The Distortion of U.S. History

[Time for change]

United States history in our school system is rarely taught in a neutral manner. Rather, it tends to be taught in a manner that will cause the American people to actively, or at least passively accept the official positions of their leaders. In particular, our democratic traditions are emphasized, while our many imperialistic activities, covert overthrowing of sovereign governments, and aggressive wars are minimized or ignored altogether.

James Loewen has written two excellent books on the subject of how American history is distorted. “Lies my Teacher Told me” discusses the distorted American history education that our children receive in school. “Lies across America” addresses the same subject from the standpoint of our historical landmarks, monuments, and museums. Early in that book, Loewen discusses the purposes of those distortions:

The efforts of the upper class to commemorate their history help them feel better psychologically; the results also help them stay upper. History is power. Those on top of society… know this. Therefore they take time to determine how history will be remembered.

History sites also help hold society together, providing a shared community heritage… Memorials in particular declare what is worth dying for, which turns out to be mostly the state, in war. In turn, most American war memorials transform their conflicts into noble causes… Consequently public history… usually fosters civic status quo by praising the government and defending its acts. Rarely do historic markers and monuments criticize the state. Instead, they make things that were problematic seem appropriate, ordained, even commendable… Most monuments and markers… proclaim flatly, “Whatever happened was good.” Things worth thinking about are converted into things taken fro granted.

But all this comes at a steep price. If we don’t understand what went wrong in the past, the likelihood of building a better future is diminished. In particular, as Loewen points out, “A rosy view of the past can help make injustice in the present seem more acceptable”.


Congressional rejection of a more intelligent teaching of U.S. history

In November 1994, the National Council for History Standards (NCHS), having used an unprecedented process of open debate, multiple reviews, and the active participation of the largest organizations of history educators in the nation, released its proposed National Standards for United States History.

That document was meant to provide voluntary guidelines for national curricula in history for grades 5-12. As explained by Gary Nash, who led the effort, these standards were meant to have one thing in common: “to provide students with a more comprehensive, challenging, and thought-provoking education in the nation's public schools.” Their signature features were said to include “a new framework for critical thinking and active learning” and “repeated references to primary documents that would allow students to read and hear authentic voices from the past”.

Major critics of the document included Newt Gingrich, Lynn Cheney and Republican presidential candidates Pat Buchanan and Bob Dole. Dole blamed the document on “the embarrassed to be American crowd” of “intellectual elites”. Lynn Cheney aggressively criticized the document as containing “multicultural excess”, a “grim and gloomy portrayal of American history”, “a politicized history”, and a disparaging of the West.

Nash defended the document from the historians’ point of view:

To be sure, it is not possible to recover the history of women, African Americans, religious minorities, Native Americans, laboring Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans without addressing issues of conflict, exploitation, and the compromising of the national ideals set forth by the Revolutionary generation… To this extent, the standards counseled a less self-congratulatory history of the United States and a less triumphalist Western Civilization orientation toward world history…

Historians have never regarded themselves as anti-patriots because they revise history or examine sordid chapters of it. Indeed, they expose and critique the past in order to improve American society and to protect dearly won gains… This is not a new argument. Historians have periodically been at sword's point with vociferous segments of the public, especially those of deeply conservative bent.

The U.S. Senate rejected the document in 1995 by a vote of 99-1. The one dissenting vote was from a right wing Republican who felt that the rejection resolution was not hostile enough.


DISTORTION OF FACTS INVOLVING THE JFK ASSASSINATION

This part of my post is not meant to prove that the assassination of JFK involved a conspiracy (partly because of concern that such a discussion could relegate this post to the dungeon). Rather, I believe that this issue provides an excellent example of how our government sometimes acts aggressively to distort history.

Needless to say, the assassination of a U.S. president, especially with U.S. government complicity, is of monumental importance. There could be many reasons why our government would act to obstruct the uncovering and publicizing of information that shows the assassination of a U.S. President to be a government conspiracy, beyond the most obvious one of seeking to avoid accountability and punishment for the act. As noted by James Loewen, such information could radically change the way that Americans think about their country.

I’ve read five books on the subject in my life (and am currently reading a sixth), including four that claimed the assassination to be a conspiracy, and one that claimed to debunk all of the conspiracy theories – “Case Closed”, by Gerald Posner. In connection with a bet that I made with my boss, I wrote a 50 page essay disputing Posner’s book, but unfortunately that essay was lost in a fire that burned down part of my home and destroyed my computer a year and a half ago. But I digress.

Most of the information on the subject in this post was obtained from “Best Evidence – Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy”, by David Lifton. Prior to getting involved in the research project that led to his book 15 years later, Lifton was not inclined to such activities. He was pursuing a degree in advanced physics in1964. He says in retrospect that:

The notion that a presidential assassination plot had escaped official detection seemed so absurd that I wanted to attend Mark Lane’s lecture simply as entertainment… I did not arrive at the conclusion (of a conspiracy) lightly. I had always believed what my government said, and will not easily forget the day in mid-April 1961 when I … vigorously argued with a man who was … making the preposterous claim that the Cuban invasion then in the headlines was sponsored by the United States government – specifically the CIA. Like many others at the time, I thought that the charge was outrageous and that people who made such claims were kooks.

Anyhow, to make a long story short, Lifton became so interested in the issue that he dropped out of school to pursue it.

His book is one of the most interesting I have ever read. It is a detailed, 699 page exploration of the medical evidence involved in the JFK assassination, supported by almost two thousand references. I presented a summary of the medical evidence to the Preventive and Occupational Medicine faculty at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where I taught Preventive Medicine and Public Health, in 1995. They all agreed that JFK was shot from the front, and that the autopsy was faked. Here are some of the most poignant examples of U.S. government distortion of the facts, mostly from Lifton’s book:


Arlen Specter twists physician testimony to fit predetermined conclusions

The medical evidence centers basically around one critical question: Was JFK shot from the front or from behind, or both. If any of the bullets came from the front, that rules out the lone gunman theory, which is based on the supposition that Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK from a book depository, which faced JFK from the back, as he rode forward in his car at the time of the shooting. I have no idea whether Oswald was in fact in the book depository at the time of the shooting. The Warren Commission claims that he was. Others claim that he wasn’t. I have not studied that issue enough to have an opinion. But it is irrelevant to the evidence that Lifton presents, which is that two bullets struck JFK from the front.

The throat (non-fatal) wound
Dr. Malcolm Perry made the tracheotomy incision, which was very close to the bullet wound of the throat. Transcripts of a news conference later that day quote Perry as repeatedly characterizing that bullet wound as an entrance wound (meaning it came from the front). Perry completely changed his views on this matter after being “visited” by Secret Service agents. However, the other five medical personnel who saw this wound (four physicians and a nurse) are on record as having commented that the wound was an entrance wound.

The fatal head wound
Nine physicians and a nurse who treated the President at Parkland Hospital in Dallas are quoted (in Warren Commission testimony, official medical reports, or contemporary newspaper accounts) as saying that the fatal wound produced a large hole in the back right side of the head. The skull at the back of the head was noted to have “exploded outwards”. All of the physicians characterized this wound as an exit wound.

Arlen Specter’s twisting of physician testimony
Lifton explains how Arlen Specter questioned the physicians in order to obscure the fact that the bullet that caused the throat wound came from the front:

I could not understand how a proper investigation could… interrogate the Dallas doctors in a manner that seemed designed to wring a statement from each of them that would support the Commission’s position on the throat wound. To accomplish this, Specter asked each doctor a long hypothetical question, beginning with the phrase, “Permit me to add some facts which I shall ask you to assume as being true”. Typical was the question asked of Dr. Carrico, which began:

Permit me to add some facts which I shall ask you to assume as being true for the purposes of having you express an opinion. First of all, assume that the President was struck… from the rear at a downward angle… then (the bullet) exiting precisely at the point where you observed the puncture wound to exist. Now based on those facts was the appearance of the wound in your opinion consistent with being an exit wound?

Dr. Carrico replied: “… With those facts… this would be … I believe … an exit wound.”

And such was the conclusion of the Warren Commission


Control of the body prior to autopsy

The autopsy findings, which grossly contradicted the findings of the doctors at Parkland Hospital, were what the Warren Commission relied on to conclude that the bullets all entered from the back. What that means is that if the Parkland doctors were correct, the body would have had to have been altered prior to the autopsy.

Lifton notes a whole series of events that together explain how the Secret Service managed to maintain control of the body prior to autopsy. The first step was to prevent the autopsy from being performed at Parkland Hospital, as required by state law – which the Secret Service managed to do by confiscating the body by force.

Skip forward a bit, to the arrival of the body at Bethesda Naval Hospital (Maryland). Lifton quotes seven persons who noted Kennedy’s body brought into the morgue in a plain gray coffin, very different than the fancy bronze coffin into which Kennedy’s body was placed in Dallas after he was pronounced dead, and which was televised being unloaded from the plane that carried the body from Dallas to Washington. The body arrived at the morgue in the gray coffin at about 6:45 p.m., well before the arrival of the bronze coffin that supposedly contained Kennedy’s body.

Meanwhile, when the 6-man Army “casket team” tried to obtain the bronze coffin (which unbeknownst to them obviously did not contain the body), they were pushed out of the way by Secret Service agents, who loaded the coffin into an ambulance, which then proceeded to Bethesda Naval Hospital. The Army casket team then proceeded by helicopter to Bethesda to await the body (so they thought).

The motorcade with the bronze coffin (supposedly containing the body) arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital at 6:55 p.m. (AFTER the arrival of the plain grey coffin which contained the body). But the Army casket team was still not allowed to obtain the coffin. A taped interview of Army casket team member Hubert Clark, by David Lifton, explains what happened after the arrival of the bronze coffin:

“I think there was a decoy, supposedly to get the people away from the hospital... And we went around to the back I remember driving some distance ... before we actually came in contact with the real casket ..."

Lifton asked if he remembered losing the ambulance. Clark responded:

“I ... we lost it ... We were saying, 'Now where the hell is he?... Why is he speeding?' And we were trying to figure out, 'Well, why is he going so fast? We're going to lose him.' ... and we were saying to each other ... 'What, is he trying to lose us?'..."

Clark said that he thought the ride lasted 10-15 minutes and that the truck got up to speeds of 45 or 50:

”We followed the ambulance until we lost it .. And then it was ... another fifteen minutes trying to find ... to get back to where we started from.”

Lifton interview with the chief autopsy physician

Lifton devotes a great deal of discussion to the many inconsistencies in the reports and testimony of the chief autopsy physician, Lieutenant Commander James Humes. Humes refused to talk with the New York Times on December 5th, 1963, saying that he was forbidden to talk with them about the case. He destroyed some of his autopsy notes, a topic that the Warren Commission failed to question him about. Lifton decided that he needed to talk with Humes in order to clear up some of the inconsistencies:

When Commander Humes came on the line… I said I wanted to ask a few questions… Humes replied that he didn’t know what he could tell me. “… Our position with regard to this whole situation is that we testified before the Warren Commission, we gave a report… and we haven’t changed anything…”

I said I thought I had made a research discovery about his testimony. I quoted the passages describing what I thought were anomalies… Then I added that I had discovered additional evidence. I didn’t say it was an FBI report… I told Humes what I thought had happened – in essence, that he and the Warren Commission had not communicated properly… “And my own personal opinion, Dr. Humes, was that you were trying to say something. And that the man at the other end of the line, the lawyer involved, Specter, simply because he didn’t have the training in forensic pathology, did not understand what you were saying.”

There was a pause, and Humes, stuttering, replied: “You’ve lost me here somewhere, young fellow. I don’t know what you – I … I… I missed the point.”

Suddenly, a burst of static came on the line. I couldn’t hear. I yelled “Hello? Hello?” Then I heard a click, and the line was dead. I flashed for the operator and asked her to re-establish the connection. Within seconds, a female voice came on the line. It was Humes’ daughter. Her father was not there. Then… Humes’ wife. Mrs. Humes said her husband had gone to a meeting and she suggested I call him at his office at Bethesda Naval Hospital. I was reluctant to call Humes there, because I was aware he was under military order not to talk…

In the context of everything else, that conversation chilled me. A few years later I heard a rumor that Humes had written a book titled “Buried Secrets”, shortly before he died, in which he confessed that the whole autopsy was a fraud. I went to a bookstore to order the book, and my order went through. But the book never came. I went back to the book store to ask about it, and I was told that it was out of print.


Additional testimony suggesting that the autopsy was fraudulent

Lifton presents a great deal of evidence to show that the autopsy was fraudulent, and also that the autopsy physicians were not in charge of the autopsy, but rather took orders during the autopsy from unidentified men who were not physicians and had no obvious reason to even attend the autopsy. This kind of evidence is also presented by Jim Garrison, a Louisiana District Attorney, in his book, “On the Trail of the Assassins”.

Garrison notes that one of the autopsy physicians, Dr. Pierre Finck, had testified that “the autopsy strongly supported the likelihood that the President had been killed by one rifleman firing at him from behind. However, it eventually became apparent that Dr. Finck, for unknown reasons, had failed to fully examine the neck wound. Garrison describes a bizarre line of questioning of Dr Finck on this issue, at the trial of Clay Shaw (whom Garrison had charged with JFK’s murder):

After Dr. Finck committed himself to the proposition that the entry wound was in the back of the neck, Oser (the lawyer who cross-examined him) quickly moved to the question of whether the neck wound had been probed at the autopsy. This should have been a standard and routine examination to determine the route of the wound…

Oser: Was Dr. Humes running the show?

