{"id":2818,"date":"2012-02-13T19:57:28","date_gmt":"2012-02-14T00:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=2818"},"modified":"2012-02-15T22:41:27","modified_gmt":"2012-02-16T03:41:27","slug":"on-the-afterglow-of-historical-fairy-tales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2012\/02\/13\/history\/on-the-afterglow-of-historical-fairy-tales\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Afterglow of Historical Fairy Tales"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are fortunate to be living in an age in which historical source material is becoming increasingly abundant and difficult to destroy, because we are also living in an age that has been prolific in the rearrangement of historical fact to suit ideological ends.\u00a0 I just ran across yet another data point demonstrating the process whereby the myths created in the process are transmogrified into “historical fact.”\u00a0 It turned up on Atomic Insights<\/a><\/em>, a blog penned by nuclear power advocate Rod Adams.<\/p>\n

The reason this particular “historical fact” turned up in one of Rod’s articles is neither here nor there.\u00a0 As far as I know he’s perfectly sound politically, and has no ax to grind outside of his nuclear advocacy.\u00a0 It was apparently reproduced without any malice or intent to deceive as a “well known fact” in an article about the mutual hostility of the U.S. and Iran.\u00a0 According to Rod,<\/p>\n

On the other side of the issue, Iranians date their hostility to America to 1953, when the United States CIA took actions to stimulate the overthrow of the democratically elected leader named Mohammad Mosaddeqh. Our main beef with him was the fact that he had decided that the oil and gas under his country actually belonged to the people, not to the companies that had arranged some sweet deals during a colonial era. When he moved to nationalize the oil reserves, the UK and the US took action to install a dictator who was more compliant with our \u201cinterests.\u201d\u00a0 That part of the controversy is pretty well known and discussed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, that part of the controversy isn’t discussed nearly enough.\u00a0 If it were, this version of “history” would have been relegated to the garbage heap long ago.\u00a0 I wrote a series of articles debunking it some time ago that can be read here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>.\u00a0 The “official” version of this particular historical fairy tale, entitled All the Shah’s Men<\/a><\/em>, was written by New York Times reporter Steven Kinzer, apparently in the proud tradition of Walter Duranty’s glowing accounts<\/a> of Stalin’s Russia.\u00a0 Kinzer’s “history” was based largely on a CIA source document<\/a>, which is available to anyone on the web.\u00a0 Evidently he assumed no one would actually bother to read it and the other easily available source material, because the idea that they “prove” the great Mossadegh Coup myth is palpably absurd.\u00a0 The CIA activities described were so dilettantish they wouldn’t have seriously undermined the flimsiest of banana republics, not to mention Iran.\u00a0 On the very day that the coup happened the supposedly miraculously effective CIA plotters in Tehran, convinced that the coup had failed, sat meekly on the sidelines, taking no significant role in directing events whatsoever. \u00a0To believe the\u00a0claim that their actions\u00a0were undertaken solely to mollify evil US and UK oil and gas cartels it is necessary to willfully blind ones self to the possibility that Communist aggression ever actually\u00a0existed or that the US government ever honestly believed that it was a threat at the time.\u00a0 Of course, I cannot prove that I am any less prone to historical distortions than Mr. Kinzer et. al.\u00a0 However, I can suggest that anyone interested in the facts read the source material.\u00a0 It speaks for itself.\u00a0 I suspect that anyone reading it with an open mind will conclude that his yarn about the mind boggling effectiveness of the great CIA plot and the reasons it happened are baloney.<\/p>\n

That hasn’t prevented these myths from gelling into historical “facts.”\u00a0 Rob’s blog is hardly the only place you’ll find similar disinformation.\u00a0 The more\u00a0a\u00a0given\u00a0myth serves ideological ends, the faster the gelling process proceeds.\u00a0 In this case it was doubly effective.\u00a0 It stroked the egos of the CIA supersleuths who had no trouble convincing themselves that they really had “killed seven at one blow,” and it also had just the right “anti-imperialist” touch for the ideologues of the left.\u00a0 But heaven forefend that you should take my word for it.\u00a0 Look for yourself.<\/p>\n

One could cite many other similar instances of rearranging history.\u00a0 For example, there’s the old southern schoolmarm’s yarn about how the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, the anti-nuclear activists’ yarn about how the atomic bomb had nothing to do with ending World War II, the Nazi yarn about how the German army lost World War I because it was “stabbed in the back” by revolutionaries on the home front, and so on and so on.\u00a0 One often hears the\u00a0old bromide\u00a0that “history is written by the victors” from the creators of these fantasies.\u00a0 That may be, but in all the cases cited above, and many more like them, there is no lack of source material out there for anyone interested enough to dig it up and read it.\u00a0 In the case of the Civil War, for example, it reveals that common people in the north thought it was about slavery, common people in the south thought it was about slavery, foreign observers uniformly concurred it was about slavery, and southern politicians made no bones whatsoever about the fact that it was about slavery in their declarations of secession.\u00a0 Under the circumstances, based on the unanimous testimony of the people who actually experienced it, I tend to believe\u00a0the Civil War\u00a0was, in fact,\u00a0about slavery.\u00a0 If you make the effort to “go to the source” with an open mind, you’re liable to find a lot more fossilized historical “facts” that aren’t quite what they seem.<\/p>\n

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We are fortunate to be living in an age in which historical source material is becoming increasingly abundant and difficult to destroy, because we are also living in an age that has been prolific in the rearrangement of historical fact to suit ideological ends.\u00a0 I just ran across yet another data point demonstrating the process … Continue reading “On the Afterglow of Historical Fairy Tales”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[59,8,89,38,53,88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foreign-affairs","category-history","category-intelligence-agencies","category-iran","category-politics","category-slavery"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-Js","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2818"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2839,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2818\/revisions\/2839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}