a retired government and academic librarian who attended West Point in 1964 and 1965, wrote the below article on LinkedIn in July 2021 about a left-wing biased American history textbook used at West Point.
This goes along with what West Point cadets told us they nicknamed their American History class. They called it the “I hate America class”.
The proposed Duty, Honor, Country Commission would in part look at what is being taught and the materials at service academies.
Here is Lou’s article:
West Point’s leftist-if-not-Marxist plebe American History textbook helped produce “communism will win” CDT and mustered out Army officer Spenser R.?
“Commie cadet” Rapone and the need to re-evalute social sciences textbooks and other course materials
USMA Board of Visitors, please consider this, objectively:
I’m sure you are all aware of the case of graduated (2016) “communism will win” cadet and later mustered-out Army officer Spenser Rapone. Although Spenser was reportedly shaken by his experiences as an enlisted man in Afghanistan, he was politically radicalized *academically* at West Point. A civilian Muslim Department of History professor was blamed.
Fair, truthful, accurate history is the most important memorial for passed Americans – especially our war dead – and for future Americans who need to learn (in The School for Soldiers) from its hard-earned lessons to avoid repeating past mistakes and suffering. And on a battlefield, objective/unbiased and accurate thinking can be the difference between life and death.
Note this quote:
“In textbooks, being “factual” does not necessarily mean being unbiased or value-free. As any good lawyer knows, it is possible to present extremely biased arguments that can be alleged to be “factual,” because they are compatible with a given set of facts.
By the careful choice of what [which] facts to include or exclude, it is possible to construct arguments that can be wholly one-sided, yet can be asserted to “fit the facts.”
Textbooks are influenced by the political, ideological, or moral beliefs of their authors (or by the beliefs that authors presume to be held by the “typical” teacher for whom they write). ….” http://www.socialstudies.org/sites/default/files/publications/se/6003/600310.html
This last spring, I was startled to learn that the plebe American History textbook is by leftist if not Marxist Eric Foner. Thanks to new History Department head Col. Gail Yoshitani – who has my gratitude – I finally learned what edition of Foner’s text is being used and was then finally able to obtain a copy via eBay. (I got no response from the previous DoH head, and my request for a copy of the textbook was rejected by West Point’s Freedom of Information Act office.)
(When was Foner’s textbook first used in the Academy? Who were the textbook selection committee members?)
In this recording, Foner (who is a Columbia University professor) talks about his role – he claims only to be “a foot soldier, definitely” – when he was a graduate student in the anti-racism/anti-Vietnam student rebellion at and occupation of Columbia in 1968. Although he is ducking and weaving throughout the interview, it emerges that he was involved with the Studends for Democratic Society (SDS). Note also his radical antics in/*with* the academic system then and his talk about the power of the critique of and control over conventional history textbooks. https://richardhofstadter100.omeka.net/items/show/144
And his textbook – which is acclaimed in American academia – has *become* the “conventional history” itself.
Please consider the 9 examples of Foner’s bias/distortions I have attached to verify why this textbook is actually destructive of Cadets’ and graduates’ balanced, objective, and accurate understanding of these key moments in American history. Following them is what little I’ve learned about the other textbooks available.
Following that is the basic issue of what and how much Cadets should learn and whether and/or at what point that can undermine their service as Cadets and then as officers if it isn’t truthful and balanced. And following that is my thoroughly researched 13Jul97 article in my hometown newspaper titled “Vietnam Wasn’t A Class War.” [1]
It should be noted here that American academia has been populated and then groomed by many leftist-if-not-Marxist ideologues like Foner – many of whom got their start as student radicals during Vietnam like Foner – who have gotten and kept themselves in power with selective publication, hiring, firing/tenure, (crucially) history departments’ academic accreditation, etc. American history textbooks seem similarly biased, so finding an unbiased and balanced, factual (rather than indoctrinating) textbook may be difficult if not impossible.
Most active duty Army officer historians and history instructors try to be objective and seem rather naive about agendas some colleagues may have. Allowing politicized and politicizing civilians (or politically radical military officers) into service academy social science faculties serves to create politicized/radicalized Cadets – disastrously so in Spenser’s case.
When most all West Point’s faculty were military and the sole (B.Science) degree was Mechanical Science, this wasn’t a problem. However, of all schools West Point certainly should have History as an accredited major (since so many of its graduates have indeed made it). But it must not allow truthful history to be betrayed to appease a leftist-if-not-Marxist academic social sciences establishment.
I myself indirectly tangled with Foner about the dishonestly omissive, originally intended Smithsonian Enola Gay exhibit. Written testimonies from both of us are in the May 1995 Senate Hearing 104-40 about the exhibit, very vigorously chaired by Alaska’s Senator Ted Stevens, a USAAF officer in China-Burma-India during the war. The academic community’s support for the original – in effect Hiroshima revisionist/distortionist – Smithsonian exhibit confirmed American academia’s chronic leftist bias. Its case was presented by renowned Nazi Holocaust scholar Dr. Ed Linenthal from Minnesota who did not after all – as the revisionists apparently hoped – attempt to equate the war-ending atom bombings with the Nazi Holocaust. (I myself had briefly said something to Ed in a stairwell at AHA 95, and I later alerted Ted to the possible threat of this appearing at the May95 hearing.) https://archive.org/stream/smithsonianinsti00unit/smithsonianinsti00unit_djvu.txt
Ed then wrote his book History Wars about such historiographical battles, and history at West Point seems to have suffered a coup de main fait accompli. Joe McCarthy and friends must be clawing their coffins. Judging by Spenser Rapone, the Army has indeed been infiltrated to its core: the Corps.