Finck: Well, I heard Dr. Humes stating that… he said, “Who’s in charge here?” and I heard an Army general, I don’t remember his name, stating, “I am”. You must understand that in those circumstances, there were law enforcement officers, military people with various ranks…

Oser: But you were one of the three qualified pathologists standing at the autopsy table, were you not, doctor?

Finck: Yes, I was.

Oser: Was the Army general a qualified pathologist?

Finck: No, not to my knowledge.

Oser: Can you give me his name, colonel?

Finck: No, I can’t. I don’t remember…..

Oser: Colonel, did you feel that you had to take orders from this Army general that was there directing the autopsy?

Finck: No, because there were others, there were admirals… and when you are a lieutenant colonel in the Army you just follow orders, and at the end of the autopsy were specifically told, as I recall it… we were specifically told not to discuss the case.

Oser: Did you have occasion to dissect the track of that particular bullet in the victim…?

Finck: I did not dissect the track in the neck.

Oser: Why?

Finck: This leads into the disclosure of medical records….

Oser: Your Honor, I would like an answer from the colonel…

The Court: That is correct, you should answer, doctor.

Finck: We didn’t remove the organs of the neck.

Oser: Why not, doctor?

Finck: For the reason that we were told to examine the head wounds and the…

Oser: Are you saying someone told you not to dissect the track?

Finck: I was told that the family wanted an examination of the head… but in this autopsy didn’t remove the organs of the neck…

Oser: You said you did not. I want to know WHY didn’t you as an autopsy pathologist attempt to ascertain the track through the body which you had on the autopsy table in trying to ascertain the cause or causes of death? Why?

Finck: I had the cause of death.

Oser: Why did you not trace the track of the wound?

Finck: As I recall I didn’t remove these organs from the neck.

Oser: You said you didn’t do this; I am asking you WHY you didn’t do this as a pathologist?

Finck: From what I recall I looked at the trachea… but I didn’t dissect or remove these organs.

Oser: Your Honor, I would ask Your Honor to direct the witness to answer my question. I will ask you the question one more time: WHY did you not dissect the track of the bullet wound that you have described today and you saw at the time of the autopsy at the time you examined the body? WHY?

Finck: As I recall I was told not to, but I don’t remember by whom.

Interview of Allen Dulles by David Lifton

Early in his investigation, Lifton managed to get an interview with Allan Dulles, one of the commissioners on the Warren Commission, in which Dulles insisted that other people be present, so as to ensure that he wouldn’t be misquoted:

I proceeded to describe (to Dulles) the motion of the President’s head on the Zapruder film and some of the grassy-knoll testimony. How could the Commission’s Report make a statement like that, in view of all that evidence?

Dulles responded: “We examined the film a thousand times,” and he proceeded to deny that the motion I described appeared on the film… I retrieved from my briefcase a demonstration panel… in which the relevant portions of all frames between 313 and 323 were arranged in sequence… The backward motion (of the head) was obvious. I walked over to Dulles, and put one of the panels on his lap. “Here”, I said…”Just look at the President’s head and the rear seat of the car, and see if they get closer together or farther apart in successive frames after impact.”

“Now what are you saying.. just what are you saying?” said Dulles, his voice rising.

“I’m saying there must be someone up front firing at Kennedy, and that means a conspiracy”, I replied.

“Look”, he said, “There isn’t a single iota of evidence indicating a conspiracy… no one says there was anything like that…”

As politely as possible I described the statistics in Harold Feldman’s “Fifty-Two Witnesses: The Grassy Knoll”, closing with the fact that several people on the overpass saw smoke coming from the area behind the fence, and that a policeman “even smelled smoke there.”

“Look,” he paused, and then, his voice rising again, angrily, “What are you taking about? Who saw smoke?” he thundered…

“Sam Holland, for instance”, I replied. “He was standing on the overpass.” I named a few others, and said that anyone could buy the book “Four Days”, turn to page 21…

By now Dulles had worked himself into a lather. “Now what are you saying”, he roared, “that someone was smoking up there?”… “Are you telling me that there was no one up in that building, that no gun was found there, that no shells were found there (in the book depository)?”

“Oh, no, sir”, I said… “I’m sure there was a gun there. I’m sure there were shells there… I think someone was shooting from there. But I think someone was also shooting from up front. Harold Feldman analyzed all that testimony and quotes witnesses who even heard shots from two locations.”

“Just who”, asked Dulles in an extremely sarcastic tone, “is Harold Feldman?” And who does he write for?”

“He frequently writes for The Nation”

Dulles raised his right hand, slapped his knee with a savage intensity, and laughed loudly and derisively. “The Nation! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.” …

The interview went on a while, with more of the same, and it ends:

Dulles got very angry. “You have nothing! Absolutely nothing! The head could be going around in circles for all I can see. You can’t see a thing here! I have examined the film in the Archives many times. This proves nothing.”*

* I need to point out that the evidence that Lifton presented Dulles with at this meeting turned out to be not as clear cut as he thought at the time. Lifton discusses this in more detail later on in his book. The main evidence in his mind at the time of the Dulles interview was frames 313-323 (encompassing about one half of a second) of the Zapruder film, which showed a backwards movement of Kennedy’s head following contact with the bullet some time between frame 312 and 313. What Lifton didn’t realize at the time was that the backwards movement of the head was preceded by a very short forward movement of the head between frames 312 and 313. Lifton then goes on to discuss how that additional information could be reconciled with the medical evidence, which clearly indicates two shots from the front. The bottom line though is that the medical evidence, as described by the doctors who treated JFK at Parkland Hospital, is much more solid evidence of bullets hitting the front of the head than is the evidence from the Zapruder film.


FINDINGS OF THE HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE ON ASSASSINATIONS

In 1976 a House Select Committee on Assassinations was established to reinvestigate the JFK assassination, releasing its final report in 1979. But before that investigation could explore vital evidence concerning the autopsy, President Jimmy Carter had to rescind a 1963 order from the Whitehouse that prohibited anyone involved with the autopsy from ever discussing it.

The final report criticized the previous investigations by the Warren Commission, FBI, and CIA, as well as the protection offered the President by his Secret Service. Based on newly available acoustical evidence that indicated the existence of a fourth shot which probably came from the front, the report concluded that the assassination was “probably a conspiracy”. However, it continued to lay the blame principally on Oswald and exonerated the U.S. government in the conspiracy.

Most significantly, the report claimed that the Parkland doctors were mistaken in their medical opinion that two bullets struck Kennedy from the front. Recognizing the vast discrepancy between the opinion of the Parkland Hospital physicians and the autopsy findings, the report said that either the Parkland doctors were mistaken or else the Secret Service was “mistaken” in their contention that the body arrived at the autopsy room unaltered. It said that the Secret Service could not have been mistaken about that because the coffin with the body in it was under their constant observation from the time it left Parkland hospital until it arrived at the autopsy room. In other words, the committee refused to seriously consider the possibility that the Secret Service participated in the cover-up.

Even so, just the mention of the word “conspiracy” was too much for our national news media to bear. Lifton summarizes the reaction:

Editorials criticized the Committee for having wasted the taxpayers’ money. One newspaper suggested its report be filed in the wastebasket. The New York Times, apparently not challenging the acoustics evidence, objected to the word “conspiracy.” “The word is freighted with dark connotations of malevolence… ‘Two maniacs instead of one’ might be more like it.” The Washington Post said: “… leave the matter where it now rests, as one of history’s most agonizing unresolved mysteries.”

CONCLUSION

It is very sad in my opinion that our history is so manipulated by the caretakers of the status quo. That manipulation prevents us from learning the lessons that history could otherwise teach us, which could thereby help us build a better future and become a better people.

It seems to me that there is no single historical event in our nation’s history that so well illustrates the aggressive manipulation of our history as well as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. No wonder that whole sections of book stores are filled with nothing but JFK assassination books.

The examples from the JFK assassination investigation that I provide in this post are poignant illustrations of how the U.S. government aggressively has sought to hide and manipulate information on historical events of crucial importance to the American people. The first example shows how Warren Commission attorney Arlen Specter sought to twist the medical evidence surrounding the assassination beyond recognition. The second example shows how our Secret Service ensured that the circumstances surrounding the autopsy of our dead President would forever remain a secret from the American people. The third example suggests that the physician in charge of the autopsy was kept under tight reign by those who wished to obscure the autopsy results from the American people. The fourth example strongly suggests the presence of officially unauthorized powerful people at the autopsy itself, whose purpose was to ensure that an accurate autopsy was never performed. And the last example shows the utter contempt in which a prominent Warren Commission commissioner (and former CIA Director) held anyone who dared to question the official story fed to the American people.

[Fire1]

1. I've used "Lies My Teacher Told Me," as a teaching tool.

Great Book.

[Time for change]

3. That's great to hear that you're using it

Yes, it was a great book.

What and who do you teach, and have your co-workers given you any flack about it?

[Fire1]

7. We used it in intermediate social studies and had great fun

pointing out the contradictions and flat out lies in the text. We 'adjusted' the material accordingly.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

2. ...

[Beam Me Up]

4. "no single historical event"

Very carefully chosen words, those are.

I can think of one singular date that illustrates far more conclusively, "how the U.S. government aggressively has sought to hide and manipulate information on historical events of crucial importance to the American people," and it is considerably more recent than Friday, November 22, 1963.

(If you can't feel the white-hot rage that lies behind those necessarily discreet words, you aren't paying attention.)

[BeFree]

9. We know

Well, some of us do. TFC knows.

I wonder when the next date will occur, and what will we do then? Will we be ready to counter the Official Theory the next time? I believe we are well positioned to do so, we have our ways and means to really jump on it next time.

There will be another date. This time WE write the history and not let them near it, eh?

[Beam Me Up]

11. It already has.

Everyone noticed. Nobody got it.

Not to say there won't be more shoes dropping but what do you think this whole "financial crisis" IS?

The "emergency" that rushed onto the stage on September of last year (on a most interesting date), was forecast by one investigator on Friday September 7, seven years earlier. In fact, he sent out a frenzied email alert warning that the "derivatives" bubble born by many of the now familiar suspects was about to "burst". The following tuesday, not only was the offices of the SEC demolished in 6.5 seconds, Wall Street was subsequently closed for almost a week. But, of course, all this is just "coincidence".

[BeFree]

12. Good point

I was thinking about the other shoe dropping, but we are being hammered right now. The whole electronic voting thing, the war in Iraq, etc, fill the shoe closet as we speak.

You and I know they will stop at nothing. Hell, I bet Reagan, when he learned the truth, revolted and that's why Hinckley came to be a shoe dropper. If they'd do it to their own, what would stop them from doing it to 1,000s of innocents?

I guess to go further would get us sent to the dungeon?

[Time for change]

39. Perhaps you're right about that

But we know far less about it than the JFK assassination.

And we're not allowed to talk about it on this forum -- and therefore I put it out of my mind when I wrote that sentence.

[Wapsie B]

5. It's been said that both parties love this country.

The difference is that the gopers cannot and adamantly refuse to confront the darkness in our past. Contrast that with Liberals who love this country warts and all. They wish to shine the light on mistakes of the past so as not to relive them in the future.

I'm paraphrasing Sen. Franken here.

[Uncle Joe]

6. goper love of our nation, reminds me of a phrase, I heard off base

in the Philippines.

It went something like this. "Me love you, no shit" or "Me love you real good."

The result was the same, your money would go away, you would get screwed and in many cases your health would be in jeopardy.

[Beam Me Up]

8. It's too late now.

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." --Thomas Jefferson

"When the illusion of freedom becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, pull back the curtains, and you will see the brick wall in the back of the theatre. --Frank Zappa

[Time for change]

44. That's an important distinction

I didn't know that Franken had said that, but I'm very glad he did. I'm looking forward to him joining the U.S. Senate.

[zeemike]

10. Wow I just read the whole darn thing

You have really done your homework on JFK assassination.
And of course there is a lot more to the story, but books have been written on it, but few people read books any more and so it allows for the distortion of history.
Most people now get their information from sound bites on the TV.
Your work here at DU has impressed me.

[Time for change]

18. Thank you -- The JFK assassination is a seminal event in American history IMO

It's opened a lot of peoples' eyes as to what we're up against.

It's one of the most interesting topics I've ever looked into, and Lifton's books is especially good. The one I'm reading now is also very good -- "JFK and the Unspeakable -- Why he Died and Why it Matters". Both that book and "Best Evidence" are about the JFK assassination, and yet the appears to be almost no overlap between them. They both address it from very different angles.

[zeemike]

30. And actually I was one of them

That had their eyes opened.
I was 20 when JFK was assassinated and was in Texas in the library reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand when the librarian came over and toled me that "They have shot the president in Dallas"
That pretty much ended my fascination with Ayn Rand. Especially when one of my right wing friends said "they finally killed that n**** loving son of a bitch"
That is when I realized just what the right was.

[Wapsie B]

13. Seems to me there was a story here that talked about a group of conservative fundies

being very influential about the choice of textbooks for the state of Texas. It was a number of years ago.

[pnorman]

14. "Lies My Teacher Told Me"

I'd heard of that book frequently in the past, but never gave it much thought. Until now, I had assumed it to be just another shallow book with a "gimmicky" attention-grabbing title. I just checked Audible.com, and saw it listed there. Thanks to this posting, that book may soon be in my shirt-pocket (media player) later this evening. Thanks for the tip, and I'll read this entire thread with great interest!

pnorman

[Time for change]

57. I think you'll be glad that you did.

[ShadowLiberal]

15. The fact is a lot of history is biasedly told by the winners

The people who win wars write the history of that war, and their side of the story usually ends up sticking.

I mean take George Washington as an example, in school we're all told what a great guy and what a hero Washington was, almost everyone in America loves him. Yet if America had lost the revolutionary war then we'd probably learn about how Washington was evil traitor who tried to overthrow King George's rightful rule of America.

There are exceptions though, I mean some people like Stalin were very successful as leaders, he made the Soviet Union stronger, but he's generally only remembered for his many victims who he and his policies killed in his own country during his reign.

Andrew Johnson used to be a failure who was remembered in a very positive light to, what changed people's minds on him overtime was racism towards blacks waning. Johnson fought against giving blacks the rights to vote, and other rights congress gave them, and historians used to write about Johnson having to fight an incredibly corrupt congress.

[Time for change]

40. That is certainly true

But it's not just biased in favor of the winners -- it's also biased in favor of our nation's elites, at the expense of the vast majority of Americans. Teaching history in an unbiased manner will allow all Americans to learn its lessons and help us to work towards a better society, whereas teaching it in the current biased manner benefits mainly the powerful, who wish to add to their wealth and power.

[hendo]

16. "Lies My Teacher Told Me" is a great book

it should be mandatory reading at the highschool level.

[ChoralScholar]

17. I've read "Lies My Teacher Told Me"

And gave my copy to our Social Studies chairperson at my last school.

It is a great book.

[reprehensor]

19. Expanding on CIA lies.

There is a fundamental misconception about the role of "intelligence agencies", like the CIA;

"The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting "intelligence" justifying those activities. It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as Soviet nuclear weapons capability, to support presidential policy. Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target of its lies."

-Ralph McGehee, "Deadly Deceits" frontispiece. Ocean Press, 2002.

The CIA is expected to lie, even (especially?) under oath. I assume the same parameters apply to the other "intelligence" agencies. The tone was set for this type of activity by none other than Allen Dulles during his testimony before the Warren Commission;

(From Paul Hoch's chapter in The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond, A Guide to Cover-Ups and Investigations.)

The Commission members clearly understood the worthlessness of a categorical denial from an intelligence agency. As a matter of policy, they were told, the CIA would lie to protect an informant or agent, unless otherwise instructed by the President:

REP. BOGGS: Let's say Powers did not have a signed contract but he was recruited by someone in CIA. The man who recruited him would know, wouldn't he?

MR. DULLES : Yes, but he wouldn't tell.

THE CHAIRMAN : Wouldn't tell it under oath?

MR. DULLES: I wouldn't think he would tell it under oath, no.

THE CHAIRMAN: Why?

MR. DULLES: He ought not tell it under oath. Maybe not tell it to his own government but wouldn't tell it any other way.

MR. McCOY: Wouldn't he tell it to his own chief?

MR. DULLES: He might or might not. If he was a bad one then he wouldn't ... I would tell the President of the United States anything, yes, I am under his control. He is my boss. I wouldn't necessarily tell anybody else, unless the President authorized me to do it. We had that come up at times.

Scott, Peter Dale; Hoch, Paul; Stetler, Russell. 1976. The Assassinations. New York: Vintage Books. p.137

With the tone set by an agency stalwart like Dulles, Richard Helms took this advice to heart in 1977. John Stockwell describes his less than positive experience with the CIA in his book, "In Search of Enemies";

"...What about the oath of secrecy I signed when I first joined the CIA in 1964? I cannot be bound to it for four reasons: First, my oath was illegally, fraudulently obtained. My CIA recruiters lied to me about the clandestine services as they swore me in. They insisted the CIA functioned to gather intelligence. It did not kill, use drugs, or damage people's lives, they assured me. These lies were perpetuated in the following year of training courses. It was not until the disclosures of the Church and Pike Committees in 1975 that I learned the full, shocking truth about my employers...

...the congressional committees disclosed CIA activities which had previously been concealed, which I could not rationalize...

...There were other disclosures which appalled me: kinky, slightly depraved, drug/sex experiments involving unwitting Americans, who were secretly filmed by the CIA for later viewing by pseudo-scientists of the CIA's Technical Services Division.

For years I had defended the CIA to my parents and to our friends. "Take it from me, a CIA insider," I had always sworn, "the CIA simply does not assassinate or use drugs..."

But worse was to come. A few short months after the CIA's shameful performance in Vietnam, of which I was a part, I was assigned to a managerial position in the CIA's covert Angola program. Under the leadership of the CIA director we lied to Congress and to the 40 Committee, which supervised the CIA's Angola program. We entered into joint activities with South Africa. And we actively propagandized the American public, with cruel results - Americans, misguided by our agents' propaganda, went to fight in Angola in suicidal circumstances... Our secrecy was designed to keep the American people from knowing what we were doing - we fully expected an outcry should they find us out.

The CIA's oath of secrecy has been desecrated in recent years, not by authors - Philip Agee, Joe Smith, Victor Marchetti, and Frank Snepp - but by the CIA directors who led the CIA into scandalous, absurd operations...

Their cynicism about the oath, and their arrogance toward the United States' constitutional process, were exposed in 1977, when former director Richard Helms was convicted of perjury for lying to a Senate committee about an operation in Chile... After receiving a suspended sentence, Helms stood with his attorney before television cameras, while the latter gloated that Helms would wear the conviction as a "badge of honor". Helms was proud of having lied to the Senate to protect a questionable CIA operation..." - pp. 9-11.

...

"...our secret little drama of Angola was played before a splashy backdrop of disclosures made by the Church Committee. The former deputy director of plans (operations), Richard Bissell, testified that feasibility studies of how to assassinate Patrice Lumumba had been made in 1961. Sid Gottlieb, the CIA chief of the Office of Technical Services had hand-carried poison to Kinshasa for the Lumumba operation. Gottlied himself testified that, years later, the CIA director, Richard Helms had ordered him to destroy all records of the tests he had run of specific poisons to be used in killing Lumumba. The CIA's Chile operation was further exposed; its relationship with the Chileans who killed General Schneider was admitted. Under intense pressure, Colby disclosed CIA control of large supplies of deadly poison gases, which President Nixon had ordered destroyed some months earlier. Director Colby also testified about the CIA's development of exotic weapons, the press was permitted to photograph Colby showing the committee an electric pistol which fired dissolving poison pellets. The agency also admitted, in a more bizarre vein, that it had conducted drug experiments on hundreds of unwitting American citizens by hiring prostitutes to lure them into apartments, feed them drugs and seduce them,so their activities could be filmed secretly for later viewing by pseudoscientists of the CIA's Office of Technical Services." - pp. 172-173. Norton hardback.

In the Turner (!) production, "Secrets of the CIA" several ex-CIA agents and assets tell it like it is;

"The CIA is a state-sponsored terrorist association... You don't look at people as human beings, they're nothing but pieces of material." - Verne Lyon, ex-CIA deep cover asset.

[leveymg]

41. There are several CIAs, and several "Secret Governments". There is no conspiracy, just a

conspiracy of competing conspiracies working for several governments, some of them not located in North America, most of them not governments. Much of the worst of what the CIA used to do, or we are led to believe they did, has been privatized. The Agency has long been a "front" that lends a Get Out of Jail Free Card to those who own Boardwalk, or want to take it away from present management.

