ZGram - 11/6/2002 - "Some liberal 'icons' crumbling"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGRAM- WHERE TRUTH IS DESTINY

NOVEMBER 6, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Your treat for today:

[START]

Bellesiles Resigns, Gun Book Disgraced - But Still In Print

By Sam Francis | November 04, 2002

One by one, the superstitions of liberalism are crumbling into the sea like
the towers of lost Atlantis.

Last month anthropologist Franz Boas, a patron saint of the liberal view of
race, bit the deep waters when one of his major studies turned out to be a
fraud. So did Margaret Mead, one of Boas's major disciples and also a
pillar of liberal views of sexual liberation. Then there are all the
apologists for characters like Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, and others, all of whom are now known to have been secret
communists and spies to boot, despite decades of yelling and screaming by
their defenders that they were just saintly progressives hounded by
McCarthyite fascists.

Now, just last week, yet another liberal myth, one barely a couple of years
old, as well as the mythologist who fabricated it gurgled down into the
oceanic depths.

The latest liberal fraud was the claim of Emory University "historian"
Michael A. Bellesiles in his 2000 book, Arming America: The Origins of a
National Gun Culture, that most people in early American history really
didn't own many guns. The reason the left swallowed this claim - dismissed as
preposterous on its face by real experts on firearms history - was that it
appeared to bolster the enemies of the right to keep and bear arms. If gun
ownership is a fairly recent habit in our culture, then it could not have
been considered necessary to a free republic by the Founding Fathers and
the authors of the Second Amendment.

Mr. Bellesiles' book at once became a holy relic in the temples of the
left. Columbia University awarded it the Bancroft Prize, probably the
country's most prestigious award for historical scholarship, and such
bigwig academics and writers as Edmund S. Morgan and Garry Wills hailed the
book as a marvel of learning.

But to anyone with a balanced mind, there was something fishy. When critics
clobbered Mr. Bellesiles' book, it turned out that the Emory professor was
unable to substantiate several of the major claims his "research" was
supposed to have proved. Unable to identify the sources for some of his
conclusions, he claimed his data had been destroyed in a flood in his
office. Scholars couldn't locate records on which he was supposed to have
relied. It turned out they had been destroyed decades before he claimed to
have examined them.

Aside from hostile reviews by skeptical scholars, [See James Lindgren's
Yale Law Review piece here.] the William and Mary Quarterly in January
published a symposium that cast even further doubt, not just on the truth
of Mr. Bellesiles' conclusions but on his very honesty as a historian.

Finally last week the last remaining pillar crumbled. A committee of
scholars composed of three major academics from Harvard, Princeton, and the
University of Chicago reported that the Bellesiles book showed "evidence of
falsification," "egregious misrepresentation," and "exaggeration of data."
The Emory professor's "scholarly integrity is seriously in question," they
concluded. Mr. Bellesiles submitted his resignation from the university
faculty the next day. [Full report in PDF format]

Yet die-hard defenders of the frauds of the left were still swinging in Mr.
Bellesiles' defense. The Nation magazine, which defended the innocence of
convicted perjurer Alger Hiss for decades after two trials and a mass of
new scholarship showed him to be guilty, carried an article by editor Jon
Wiener that tried to make out that Mr. Bellesiles was merely the innocent
victim of
the omnipotent and mysterious "gun lobby" - mainly because NRA president
Charlton Heston was outraged by the book's foolish claims when he first
read about them.

Presumably, Mr. Wiener will soon try to prove the NRA bribed the three
scholars at Harvard, Princeton and Chicago to issue their damning report.

As for Mr. Bellesiles, he has shown himself more than willing to play the
role of martyr as what Mr. Wiener calls "the target of a campaign to
destroy your work." In his defiant statement last week,[PDF] he compared
himself to those attacked by "Holocaust deniers."

When you've got the entire establishment on your side, why shouldn't you be
defiant?

Mr. Wiener points put that Mr. Bellesiles is preparing a second edition of
his worthless book for Vintage, the prestigious paperback arm of Random
House.

And so far there's no breath of retraction or apology from the reviewers
whose shameless trumpeting raised the book to glory in the first place.

Nor is there any suggestion from Columbia that it plans to reconsider the
Bancroft Prize.

That's what happens when the dominant ideology of the nation is nothing
more than a gigantic tissue of deceit and fraud.

But sooner or later, despite all the cover-ups and denials by the elite
that relies on the big lies liberalism pushes, the truth will out, and the
powers and policies that liberal lies support will crash with them.

(Source:  http://www.vdare.com/francis/bellesiles_resigns.htm )

[END]