And with the Academy making Foner an “authority” in Cadets’ minds, what is their reaction to this 16Aug17 Nation article “Eric Foner: White Nationalists, Neo-Confederates, and Donald Trump. The historian and author explains how racism is part of the Trump family DNA.”? As Foner should well know, the Nazis genocidally claimed “Jewish Bolshevism” – in Foner’s similar terminology/mentality that would be “Communist DNA” – in their runup to the Holocaust.
And so I ask the Board of Visitors to consider and pass a resolution asking (or requiring, if you have that power) the Academy to do the following:
I. Scrutinize more closely current and prospective (military or civilian) social sciences faculty members’ political, religious, and/or ethnic – including all races and religions – advocacy involvements and public views.
II. Review of all social sciences textbooks and other course materials to expose and remove bias, beginning with those for the younger (and most impressionable) classes. If none of what is available are satisfactory, Department of History write its own basic, undergraduate level American History survey textbook. (West Point has its own leadership textbook, and our history has in many cases itself been the product of West Pointers.)
III. Choose social sciences textbook and course materials selection/purchase committee members for their political objectivity as much as other criteria.
IV. Reject outside political, religious, and/or ethnic interest/education/advocacy groups’ offers of free curriculum materials and seminars, unless they are instead objective and directly needed.
V. Request graduated and current USMA classes’ Historian officers to help examine historical content, especially for their respective eras.
VI a. Provide to Cadets and faculty (for them to consider) department-approved corrections and alternative viewpoints on specific issues, which may be necessary to balance social sciences textbooks and course materials which have been used.
And do this as soon as possible – maybe using some of the examples I’ve given below – while the Foner textbook is still in use.
VI b. And undo educational/indoctrination damage which may have already been done by advising serving and retired graduates of the availability of the re-balancing information and views.
Thank you, Board of Visitors, for considering my concerns, if you do.
–
Attachments:
1. I’ll start with the factual military history errors of this exaggerating statement by Foner on p. 491: “The most famous Indian victory took place in June 1876 at The Battle of Little Bighorn, when General George A. Custer and his entire command of 250 men perished.”
Custer was commanding the battle as a lieutenant – junior – colonel, not as a general (of volunteers) as he had been in the Civil War. And his entire command was the 7th Cavalry Regiment which included Reno’s and Benteen’s detachments which were not with him up on the ridge and which did survive.
Now, military history mistakes this obvious in the book’s first edition would have been immediately seen and reported, but leftist “social issues” historians like Foner typically regard military history and its historians with contempt (as I saw at AHA Chicago 1995 – see 6. below), so it is possible such reports were just ignored.
As well, Foner does not note as he should have how Custer’s Last Stand occurred right before American’s Centennial, which might have made Americans at that moment consider deeply our relations with and treatment of our first Americans.
2. American Indians and wars/relations generally:
On p. 49 regarding the Jamestown Massacre, Foner acclaimingly writes “In 1622 … led a brilliantly planned surprise attack that that in a single day wiped out one-quarter [347] of Virginia’s settler population of 1,200.” He then refers to it as the “Uprising of 1622.”
Some background: The English Jamestown colony had tried to maintain good relations with the Powhatan Indians and assimilate – integrate – them into an English way of life (which was more agriculturally/economically and militarily efficient. By contrast, many Indians were made forced/slave laborers in Spanish colonies.) I have read that 20 English soldiers even joined the Powhatans for an expedition/war against a distant tribe … but never returned.
The “brilliance” of the Powhatans’ attack was obscene treachery. They came (even bearing gifts, the previous day) as unarmed friends, entered the English families’ homes as guests at breakfast time, and then used the families’ own weapons and tools to murder them: men, women – fathers and mothers – and then children (who would have watched their parents murdered before them) which (and whom) Foner leaves unmentioned. The massacre is the subject of the 16Feb17 Journal of the History of International Law article by J. Bennet, “The Forgotten Genocide in Colonial America: Reexamining the 1622 Jamestown Massacre within the Framework of the UN Genocide Convention.” Wiki also notes the tragedy is popularly referred to as the Jamestown Massacre, not the “uprising” euphemism. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/1995/06/14/revisit-the-fatal-clash-of-english-and-powhatan-societies-in-1622/51df01a5-2f42-496c-afa0-d5180afa7df6/
So does Foner think the Nazis’ monstrous, even more obscenely efficient Holocaust extermination of men, women, and children was “brilliant” too? … or the Soviets’ megacides like the Holodomor in Ukraine?
By contrast, on p. 137, Foner correctly described the murder of “a half dozen men, women, and children” of the Indian village of Conestoga, who similarly thought they were at peace under the protection of previously/historically Indian-friendly Pennsylvania. And on p. 423, Foner rightly describes/specifies the “more than 150 men, women, and childen” Indian victims – who thought they were at peace like the Jamestown victims did – of the Sand Creek Massacre by Chivington and his militia in 1864. (And intentional and/or wanton killing of innocents should be described as massacre, for accuracy.)
What is the reason for Foner’s discriminatory word choice?
Regarding the American Revolution on p. 181, Foner correctly describes our Gen. Sullivan’s 1779 campaign destroying the pro-British Iroqouis’ food stores, leaving them to starve or flee to Canada, but he discreetly omits the Cherry Valley (New York, 1778) Massacre (which included the murder of the most beautiful girl in Mohawk River Valley, the minister’s daughter Jane Wells) which triggered it.
Nor is there any mention of the needless, vicious massacres of Forts Dearborn (the wind-swept later site of Chicago) and Mims (in the South) during the War of 1812, which further hardened whites’ anger and distrust toward Indians. (During the August 1812 Dearborn evacuation massacre, a warrior jumped into the children’s wagon and brained/murdered most of them with his war club. In fact, the very first West Point graduate Killed In Action – George Ronan USMA 1811 – died along with his militia men and the fort physician, trying to defend the wagons.)
In the South, Andrew Jackson had gone through or seen things like this firsthand himself during the Revolution and that war, and it was his administration – he was also under secessionist political pressure from Southerners – which pushed through the 1830 Indian Removal Act which ultimately climaxed in the Trail of Tears death march – 4,000 dead – of, as Foner (rightly) specifies, “18,000 Cherokee men, women, and children.”
3. Slavery and the Civil War:
Slavery and other “social issues” seems to consume a disproportionate amount of space in this “brief” edition of Foner’s book. (There should have been much more coverage of the War of 1812’s nearly fatal military and naval campaigns.) He has a very good knowledge of the social and political runup to the Civil War – his academic forte – and his emphasis on slavery as being the fundamental issue which brought about our most grievous war – not competing sectional economics or states rights, for example – I fully agree with.
Although the military history of the Civil War seems accurate generally, there should have been much more, as central as it is to American history and American military history.
I liked the book’s (too-brief) coverage of U.S. Grant as commander and am very happy to see that he now has a long overdue statue at West Point.
There is a fascinating quote of his old friend Confederate general Simon Bolivar Buckner – especially the last paragraph – at https://www.granthomepage.com/intbuckner.htm and there is this:
“”There is one West Pointer, I think in Missouri, little known, and whom I hope the northern people will not find out. I mean Sam Grant. I knew him well at the Academy and in Mexico. I should fear him more than any of their officers I have yet heard of. He is not a man of genius, but he is clear-headed, quick and daring.” So said Confederate General Ewell in a conversation with other Confederate generals, former West Pointers themselves.” https://libguides.css.edu/usgrant/home/quotes (Actually, many geniuses are self-effacing like Grant was, to conceal themselves, and his uncanny grasp and control of situations and people around him betray him as such.)
I am not finding anywhere – yet, anyway – in the book about the total number of our Civil War dead, which was upgraded/worsened to 750,000 (Gugliotta 2Apr12 NY Times) – 215,000 being deaths in combat – which may still be more than all our other wars combined. (Coatneys were from northwest Indiana then, and my gg grandfather died in 1862, and his eldest son died on 24Nov63 – the day Lookout Mountain was stormed/taken – but we were hardly literate enough to inscribe the family Bible then, so I don’t know how or where they died … although I doubt GG Grandma Eliza could have raised the other 6 children as she did without veterans’/survivors’ pensions.)
4. World War 2 in the Pacific:
Foner notes the Imperial Japanese 1931 invasion of Manchuria and correctly describes 300,000 Chinese prisoners of war and civilians being “massacred” at Nanjing in 1937 – Japanese newspapers ran gleeful articles about their soldiers’ (more aptly, warriors’) beheading competitions – but he does not use the contemporary and historical Rape of Nanking name for this, which he should, to reflect its reality and world opinion at the time. (Even the Nazi German consul on the scene gave sanctuary to Chinese women and girls trying to escape.) Neither is there the essential Sep37 “Bloody Saturday” photo – posed or not is irrelevant, considering its galvanizing effect on world and especially American public opinion – of the crying and hurt-appearing Chinese baby sitting in the bombed-out Shanghai railway yard.
Foner does not mention the intentional sinking of USS Panay on 12Dec37 – the day before the Rape of Nanking, where it was anchored – by Imperial Japanese pilots which enraged Congress and the American people and personally connected us to the Nanking victims. (The Panay was as clearly marked/identified as a U.S. ship from all angles as USS Liberty was on 8Jun67.)
But infinitely worse – a flat, vicious, leftist-if-not-Marxist lie – are these statements by Foner on p. 698 “Both sides saw the Pacific war as a race war.” and “Government propaganda and war films portrayed the Japanese foe as rats, dogs, gorillas, and snakes – bestial and subhuman.” and again on p. 707 about using the atom bombs , “Four years of war propaganda had dehumanized the Japanese in American eyes, ….”
Actually, the policies and behavior of the Imperial Japanese military-political leaders and soldiers and sailors fully qualifies them as bestial and subhuman – everywhere they attacked and/or occupied – Nanking was not exceptional. I find nothing in the book about Koreans being used as slave workers or about the Imperial Japanese using Korean and captured European girls as “comfort women” – continually raped sex slaves.
The graphic example of racism Foner gives is a poster from some U.S. Army source, and it might be remembered that after having seen what happened in Nanking, many in our Army were distraught about the thousands of Army prisoners (and their families) in Japanese captivity in the Philippines and elsewhere, and when the truth came out about the prison camps and hell ships, their anguish was proven justified.