That's why all conspiracy theories seem to get it wrong. They underestimate the complexity of the world, and how loyalties are cross-divided, without most of those working for intelligence services even being aware of who they really work for or why they're doing the things they do.

Actual assassinations are relatively rare. Most targets are bought-off, blackmailed, or provoked into destroying themselves. It is almost inconceivable that any political figure would rise to the top unless there was some terrible secret that can be used to control that person. Almost immediately, modern Presidents are "blooded", forced to take part in some awful crime of state that yokes any who might stray. JFK was no exception -- in fact, they had more hanging over him than almost anyone else who swam in the White House pool -- but, Jack and Bobby somehow came to believe they really were in charge.

The methods of covert operations and intelligence services haven't really changed since antiquity. Most of the world operates more like Babylon than Athens. Even Athens destroyed Socrates, the premier "conspiracy theorist" and "whistle-blower" of his day.

The Truth shall make you free.

[Time for change]

58. I don't think we can assume that just because they had a lot of stuff hanging over JFK that

that meant that he agreed to go along. They may have thought that they bought him off, but if they did, he didn't stay bought off. We know of at least three incidents where the military tried very hard to get him to invade Cuba (when the Cuban exile invasion at the Bay of Pigs failed, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Operation Northwoods). He also had plans to withdraw from Vietnam when he was killed. His military and CIA was terribly upset with him. I believe that assassination was the only way they could stop him. Not everyone can be bought.

[pnutbutr]

20. I'm fing confused here

Is this about history in US public schools or a JFK conspiracy post?

I'm gonna ignore the JFK bull for now and comment on the history thing. Public education in the US grades K-12 are meant to present a basic understanding of history same as the other classes. It's difficult to go into great detail about many things because the kids just won't understand or will lose interest and in the interest of time cannot be taught. Which is why we have college where detailed specialized education exists for the exact purpose of discussing the things being complained about. Not everyone wants to know about those things in history just as not everyone wants to learn advanced calculus. College provides the setting for students to select a specialty and pursue it, learn the intricacies and details and expand on the basics taught in high school.

[Time for change]

23. It's about both. You don't see a relationship?

The stuff about JFK in this OP shows how our government misleads us -- irrespective of what we think happened to JFK.

To take one more very important example, see reprehensor's # 19 post, above. You don't think that it's important that school children learn about that kind of thing? I'm not talking about all the details, but don't you think that it's important that Americans grow up understanding that we have an organization that we call an "intelligence" organization, whose main function is to go around the world overthrowing sovereign governments that our leaders believe are in our "national interest"? (Actually, those activities are more in the corporate than the national interest -- very few ordinary Americans benefit from that kind of thing). Do you think that is consistent with the "democracy" that we learn is school is supposed to be the central tenet of our nation?

[pnutbutr]

24. I'd be worried

about teachers misrepresenting the reasons behind the actions. People have different points of view and things like that are best served in higher education where the student has more developed critical thinking skills and will be less likely to take whatever they are told as gospel. Get a conservative teacher in there and you have yourself a problem cause your child is gonna be taught their point of view. Some kids may be able to tell it's BS but for the most part kids just believe what they are told in school and dare not question the teacher. Sorry, but I see a huge danger in trying to teach stuff like that to kids who haven't developed their objectivity and critical thinking.

[Time for change]

26. But history is currently grossly misrepresented in our schools

By being taught the "official" point of view, as manifested in standard history texts for children, our students get a very inaccurate picture of U.S. history. They learn that we a the leading force for democracy and freedom in the world, without learning of the vast amount of information to the contrary.

As a result, the American people are way too eager to be led into war without questioning the excuses that their leaders provide for it. That's what I see as the huge danger. And it's not just a potential danger, it's one that has done a tremendous amount of damage to the world and to our country.

[pnutbutr]

28. maybe

I'm a bit off on this since in high school I was taught about some of the negative consequences of American involvement in various actions around the world as we discussed them. It was basic and brief but it was taught. Not much detail pro or con to American involvement and it primarily focused on times and dates, the basics. There really isn't the time in high school to go into detail on every topic and it would probably just overwhelm the kids. That's why I believe college is the appropriate venue for the detail you are talking about.

[zeemike]

31. That is really the problem in education...low expectations.

High school should be about learning not about who wins the next football game.

[Fumesucker]

27. The point of the post being though that the "basics" taught in primary and secondary school..

Are quite often dead wrong..

"Lies My Teacher Told Me"

"Lies" of course meaning "things which are not true".

[pnutbutr]

29. I've never read it

any examples?

Civil war was about slavery type of thing?

[Fumesucker]

32. From an Amazon customer review..

http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0684818868

In this superb book, James Loewen argues what most Americans have understood since childhood, namely that our American History textbooks, are, boring, theme-driven, inaccurate and largely ineffective at imparting the richness of their subject. While the books title and argument may seem like a leftist gerrymander, they are not. Loewen, a professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont (who spent several years analyzing ten high school American History textbooks totaling more than 8,000 pages), is not out to reverse the traditional cast of heroes and villains in American history. Instead, Loewen advocates an honest and inclusive history that simply reveals events as they actually happened. While this may expose some dark truths about heroic people and events in American history, and may cast historical villains in a new light, Loewen does not believe it will cause students to despise their country. On the contrary, he argues that revealing conflicts and problems that our text books ignore or conceal will make American history come alive and will almost certainly enhance students appreciation for their country. Ironically, while many textbook editors and teachers fear that altering their inaccurate and theme-driven content will cause students to despise their country, they miss the fact that this is precisely what the specious, vapid nature of the textbooks already accomplishes. Some of Loewens interesting observations are contained below:

COLUMBUS

Columbus was almost certainly not the first European to discover or colonize North America. He tortured and mutilated the native population of Haiti and eventually exterminated it by working the inhabitants to death searching for gold. All of these facts are available in the journals of Columbus and his colleagues.

NATIVE AMERICANS
Prior to the arrival of white settlers, North America was thickly settled with tens of millions of Indian tribes that formed a complex civilization consisting of advanced agricultural techniques (guess where white settlers learned it from), trade, roads, villages, and government. The white settlers wiped out most of these people at first inadvertently by spreading disease, and then deliberately through wars of extermination. History text books often present Indians as sparse, primitive, violent (it was actually white people who scalped Indians), and inevitable victims of progress.

[pnutbutr]

35. um

Maybe I had good teachers or something cause that's stuff I learned in high school history. Native Americans did live primitively compared to the Europeans and there were wars between many of the tribes which validate the violent part. I'm not sure what the problem here is.

Guess you haven't read it either since you had to search for an amazon review. :rofl:

[Fumesucker]

37. It was easier than typing it all out..

Your teachers taught you that Columbus exterminated the natives by working them to death in search for gold?

