Category: Sins of Omission

In most history textbooks today, coverage of the war in the Pacific consists of a summary of the Battle of Midway, a brief mention of leapfrogging islands, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The Battle of Midway is almost invariably described as the “turning point” in the Pacific campaign that put the Japanese...

More than 20 years ago, I presented a paper on the Old West at an historical conference and was surprised to find that I upset several female professors in the audience.  I had not disparaged their frontier sisters.  Quite the opposite: I described how strong, courageous, enterprising, and successful were many of those pioneer women. ...

“Thou shalt not honor a white man,” says the first commandment of the politically correct—unless, of course, the white man in question is hastening the destruction of Western civilization or, perhaps, preserving the habitat of the pupfish.  A recent example of dishonoring an American hero occurred at the University of Washington, when a student senator,...

Whenever whites commit crimes against blacks, the dastardly deeds make headlines and are featured on nightly news programs.  The president wrings his hands and makes speeches about racism.  The Promise Keepers hug one another, cry, and confess to a newly minted transgression, the “sin of racism.”  Western Europeans look down their long noses at us. ...

In the early 1960’s, I was introduced to a fellow motorcycle rider by the name of Steve Foss. Before I could say anything, he quickly offered, “No relation to Joe Foss.” He had anticipated my question and that of nearly everyone he had met for years back. For most Americans back then, the name Foss...

“Japan didn’t fight wars of aggression.  Only China now says so,” declared Yuko Tojo, the granddaughter of Japan’s wartime prime minister, Gen. Hideki Tojo, in an interview with the Japan Times in late June.  Yuko was half right.  Although Japan fought several wars of aggression, only China seems to raise the issue today.  America dropped...

While teaching at UCLA, I heard a student ask one of my teaching assistants why the United States dropped The Bomb on Japan and not on Germany.  The T.A. immediately responded, “Another example of racist America.”  A doctoral student, he did not seem to know that Germany surrendered more than two months before we had...

Ever since the late 1960’s, the cultural Marxists of academe have worked assiduously to destroy American heroes or simply to omit them from textbooks—and they have been largely successful.  As we approach the 60th anniversary of VE Day and VJ Day and the youngest of the World War II veterans are entering their 80’s, it...

For hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, the Indians of North America practiced slavery.  Until the 18th century, those enslaved, for the most part, were other Indians.  The tribes of the Pacific Northwest, for example, raided constantly, principally to secure slaves.  The populations of some villages were one-third slave.  There is even an instance of a...

“Chicano Studies” departments at American universities portray the Battle of the Alamo as the triumph of the lawful rulers of Texas over a rowdy, drunken band of illegal aliens.  Such a portrayal has a delicious irony to it, though it is mostly false.  Almost always omitted from the Chicano version of events are several unsettling...

In 1975, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) launched a campaign for reparations for those Japanese who had been forced to evacuate the West Coast during World War II.  A heavily financed lobbying effort came to fruition five years later when the House of Representatives passed a bill creating the Commission on Wartime Relocation and...

The Last Samurai is the latest movie to treat us to the spectacle of the U.S. Army slaughtering American Indian women and children.  Playing a disillusioned captain, Tom Cruise suffers from nightmares for his role in the dastardly deed.  He finds honor and redemption as a Great White Samurai in Japan.  Many movie reviewers have...

On the wintry morning of February 20, 1853, more than a hundred Chinese miners were working their claims near Rich Gulch.  Without warning, five mounted and gun-brandishing bandidos swept down upon the Chinese.  Taken by surprise and without arms themselves, the Chinese could do little but comply when ordered to hand over their gold.  An...

Every time I ask my college students if they are familiar with Nazi atrocities, the collective reply is “Of course.”  Nearly all of them have also heard of Dr. Josef Mengele and his horrific medical experiments conducted at Auschwitz.  The “Angel of Death” has been the subject of countless lectures, articles, books, movies, and documentaries. ...

At Wounded Knee Creek, on December 29, 1890, the last fight of any size or significance between the U.S. Army and American Indians occurred.  Although a terrible tragedy involving the loss of Indian women and children, the battle has been wildly mischaracterized, especially by those bent on making the Indian an innocent victim of the...

Second only to the myth of Indian as ecologist is that of red brotherhood.  Although physically similar, the Indian peoples of what is today the United States were a diverse lot.  There was no common language, culture, or identity.  A few groups of Indians evolved political organizations—the Iroquois League of the Five Nations was the...

“Nigger Charley” Tyler rode the range of the Owens Valley in the trans-Sierra country of California during the early 1860’s.  He was one of the hired hands of the ranching McGee family, who grazed their beeves in the valley and then drove them north to market at the booming mining camp of Aurora.  Paiute Indians,...

The competition for victim status is fierce in today’s America.  Considering their disproportionate degree of success here in the United States, it is ironic that, for the last several decades, Japanese-Americans have been engaged in that competition.  The relocation camps of World War II are now called “concentration camps,” relocation itself is referred to as...

For several years, Charles Truxillo, a professor at the University of New Mexico, has been proclaiming that the American Southwest will—and should—be reconquered by Mexico through massive immigration.  Most politicians and media have either ignored Truxillo or tried to characterize him as an isolated extremist, claiming that most Mexican immigrants have no political agenda and...

Three New York firefighters raise Old Glory over the rubble of the World Trade Center.  The dramatic moment is captured from afar by a photographer.  Within a day or two, the photo is featured in newspapers across the United States.  It becomes as recognizable as the Marine flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi.  T-shirts soon appear with...

Most of us learned in grammar school, if not before, that the American Indian had a special reverence for nature.  He was a kind of proto-ecologist who conserved natural resources, be they trees or beasts, with a religious devotion.  I cannot recall the number of times I heard someone repeat, mantra-like, that “The Indian used...

I learned firsthand how disturbing facts could be when teaching a U.S. history course at UCLA in 1987. One of my teaching assistants, a politically correct young woman, became terribly upset after listening to my lecture on slavery. “He shouldn’t be saying such things!” she exclaimed to another teaching assistant. When asked by the other...