In the shock, fear/hysteria, and hatred unleashed by the treacherous Imperial attack on Pearl Harbor – without a declaration of war and in the midst of negotiations – this was certainly true in many public entertainment and media sectors. And we can see this still going on in the portrayal of Persians/Iranians being bestial/subhuman in the calculated 2006 Battle of Thermopylae film “300.”
However, it was the absolute policy of the Roosevelt government – its Office of War Information information and propaganda unit – that the Pacific war NOT be allowed to become the racial war which Imperial Japanese propaganda was promoting … which Foner is parroting! In OWI’s 1942 handbook for American media, Government Informaton Manual for the Motion Picture Industry (GIMMPI) , at https://libraries.indiana.edu/collection-digital-archive-gimmpi, there is this America-defining entry in section II. The Enemy. Whom We Fight. The Nature of our Adversary. :
“B. The power, cruelty, and complete cynicism of the enemy should be pictured, but it is dangerous to portray all Germans, all Italians, and all Japanese as bestial barbarians. The American people know that this is not true. They will resent efforts to mislead them.”
[Bestial. Had Foner seen this and gone ahead and made his viciously wrongful accusation anyway?]
“It is the policy of this government to distinguish between tyrannical systems which have attacked the peace of the world and the people whom those tyrannies have massed against us. That policy is binding upon this agency (OFF) as upon all agencies of government. I hate Nazism and Fascism and all their works. But the campaigns of personal hatreds, of hatred for whole nations of human beings, are disgusting to me. There is a clear difference between the hatred of persons and the hatred of evil.” – Archibald MacLeish, Director, Office of Facts and Figures. (New York Times, June 7, 1942)” … and the Assistant Director of OWI.
With the confirmations of the Imperial Japanese atrocities coming out of the newly liberated Philippines, there was some public anger that the newly released film Thirty Seconds over Tokyo wasn’t more vindictive – that it seemed like opinion-softening U.S. government propaganda! https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-film&month=9508&week=a&msg=0ZRwVFM1/JnpEecd%2BRlkDw&user=..&pw=
And – bottomline – if we were indeed waging a race war against the Japanese people as Foner is accusing, why did we immediately treat them so kindly after the surrender and during our occupation? Did we set up concentration and extermination camps to imprison, starve, and then exterminate millions of Japanese men, women, and children? No, it is the opposite that is true.
5. The internment/imprisonment of Japanese-Americans:
On the Japanese-American Densho online encyclopedia, Takeya Mizuno of Toyo University in Tokyo writes: “In October 1942, the OWI Director Elmer Davis recommended to President Roosevelt that Nisei be allowed to voluntarily enlist in the military. Davis wrote that how the federal government would treat Japanese Americans “is of great interest to OWI” in order to combat “Japanese propaganda [which] insists that this is a racial war.”[7]”
Foner’s description of this (with hindsight, certainly racist act) in the book is fair, overall, but … as with Hiroshima … omits the context – in this case of shock and fear after Pearl Harbor – which precipitated it, dismissing it (with arrogant, insensitive hindsight) as “exaggerated fears.” As well, Japanese-Americans tend to be more reserved than most Americans, and in extreme circumstances this can arouse suspicion.
However, in podcast 114 supporting the book, Foner goes so extreme as to describe our wartime internment/prison camps for Japanese-Americans to be “concentration camps,” a now loaded term emotively and wrongfully bringing to a young viewer’s mind “Holocaust education” images of starving, beaten, and often murdered innocent people. (Auschwitz was a concentration camp where thousands died. Birkenau nearby was for final extermination.) http://media.wwnorton.com/college/history/foner3/question114.m4v
This “concentration camp” question of terminology has been brought to the fore by new Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) who attempted to use the term describing the internment/prison camps for illegal immigrants along our border and has received strong and credible criticism for it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/20/concentration-camps-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-japanese-americans/
6. Hiroshima:
On pp. 705-6, Foner – who, as I said, was among the revisionist historians for “open debate” of this issue who tried to defend the omissive, revisionist depiction of the atom bombings in the originally intended 1995 Smithsonian Institution Enola Gay exhibit – writes “Because of the enormous cost in civilian lives – more than twice America’s military fatalities in the entire Pacific war – the use of the bomb remains controversial.”
This is completely wrong. Except for a very few scientists and others who may have thought they would be used with hesitation or shouldn’t have been used, there was no “controversy” at the time at all. The bombs were correctly seen by everyone – including Emperor Hirohito himself who best knew and was the only person able to end the war – to have ended the Pacific war and to have been necessary to do so.
In his first-ever radio address to his people, the only *specific* factor Hirohito cited to justify ending the war was our “new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, ….”
He also referred to the general course of the war – Okinawa being taken and the Russians overrunning the Japanese army in Manchuria and China, presumably – but what the atom bombs distinctly and uniquely seemed to show was that we could (and as importantly would) stand off and with few or no more casualties obliterate the Japanese population/people one city after another.
That is, what the bombs did was seem to uniquely and completely invalidate and defeat the Imperial militarists’ attrition strategy of fighting a war of attrition so costly – regardless of the death ratio and innocent lives – that we would be forced into a conditional peace treaty so that the Emperor would remain supreme, they could stay in power, … and they could someday have the bomb themselves. The controversy Foner cites has been very postwar, by aptly described “Hiroshima revisionists” like himself.
And the Japanese had been fighting fanatically – the last holdout finally surrendered in the Philippines in 1974!
Foner reports there were estimates that 250,000 American lives would be lost invading Japan, but simple extrapolation from Okinawa and Iwo Jima shows 1 million United Nations dead. (Over half the 12,000 American dead at Okinawa had been Navy from kamikazes, and even the British built Royal Norwegian destroyer Stord was being fitted out for the Pacific.)
Nor does Foner give any figure for what Japanese civilian casualties from an invasion would have been. The Okinawa Prefecture now estimates 100,000 Okinawans – one-third the civilian population – died in that “typhoon of steel” as accidental deaths or (propagandized against Americans) actively fighting our troops or committing suicide. Half of the Japanese military families on Saipan had died, the vast majority from Suicide Cliff or suicide by other means. Going by Okinawa, one-third of Japan’s population would have been 24 million men, women, and children; and even children were to be used as little antitank kamikaze bombs.
Foner claims Hiroshima was chosen as a target because it had been virtually untouched, so (ghoulishly) we could see what an atom bomb would do to such a city. Actually, it was very much a military target, being the headquarters of 2nd Army which would be commanding the defense against a UN landing on Kyushu Island.
We had only one more atomic bomb ready to drop, and with the Japanese tunneling into the Iwo-Jima-like volcanic rock, they had very little military combat value – in truth, they were little more than a colossal shock bluff – and we later found out how radioactively toxic they would have been to our servicepeople as well as to Japanese people.
As to the wishful idea of using (up) a bomb for a “demonstration,” that would have instead given the militarists time to think and realize the above and would have completely lost the bombs’ greatest – shock – value. It could not wait. Even then, the militarists tried a last minute coup – killing General Mori, the Emperor’s palace guard commander, and his executive officer brother in law (whom Mori thought he had gotten into a safe position to survive the war) – which only barely failed.
At the 1995 American Historical Association conference in Chicago, the Hiroshima revisionists’ panel was given center stage on-site, while the World War II Studies Association’s gatherings were scheduled elsewhere in that Allied Victory 50th anniversary year. I also attended the revisionists’ panel and then during Qs&As/feedback stood up to condemn it – to the applause of some of the historians there – as being “one-sided, hind-sighted, and all too academic,” trying to substantiate its claim that there should have been a sooner, conditional peace.
For more debunking of Foner and the other revisionists, see my 30Oct96 comment on academic H-Asia at https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-asia&month=9610&week=e&msg=25bmuRT0snSXAYDHdNMfJw&user=&pw= as well as Senate Hearing 104-40 where the academics and veteran general officers went head to head against each other – the veterans made the winning case – and where, again, Foner and I both have written, opposing testimony at https://archive.org/stream/smithsonianinsti00unit/smithsonianinsti00unit_djvu.txt
7. World War 2 in Europe:
In describing the runup to World War 2, Foner mentions on p. 605 “fears generated by the Russian revolution” and he had mentioned the “Soviet regime,” but even a brief mention of the atrocities by both sides during the revolution and the mass deaths/murders – like the Ukraine Famine/Holodomor (7-10 million men, women, and children) and Great Terror elsewhere generally – by the Soviet regimes would have explained why Europeans and Westerners feared the communists much more than the Nazis, before World War 2 started.
The communist “liquidation” of the forward-, mobile-warfare-thinking (Tukhachevsky school) half of the Red Army officer corps also gave the Nazis a tremendous command & control advantage when they blitzkrieged Russia on 22Jun41.
Foner’s coverage of the start of World War 2 in Europe looks, by omission, pro-Soviet. While he correctly describes Stalin’s offer of a defensive alliance against the Nazis being rebuffed by the West and then necessarily signing the Nonaggression Pact with Hitler (for time, to try to rebuild and rearm the Red Army), he completely omits mentioning the secret protocol in that pact dividing up Poland and then the *Soviet* invasion of Poland (which had a few hard-fought battles) from the east.
Foner similarly omits any specific mention of the Soviet Spring 1940 exterminations of 25,000 Polish officers, cadets, and intelligentsia – the most famous being The Katyn Massacre – which imperiled Allied relations during the war and would then become the “remaining” issue of the start and end of the Cold War, with the Soviets trying for 50 years to blame the the Germans – even at Nuremberg back in 1946, only to then have to withdraw the charge since the Germans were so obviously not guilty. (Despite the disappointment and rage of his loyal Polish-American constituents, to his grave President Roosevelt simply refused to believe the truth about Katyn.)
Although Foner mentions the United States becoming closer with countries fighting the Axis, he does not mention the very fundamental (to American history) August 1941 Atlantic Charter and Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s extraordinary shipboard meeting which produced that pledge to ally against aggression and create a postwar world of international law and freedom (especially from fear) which would ultimately culminate in the United Nations – a term which was documented with the 1Jan42 Declaration by United Nations. Even in 1999, Russian Nobel prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was citing the Atlantic Charter’s assurances of sovereignty, protesting our/NATO’s Kosovo bombing war and our Appendix B of the Rambouillet Treaty intent to take all Yugoslavia including Serbia.
As a student of the Russian Front – Great Patriotic/Fatherland War to Russians – I am very glad to see his description of the Russian and other Eastern peoples’ central contribution to Allied Victory and how much they suffered – he gives a figure 20 million, but it may be higher. (p. 686) However, there should have been mention of the turn of the tide in the West at Alamein and on the beaches of North Africa Nov42, and the importance of the Western Allies’ day and night bombing campaign in disrupting German war production and wearing down the Luftwaffe which directly helped all fronts. Also, when he comes to the [Nazi] Holocaust, the only figure he gives is for 6 million Jewish victims, when the total for all victims is 11 million.
Overlooking the importance of our Mediterranean, bombing, and Battle of the Atlantic campaigns, Foner says the “major involvement” of American forces didn’t happen until we landed in northern Europe on D-Day/6Jun44, seeming to agree with critics (like Stalin) that we could and should have landed in northern Europe sooner – which could instead have been as disastrous as the Canadians’ Dieppe landing was in 1942, but on a strategic scale of catastrophe.
Foner’s criticism that we didn’t – should have – targeted the Nazi extermination camps may have merit: the RAF’s 31Oct44 Mosquito (light bomber) attack on the Gestapo’s Aarhus headquarters in Denmark had precision perfect accuracy resulting in the killing of dozens of SS/Gestapo and freeing of the key resistance members. But with new 30mm-cannon-armed jet fighters and other new German weapons beginning to inflict still heavy losses, German war production and ending the war and all its grief remained the primary and most urgent target.
8. Viet Nam:
Foner’s claim that South Vietnamese would have voted for unification with the communist North is dubious, since so many in SVN were refugees from the communists in the North. Regarding the North’s support for the insurgency via the Ho Chi Minh trail, on p. 816 Foner only incidentally mentions our incursion into “neutral Cambodia” to cut “North Vietnamese supply lines.”)
In this podcast to accompany the book, Foner falsely claims that the NVNse’s 1968 Tet Offensive “destroyed” our “rationale” for the war. http://media.wwnorton.com/college/history/foner3/foner_liberty15.mp4
Actually, the Viet Cong and NVA took nearly fatal losses in what objectively was their military defeat. It only became their victory thanks to our leftist media, politicians, and academics – and student radicals like Foner – back home. As to our “rationale,” it was to defend a pro-Western Asian country – Saigon was The Paris of the Orient. President Kennedy clearly gave the rationale/justification for the war in his 1961 inaugural address, and that was never “destroyed.”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF6CPwOeS38
Foner writes authoritatively and at some little length about the student protests of the 60s and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), because he was part of them, while other young Americans of our generation were off serving dutifully in a war to protect the freedoms of others, keeping faith with our martyred president – the only true heroes of our generation.
Strangely, he talks about “chemicals that destroyed forests” without naming Agent Orange or mentioning its lasting contamination and toxicity which has so hurt Indochinese and our own veterans. (Neither is there any mention of the Thalidomide scandal, which had previously aroused public suspicion of chemical and pharmaceutical corporations generally. Nor, for that matter, is there any mention of the current concern about Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions.)
And most falsely, on p. 796 Foner writes “With college students exempted from the draft, the burden of fighting fell on the working class and the poor.” No, college deferments were delays not exemptions, although in some cases (like Foner’s?) continued academic enrollment and a weak draft board could continue the deferment too far. And research has confirmed Vietnam was not a class war, as I found in writing an article about this for my hometown newspaper.[1]
Foner claims our incursion into Cambodia and bombing of it was to interdict the NVs supply line to the south. This is true, but it is also true that Prince Sihanouk was collaborating with the NVs in that and even allowing their supply ships to unload in Cambodian ports. As well, the Khmer Rouge started its war against the Prince’s regime before our involvement, which was eventually ended under – again – political pressure at home, and the result was a megacide of 1-2 million Cambodian men, women, and children – 1/4 the entire population – which Foner describes only as “widespread massacres.”
Although he rightly covers the My Lai Massacre, Foner says nothing about South Vietnamese who died in “re-education” camps after our withdrawal – international “democide” expert Univ./Hawaii’s R.J. Rummel’s estimate is as high as 232,000.
As well, in June 2015 there is/was (since resigned) DoH’s Col. Daddis’s “staff ride” with Cadets and other faculty to Vietnam, where on DoH’s Facebook page he seemed to be very appeasingly taking a North Vietnamese/communist line about the reason for the war:
“This first reflection led quickly to the second. We should be wary when strict ideologies drive foreign policy. For two weeks I have wondered how this country, how these people, could have posed such a threat to the United States in the mid-1950s and into the 1960s. Of course, the Vietnamese weren’t a threat but Cold War fears, generated by virulent anti-communism as a matter of blind faith, made them appear threatening. As a historian, I am wary of counterfactuals. But what would have happened if we approached Vietnam with more introspection as we debated escalation here? Was a communist Vietnam truly a menace to the United States? Would our credibility really have been damaged by avoiding a war in which even senior US officials doubted the outcome?”
The first paragraph of my response there:
“Understanding the North Vietnamese point of view is one thing – conceding it … even if just for better relations as both our countries confront powerful and aggressive (Red) China … is entirely another, Col. Daddis. The Viet Nam War was our defense of pro-Western South Viet Nam, which included many refugees from Communism in the North, and it *was* justified. If nothing else, it critically delayed the spread of very aggressive Communism into the rest of Southeast Asia. Granted, its strategic planning and political leadership was bungled by our World War 2 generation … and then there is our crime and shame of Agent Orange.”
Was Spenser Rapone on this trip to Vietnam, and/or was Daddis one of his DoH “mentors?” (Daddis is the subject of a DoH Facebook post just this year, on Sep. 26.)