[pnutbutr]

38. pretty much

We learned that the natives were decimated by disease and worked to death as slaves in the fruitless search for gold

[Dr.Phool]

49. Try reading, probably one of the most important history books ever written.

"A Peoples History of The United States, 1492-present". By Howard Zinn.

It filled in a lot of blanks that were left from my history classes in high school. Such as what happened to the labor movement back in the 1930's.

Did you know that North America was as densely populated by Native Americans as Europe was when Columbus landed? Zinn uses Columbus' own logs to verify that. It was more than just a few scattered tribes, as featured in American History, or on TV.

[pnutbutr]

65. I wasn't aware that

Columbus explored all of North America. Fascinating :eyes:

[crimsonblue]

45. The Civil War wasn't about slavery...

It was decades of build up of state-vs federal power conflicts. The federal power claimed more and more domain over the states, to which many of the states disagreed with because they were still caught up in the idea that the US was a group of individual states bound together in a legal contract for the collective security. Southern states hated that northern states were trying to dictate the commercial regulations of the states, and saw it as the North trying to reduce the power of the South (the South was the hub of the economy at that time--- it wasn't until the post-Civil War Industrial Revolution explosion made the North powerful). Regardless, The North was justified in going to War with the South because the Constitution contains no "out" clause to allow a state to breech the Constitutional contract, and allowing a state to secede would probably tear the country apart to the point of non-repair.

[nolabels]

63. Large blunt object to pound square peg into round hole

To say the north was "justified" injects the idea the Civil war was some kind organized carnage. I would tend to agree about the reasons for the wars impetus but for the initial planing, i would be more than willing to bet that there are massive amounts of glorified B.S. used in a effort to give that war a happy face too :shrug:

[crimsonblue]

67. The war was organized carnage.

What is war if not organized, and deliberate chaos? The irrationality of the processes of war don't preclude that the planning of war is organized.

[nolabels]

68. Perhaps my understanding of what defines the word known as "War" is confused

At any rate the whole concept of "War" just seems infantile, irrational and uncivilized. The institution outdated as idol worship or bloodletting and has about the same track record at solving things And what a surprise, federal government usurping states rights in effort to solve prior transgressions against often those same individual states. What have we learned anyway:shrug:





To me our biggest problem is in our bastardization and adulteration of our languages which often happens and is carried out by people who where wrong and can't afford to admit it

[pnutbutr]

64. no shit

and reading comprehension eludes some of us.

[trof]

21. Excellent post and discussion. K&R.

It took me about 50 years and a lot of reading to realize that my American history classes had been mostly crap designed to us 'citizens' unquestioningly patriotic.
:-(

[Echo In Light]

22. Howard Zinn: A People's History Of The United States

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html

[mod mom]

33. Important book-and it's available in children form! "A Young People's History of the U.S"

in 2 volumes.

[Time for change]

46. I read that book many years ago, and it gave me a great deal to think about

It would be very interesting to offer two versions in history classes: Zinn's version vs. the standard version, and have students discuss the differences.

[Echo In Light]

52. A hypothetical post Q&A may unfortunately pan out like FOX "news" vs Mother Jones

[Dr.Phool]

50. Ooops, sorry, I just posted above about Zinn's book.

Probably the most important American History book ever written.

[underpants]

25. Two-tiered educational system as proposed by the Hoover Institute

[snake in the grass]

34. This is a great post.

I have always wanted to read James Loewen's books. Your post has inspired me to order them forthwith.

[Time for change]

59. Thank you -- I think you'll be glad that you ordered them.

[juno jones]

36. K&R! The omission of our recent history

skews everything. The current situations in Iran, Central and South America, and Africa among many others are really only comprehesible once one understands the amount of manipulation we had in those governments; the asassinations, coups and vote rigging that destroyed real democracy in those countries even as we touted democracy as a cure for all ills.


Backlash is proving to be a bitch and the American people in general have no clue as to why it is happening.

[Larry Ogg]

42. The Kennedy assassination is but one example of the malignant altering of facts.

And if truth is ever allowed to exist in its rightful place with historical accuracy, and is the highest standard in education; evidence would not only convict the manipulators of facts along with those who pulled the trigger but also, as this one example shows, the hidden coconspirators and targets of these lies are one in the same, the gullible and naïve collective mass known as the American electorate.

If scientist from the future could solve the problems of time travel, allowing their contemporary historians to send the people of today a brief message, they might very well tell us that, “If you looking for the guilty, you need only to look into the mirror!” Of course there will be no message from the future and we can only predict what they might think, but there may not be a future for them if we ourselves cannot learn to look into the past for the evidence we seek and change the course which was set a long time ago which remains unchanged by the present. Such as it is, one thing I find most depressing and inimical to us living through these times is that poles show that most Americans believe that the CIA assassinated President Kennedy and worked with government officials to cover it up. Yet we continue to elect and reelect those on both sides of the isle - who basically tell us we are all full of shit for not believing the official lie truth. So how well has that mistake been working out?

It’s like I said, and many will or should agree that, “The Kennedy assassination is but one example of the malignant altering of facts.” But unlike other forgotten heinous crimes past and present - in all our systems of government, the crimes and dead bodies too enumerable to count continue to add up and are made insignificant by the passage of time. Yet this one example (JFK) of justice not served stands out as an epitome to our collective willingness to be subjugated by pathological liars, usurpers and manipulators of truth, the M$M information managers, sycophants, murders, warmongers and would be tyrants, all this, because if nothing else, they have an uncanny ability and the public stage by which they can exploit the inherent weakness of human conditions, our faith in leaders, thus resulting in subjective and faulty reasoning perpetuated by epic myths and lack of critical thinking. Truth it seems takes effort and research, it is hard and painful to except, and for some avoided at all cost. Which means lies are the simplest of modus operands - palatable to the deceived who are convinced by the filters of fear that such things are not as they seem, but for the good of all and best forgotten…

Just trying to make sense of it all!

K&R

[Time for change]

48. Well, that makes as much sense as anything else I've read on this subject

With regard to your being depressed about: "polls show that most Americans believe that the CIA assassinated President Kennedy and worked with government officials to cover it up. Yet we continue to elect and reelect those on both sides of the isle - who basically tell us we are all full of shit for not believing the official lie truth."

That is certainly something worth thinking about, I have thought a lot about it, and I think I have some sort of an answer: To put it in simple terms, politicians in order to be successful need to walk a very fine line in order to accomplish two things: 1) They need to appeal to the American people; and 2) They need to obtain the blessing of the PTB.

The point is that if the PTB is adamently against them, it almost doesn't matter how intrinsically appealing they are to the American people, because the PTB will find a way to bring them down -- through constantly lambasting them through our corporate media, assassination, or whatever.

So the bottom line is that, to a very large extent, we Americans don't have much of a choice. Almost all the politicians who are presented to us have to "tell us we're full of shit for believing the official lies" because if they don't they'll be destroyed by the PTB.

That of course a gross simplification of what's going on, but I do believe there's a lot of truth in it.

