Aletho News

Announcement: Purges and Counter-Narratives

By Ron Unz • Unz Review • October 9, 2019

I doubt that any event in human history has been as thoroughly discussed and documented as the Second World War, the gigantic global struggle that ended three generations ago and shaped our modern world. Elements of that conflict have probably been the subject of hundreds of thousands of books over the decades along with countless articles in newspapers and magazines, and they still pervade our electronic media on a daily basis. Moreover, the story told by nearly all of these authors seems generally consistent, thereby appearing to constitute a very solid fabric of historical reality.

Yet there exists strong evidence that this factual consistency is more apparent than real, with those writers who substantially deviate from the accepted framework having long been denied distribution via mainstream channels of information. The growth of the Internet over the last two decades began bringing disturbing anomalies to my attention, and I gradually recognized this broader problem, which became the basis of my American Pravda articles published over the last few years.

As I described in one of my articles, as early as 1940 some of America’s most prominent and highly-regarded journalists and academics were purged from public life because they maintained their intellectual integrity while most of their peer-group bent to the prevailing ideological winds. When those who dispute a particular view of events quickly disappear from all public discussions, this may naturally intimidate the remainder, while any subsequent consistency becomes a synthetic artifact of selection-bias. And since the vast majority of later writers learn their histories within this sharply-restricted framework, the false reality they absorb gradually becomes self-perpetuating over time.

Many of the individuals cast out by the media for their discordant views had once stood at the pinnacle of public influence, and their thoughtful writings often continued long after their national audiences had been eliminated. Taken together, their works provide a perspective radically different from that of our official histories.

Over the last two years, many of my articles have used these sources to reconstruct what may be a more accurate history of the Second World War, and I recently drew upon my findings to publish American Pravda: Understanding World War II. This article is intended to provide a reasonably compact but comprehensive counter-narrative to our official histories of the central event of the twentieth century. Even 20,000 words of text hardly seems excessive when it seeks to challenge and rebut so many tens of millions of pages written on the other side.

The early response to this very long piece has certainly been quite heartening. In just over two weeks it has attracted more readership than almost any of our other website articles have accumulated over the last six months, while also provoking well over 200,000 words of commentary, much of it quite detailed and thoughtful.

Historical analysis is not entirely an intellectual exercise since it may often shed an important light on present-day events of great importance. Once we begin to accept that there is considerable evidence that the history of the twentieth century believed by nearly all Americans may be in serious error and perhaps actually inverted, we naturally become far more willing to question our ongoing official narratives on important foreign and domestic policy matters. Moreover, the past media purges of dissenting academics and journalists allows us to more easily recognize the exact same developments taking place today, sometimes with very grave consequences.

Consider the case of Stephen F. Cohen. With an academic career at Princeton and New York University that stretches back for more than a half-century, Prof. Cohen certainly ranks as one of our most eminent Russia scholars, and his presence had loomed very large throughout the Reagan Era and afterward, with his Sovieticus column being a regular mid-1980s feature of The Nation magazine, America’s left-liberal flagship publication.

Yet with the Cold War against Russia now recently revived in perhaps an even more dangerous and destructive form by his former liberal Democratic Party allies, his views seem almost nowhere to be found in the mainstream media organs that shape the reality of our ruling policy-elites. Instead, the ignorant journalists who function as our unofficial gatekeepers have crudely castigated him as one of Putin’s “American Dupes.”

In recent years, his regular appearances on the John Batchelor Show of WABC radio have represented one of his few remaining public platforms, and I’m very pleased to have recently made arrangements to republish all of these hundreds of broadcasts on our website, together with their brief descriptive summaries and several of Prof. Cohen’s other articles from this same period, thereby making this important material conveniently available to an additional audience at a very dangerous time. With Russiagate having finally collapsed only to be succeeded by Ukrainegate, I would particularly recommend his February interview entitled “How the Russiagate Investigation Is Sovietizing American Politics.”

• Stephen F. Cohen Archive

Along with providing a helpful new distribution channel for such an eminent academic scholar, we have begun doing the same for Whitney Webb of MintPress News, whose remarkable investigative work has begun attracting a great deal of attention over the last year, breaking important new ground in the Jeffrey Epstein case and other controversial matters. Her long, copiously-reported articles have revealed important facts regularly excluded from the mainstream media, setting a new standard of courageous journalism.

• Whitney Webb Archive

October 9, 2019 - Posted by aletho | Deception, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular