Another Attempt at Book Banning

musicprnt
Wed, 07 Dec 2016 21:15:20 +0000

“Being around people who all think and believe the same is the reason the leading scientists of the world in the 14th century still believed the Earth was flat. They had created their own collective safe space for their beliefs and ignored the other scientists who were saying differently, instead of debating them.” That actually isn’t true history, by the 14th century ancient works from the Greeks had come back into western Europe via the Byzantine Empire, and many learned people understood the earth was a sphere (Erostothenes measured the circumfrence of the Earth around 400+BCE),it was mostly the ‘common people’ who claimed the earth was flat. It is the same thing with the earth centered solar system, by the time of Galileo many learned people, including people in the church, knew Copernicus and Galileo was right, I suspect the church leaders who prosecuted Galileo realized he was right but prosecuted him for openly challenging what they claimed was true (heck, the church didn’t drop the earth centered solar system as official pronouncement until the 1920’s).

History is not an exact science, and any historian quite frankly who claims they don’t have inherent biases or that what they write doesn’t reflect their world view are either blind or lying. Some historical facts are of course verifiable, we know Gettysburg was fought over the July 4th time period, we know when the Draft riots happened, we know when the southern states started seceding…on the other hand, Historians argue over what ‘really’ happened at Ft. Sumter, was it a southern attack, or did the north ‘goad’ the south into attacking? We argue over what the constitution is, some historians will tell you those who wrote it saw it as this piece of law cast in stone, based on the letters those who were involved wrote, others will argue with the letters of others, and by the very nature of the constitution, that it was never seen as a perfect document, one that they fully knew would be a living document shrug.

I read this long treatise by a conservative historian who made this whole big argument that the economy of the 1930’s was fixing itself, he cited numbers and figures from the time that claimed that the work of the New Deal was in effect illusory (and also, not surprisingly, argued Keynes economic theories failed)…other historians pointed out the numbers he used were out of context, that he looked at aspects of the micro economy and argued the macro was similarly “working itself out”, and then cited numbers to show it wasn’t. They also pointed out said professor left out that when FDR, on the advice of bankers, tried to balance the federal budget in 1936-1937, the economy went into a recession …and of course, they point out the historian in question said “WWII ended the depression”, and pointed out that WWII was the largest single government expenditure in US history, it was in many ways the ultimate in Keynesian spending…

I read something recently that said the Electoral college was primarily designed to give small states more power in voting for president, and that view can be challenged, in that electors were put in place to counter a demagogue getting elected, it is only in more recent history that states required electors to vote for who they were pledged to, and likewise those who argue the constitution was about ‘will of the people’ ignore the many anti democratic things in it, but a case can be made, it is all about how you ‘shape’ the facts, and also, as @awcntdb points out, whether primary sources are available.Classic example? For a long time, historical teaching was that the pyramids were built by slave labor (some tried to tie it to the Jews supposed enslavement in Egypt), and people didn’t challenge it much…a while ago, they came across egyptian records of the building of a pyramid, and it pretty much showed it was not slave labor, the kind of supplies they were buying (the kind of food, for example,designed to entice the laborers to stay on the job) and actual pay records show that was a fallacy (and the biblical claim of mass enslavement of the Jews in Egypt is likewise historically questionable, no such records have ever been found from the time involved, and the Egyptians kept great records)…without primary sources, a lot of it comes down to guesswork, from second hand observations, from oral tales, from even physical evidence, they try and figure out ‘the truth’.

Sometimes it is pretty obvious, a book on holocaust denial can’t pass historical muster, in large part because the Germans kept detailed records of what they did, including films, and besides survivors we also have the accounts of those who liberated the camps. Holocaust denier books rely on claiming there was this massive conspiracy to blame the Nazis when in fact those who died , died of ‘disease’ or "american bombing’, which is ludicrous, on top of everything else,if such disease really happened that killed millions a lot of common people outside the camps would have died, and would have born witness to it.