But on the bright side, I do believe that Americans are catching on and getting smarter (and the Internet is helping a great deal). Over time I believe/hope that things will get a lot better. Maybe not in my lifetime, but eventually. We just need to keep on speaking the truth as we see it.

[Larry Ogg]

62. I agree… It’s like the old saying, “You can’t fight City Hall…”

Even if you’re the Mayor you can loose your job if doing the right thing means your fighting City Hall, Dennis Kucinich will attest to that! The main requirement is that one be amenable to the Powers That Be (PTB). With a few rare exceptions not many people who are both honest and appealing to the naïve public perceptions - make it through the PTB filters, of which, outside of assassination, the most formidable filter is the main stream media (M$M). Of course, if you’re a saint you could possible survive all the lies and mud slinging, and with a minimum amount of M$M air time you might make it to a level where you can actually do some good and gain support for good sense ideas, that also has a tendency to be contagious, but you would be spending a great deal of time watching your back, dodging bullets and heading for cover.

I have posted a couple of comments here on DU since Obama won the Primaries, referring to him as possibly being a Trojan horse entering the White House and once in the position of power he would do something like, bringing the troops home and into D.C. where he would instruct them to remove the corrupt PTB, (I know, that’s unrealistic hope as well as delusional, but it does make fore a good metaphor don’t you think?) Anyhow as you might imagine, I didn’t use the euphemism PTB to describe the éminence grise aka psychopaths, war mongers, robber barons, puppet heads and cronies et al, on both sides of the isle. Of course I’m beginning to realize that there’s a lot to be said about preaching to the choir, especially if you want to reveal the matrix of lies that has taken over their ideological paradigm of which is used as a shield to commit, justify and placate unimaginable atrocities. In other words if you want to free the choir from the grips of a Spellbinder you have to know how the Spellbinder stole their minds in the first place, hypothetically speaking, one might have to become the exact opposite or mirror image of the Spellbinder and speak to the quire from the para-moralistic and pathological perspective they have grown accustom to.

About the Internet
1) We would be foolish to believe that the PTB isn’t aware that honest people of conscience are using the internet in order to find and spread the truth, we should also be aware that they send out their sheep dogs to minimize the effect of truth spreading via the internet, and what fool believes the pretense of protecting children is the most likely reason for them wanting to control the internet.
2) Remember what I said about preaching to the choir? I have observed many of your truth revealing OP’s being attacked by people who want to have them moved to the dungeon, I believe there are two reasons for this. It’s not hard to assume that some are PTB sheep dogs when you see the vileness of their remarks, but we also have to assume that some are nothing more than authoritarian members of the choir that view your OP’s as antithetical to their authoritarian views of which they are accustom to and feel obligated to defend no mater what. Thus the importance of preaching to the choir in terms they understand and can relate to…

[Time for change]

69. Yes, I liked your metaphor about the PTB

It's interesting to wonder how much a politician like Obama even knows about the PTB. Who are they? Where are they? And most important, what happens when you go against their wishes?

Anyhow, your comment that the PTB might be interested in having my posts thrown into the dungeon is perhaps the best compliment I've ever received. :)

[mistertrickster]

43. What's taking so long for the digitized dictabelt . . .

I first read about this in 2004. Here's a 3 year old article:

http://media.www.smudailycampus.com/media/storage/paper949/news/2006/02/07/News/Voices.From.The.Past.Visit.Hilltop-2276959.shtml

During the motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, a Dallas police officer riding on a motorcycle in the procession had his radio on when the shots that killed Kennedy were fired. The radio traffic was being recorded on a Dictabelt, and the recording, known as Dictabelt No. 10, has been a highly debated piece of evidence in the case of Kennedy's assassination.

There is debate over how many gunshots can be heard on the recording, but if Fadeyev and Haber's method can be converted to restore the Dictabelt recording, there is a possibility that a restored version of the recording could shed more light on the matter.

Fadeyev said Dictabelt No. 10 is a "very noisy recording," and even if his process can produce a clearer version of the radio traffic, much work would be needed to determine what is actually on the recording.

"It would be up to a forensic scientist to decide what is there; it is our job to get the sound," Fadeyev said.

******

Good point, Dr. Fadeyev. Now where is the sound?

[Time for change]

53. I don't know

The House Select Committee on Assassinations did determine in 1979, through acoustic analysis, that there were indeed four shots, with at least one of them coming from the front. But then they tried to minimize that fact by saying (contradicting the medical evidence based on the testimony of the doctors who treated JFK at Parkland Hospital) that nevertheless, the shots that killed and wounded Kennedy came from Oswald in the book depository, and that they could find no evidence of any government involvement in the assassination.

[Wapsie B]

47. If I'm not mistaken there was a story here way in the murky past

talking about conservative fundies having influential people on certain state education committees who had a say in what textbooks were to be used in their area.

[Dr.Phool]

51. It was a couple in Texas. Heavily funded by the Coors Foundation and others.

I read about them in a book by Russ Bellant. I believe it was "Old Nazi's, The New Right, and the Republican Party". I've read several by him, but I think that was the book.

[ShortnFiery]

54. One of our local H.S.s here in NoVA is using Howard Zinn's "A Peoples History of the United States"

as a SUPPLEMENTAL text for an AP US History Course. OMG - the right wing nuts in the area went ballistic in the Opinion Section of our local paper. Heaven forbid we allow our advanced H.S. Juniors and Seniors read outside liberal (and conservative) sources in order to THINK FOR THEMSELVES. :crazy:

[Time for change]

55. That's great to hear

No surprise that the RW authoritarian nuts went ballistic over it.

[ShortnFiery]

60. Yes, the people complaining did NOT have H.S. students enrolled within this course.

It became so heated that Howard Zinn - the real guy - esteemed historian was contacted for comment.

http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2009/032009/03182009/453093

"Howard Zinn said he was amused by the objections." :applause: :thumbsup:

[Wapsie B]

56. Holy crap!

They actually allowed that book in a school? That's progress. One school down many more to go. Let the rwingers have a meltdown. Seriously. Push them to the brink, then over.

[ShortnFiery]

61. Zinn called his opponents "anti-American, narrow-minded and censorial."

"The whole idea of education is to have young people experience all sorts of ideas," he said. "And if you want to shut off students from certain ideas, then you are depriving them of a proper education."

Bless Howard Zinn. :loveya:

[No.23]

66. Teaching yor child more than one version of history.

To those of you who have children and attend public school, I would like to suggest something.

When you are going over a history lesson with him during homework, impress upon your child that is more than one historical version of what happened. You can even turn it into a game: let's go find a different version of what happened. History then becomes a detective story.

When my child attended public school, I did that with her. We went on many hunts for differing versions of popular renditions of history. She felt like Sherlock Holmes and I was her Watson.

Not only will your child receive an exposure to differing versions of the what many proclaim to be the truth, but he will also learn to appreciate that the seeking of varying perspectives.