We should have instead taken the war to its source – NVN – from the beginning, as we had done against the Axis in World War 2. And when casualties started becoming serious in 1966, our WW2 leadership generation should have mobilized the Country for the war instead of trying to maintain a hedonistic “guns and butter” lifestyle and wasting so many of its children’s lives. https://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/2898/CARL-T-BAUER/
(My film review of We Were Soldiers is in the Mar03 American Historical Review. Over the telephone, I interviewed General Moore and Joe Galloway for it.)
9. The Cold War:
Regarding Foner’s omission of any mention of the 1940 Katyn Massacre contributing to distrust and fear of the Soviets and the Cold War’s beginning: https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-diplo&month=9601&week=a&msg=ynlJHtcJcCxZlM0Zdcq7tQ&user=&pw=
Foner describes Americans being in fear of a postwar communist takeover of the United States. This seems exaggerated. Veterans like my dad were were much more consumed by trying to make a living and home for their new families.
However, one of the justified fears was the atomic spy ring, which has been verified in its breadth in the 1994 book Special Tasks by Stalin&Beria’s spymaster Pavel Sudoplatov and by the declassification of the Venona decoded 1940s Soviet embassy communications. Sudoplatov’s book caused an explosion of controversy, because it verified head atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer was indeed a Soviet spy with the codename Star. And the 2011 discussion about this at the Wilson Center seems to confirm Oppenheimer indeed was: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/was-oppenheimer-soviet-spy-roundtable-discussion
Moreover, the veracity of Sudoplatov’s book was emphatically confirmed to me in person in May 1999 (at a Western Ill. Univ. reception) by Zoya Zarubina, the daughter of NKVD General Zarubin who supervised the atomic spy ring from back in the Soviet DC Embassy and his literally femme fatale NKVD wife Elisabeth (Zarubina) who was a conduit to Oppenheimer out in California. And it was daddy who in early 1940 had decided which 200 of the 4,000 Poles in the Kozielsk internment camp would not be exterminated then at Katyn – and ergo who then would be.
Something else in Sudoplatov’s book which has gone unnoticed is on p. 111, where he describes NKVD officers in Kiev – who had earlier presided over the Holodomor – having “synagogue gatherings,” and it was the conspicuousness of ethnic Jewish in the NKVD that helped the Nazis’ “Jewish Bolshevism” propaganda pave the way with fear to the Holocaust itself. For balance, this should be included in any coverage of the Nazi Holocaust.
Regarding the fall of the Soviet and other communist regimes, Foner gives no reason for the pro-democracy revolution. (The reason was simple: Russians and other Eastern peoples wanted to join the West and become part of our freedom and prosperity in peace and security, and then ….)
On p. 827, Foner describes “neoconservatives” as former liberals who want cutbacks on government involvement in domestic affairs. (Questionable.) He says they want a return to Cold War foreign policy, but that was defensive, not aggressive/militarist like the neocons are. They have pushed America into starting coups, revolutions, and wars … particularly in the Mideast … with utopian visions like “Arab Spring,” quite like some of their older members who were once openly Trotskyists. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/1995-07-01/trotskyism-anachronism-neoconservative-revolution (The “neoconservative” label does serve to dupe gullible Republicans.)
Among the neoconservatives are Fred and Robert Kagan and their wives Kim Kagan and Victoria Nuland. Fred was a Department of History civilian faculty member for 10 years (1995-2005), and the charming Kim gave lectures at the Academy. They are thanked as his good friends for their key assistance by Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster in the Acknowledgments of his 1997 book Dereliction of Duty which places primary blame for our defeat in Vietnam on the Secretary of Defense – the academic, Robert McNamara – and Joint Chiefs of Staff rather than on the political leadership which appointed them and which wouldn’t mobilize the Country.
And in 2001, while a West Point faculty member, portly Fred (who has no more military service/experience than his wife) demanded on false grounds in the 19Nov01 Weekly Standard, “Replace Saddam Hussein’s criminal regime before he finds a way to use the chemical and biological weapons we know he is developing for a devastating attack on the United States.” https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/04/the-kagans-we-need/44229/
Fred was also involved, along with Robert and their father Donald, in authoring the Project for the New American Century’s September 2000 Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which on p. 51 cites how another Pearl Harbor might mobilize America for the wars they wanted.
It might be remembered that over half the Red Army’s best professional officers were “liquidated” when they were thought to be no longer needed, which then greatly helped the 22Jun41 Nazi “Barbarossa” invasion.
On p. 853 regarding our Kosovo bombing war on Serbia Foner omits mention of the guerrilla war the Albanians had been waging against the Serbs, with al Qaeda terrorists’ assistance. (WSJ, M.C. Kurop, Al Qaeda’s Balkan Links, 1Nov01, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1004563569751363760) Nor does he mention our unnecessary – the Serbs apparently wanted a partition – war being forced on the Serbs with Rambouillet Appendix B which I myself first whistleblew in American academia on H-Diplo on 14May99 and SUNY’s Tom Grunfeld then confirmed on 8Jun99. https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-diplo&month=9905&week=b&msg=kpjsP0IkA283E2EWIFYvvA&user=&pw=&fbclid=IwAR0adqiOCSjOFFDfAZe7QrbAd53kpd4B7XL2XLiRrmCybe-2ez0e8oop6aQ https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-diplo&month=9906&week=b&msg=ShHDRiIEBOlQ%2BZqxpGh/fw&user=&pw= https://www.irishtimes.com/news/push-into-kosovo-could-be-aimed-at-creating-partition-1.165826 (Henry Kissinger then did so in his 31May99 Newsweek New World Disorder article. Senator Don Nickles had already cited App. B in the Senate floor debate about a war/authoritarian powers resolution promoted by arch-neocon Senators Lieberman and McCain, using the Kosovo “war” as a pretext.)
And, despite being positioned close to the heart of our government to know this, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (Committee on Conscience) on 31Mar99 issued a statement in moral support of NATO – military action – in Kosovo … making itself complicit in our unnecessary (and by Nuremberg therefore illegal) bombing war which had begun on 24Mar99. Statement originally at https://www.ushmm.org/museum/press/archives/detail.php?category=03-coc&content=1999-03-31, but now buried at the bottom of https://www.ushmm.org/confront-genocide/speakers-and-events/all-speakers-and-events/kosovo-options-and-obstacles/kosovo-questions-and-answers
As to 9/11, Foner uncritically follows the official narrative, saying that al Qaeda became in opposition to us after the first Gulf war … but why was it allied with us in the Balkans then? And although he falsely described the atom bombings’ controversy as being “remaining” – when that was started years after the fact – he says nothing about the lingering if not growing skepticism regarding 9/11.
I have no disagreement at all with Foner about the falsehoods predicating our 2003 invasion of Iraq and the following human, economic, and strategic disaster it has been for the Iraqi people as well as for us and our military community.
However, he uncritically presents the Arab Spring – listed on the chapter index but not defined in the text – uprisings in Libya and Syria as merely spontaneous desires for freedom and liberty, when in fact they were engineered/attempted coups. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8365007/Libya-inside-the-SAS-operation-that-went-wrong.html (SAS and MI-6 “diplomats” indeed … captured by farmer militiamen! 🙂 )
Similarly, he says nothing about what the origins and who the supporters of ISIS have been or – in this 5th, 2017 edition – the far more dangerous Kiev 2014 overthrow of the legal Ukraine government by our “neoconservatives” like Bernard-Henri Levy – also acclaimed to be the “architect” of the Libyan tragedy – and Victoria Nuland which has returned us into the even more dangerous game of nuclear Russian Roulette … with Russians. https://www.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/bernard-henri-levy-remembering-the-maidan-385357.html
Indeed, the neocon-backed overthrow may have been intended to drive the Russian people – in fear of another attack by the West and now with the possibility of an interventionist NATO’s bases all the way up to Kharkov at their throats – to turn back to authoritarianism and (remembering Stalin to be a “great war leader”) to turn back to Bolshevism.
And while Foner mentions “American exceptionalism,” he does so regarding our assumption of economic superiority, saying nothing about our assumption of international moral superiority which has helped lead us into (in turn) leading/enabling the Mideast holocausts (remembering, for example, ISIS’s genocide of the Yazidi people and horrors like even putting unsubmitting Yazidi girls into cages to be burned alive with flame throwers).
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Other textbooks:
Zinn – also Columbia – is considered to be even farther left, in his The People’s History of the United States.
Tindall and Shi’s America: A Narrative History seemed promising from its title, but (after I got the tenth/2016 edition from a Norwegian library) is extremist as well. It overlooks the Jamestown Massacre entirely. Its narrative does seem more objective, and it spends time on Hiroshima defending that decision with (as well) American servicemen’s happiness and relief that the bombs ended the war. However, Tindall died in 2006, and Shi’s “narrative” thereafter seems quite neocon, if from the other end of the political spectrum.
For just one key example, on p. 1504 he claims Assad responsible for the 21Aug13 sarin gas massacre of 1,400 (pro-Assad Alawite) men, women, and children (who had been captured by the anti-Assad groups) in Ghouta Syria, and accuses President Obama of “cold feet” for not bombing Syria after Obama had said Assad staging a chemical attack was a red line which would trigger our bombing. However, it appears it was our al Nusrah/Qaeda terrorist co-belligerents/allies who perpetrated the massacre, not Assad. British Parliament – which knew what was going on and was already guilt-stricken about what we had done to the Libyans – voted down Prime Minister Cameron’s motion to bomb Syria. And pre-eminent American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote an article which he had to have published over in the London Review of Books, exposing the fraud. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line
Moreover, there have been allegations that the sarin gas used at Ghouta was, after the killing of Gaddafi, flown from Libya and then moved into Syria from Turkey.
There is a relatively short American history textbook by Robert Remini, albeit with the long title A Short History of the United States: From the Arrival of Native American Tribes to the Obama Presidency. I haven’t seen it. Even if it is more objective, it hasn’t been updated since 2009, so DoH faculty would have to write a supplementary history for the following years, which might be a very good thing to do.
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Basic Issue:
At what point does questioning our Country and its actions undermine an officer’s loyalty and discipline – obedience to orders and fulfillment of assigned missions – and what is an officer’s Duty to indeed question our Country and its actions and his/her orders? … even in the field?
We are not “Befehl ist Befehl” – orders are orders – Nazi Germans, and being educated with a sense of moral as well as administrative responsibility, we Americans do have a Duty to question.
However, how much can Cadets and (especially young) officers cope with? How can historical and current questions be fairly and dutifully raised without going to a faith- and Duty-destroying extent?
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