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casualties would result from an invasion of Japan, and Soviet Russia was moving to invade Japan and stake a claim to the spoils that would result from an Allied victory. There is much missing from this diary, the military had every reason to believe that a million U.S. The author is clearly prejudiced and slanted the diary to support his bias. 45 minutes after I posted the diary I was subjected to this: That's not the "revisionism," however, that some of our fellow Kossacks were accusing me of. EB Sledge expressed concern that such revisionism, in his words "mellowing", would allow us to forget the harsh facts of the history that led to the bombings. But when it comes to discussing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in this article: The Hibakusha ("explosion-affected people") of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seek compensation from their government and criticize it for failing to "accept responsibility for having instigated and then prolonged an aggressive war long after Japan's defeat was apparent, resulting in a heavy toll in Japanese, Asian and American lives." Historians Hill and Yukiko have pointed out that attempts to minimize the importance of the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is revisionist history. Right-wing Japanese writers don't want textbooks to describe any of the atrocities committed by the Japanese Army. But, of course, we have some revisionist history going on in the description of Japan's conduct in World War II as well. THAT's revisionist history used in a pejorative way because it's being used to whitewash something unpleasant. Look at the Turkish attempt to deny the Armenian genocide of the 1910s. Ideological uses are more, well, sinister. Yes, I TEACH students who come into my classroom after studying history in the former Soviet Union. Political influence is easy: Herodotus wanted to produce Greek support for the Persian War or the Soviet Union had a version of the truth they wanted to promote. Since this is what I was being accused of, I believe unfairly, let's see what Wikipedia has to say about the causes:īroadly understood, there are two motivations behind revisionist history: the ability to control ideological influence and to control political influence. The illegitimate distortion of the historical record such that certain events appear in a more or less favorable light. After observing that it CAN be (and often is) legitimate scholastic re-examination of existing knowledge about a historical event, Wikipedia's article on Historical Revisionism bends over backwards to be fair, and so, I'll use it for this section. But call it "revisionism" and all of a sudden you can't find an article on it using a Google search that isn't biased in one way or another. As far as the revisions we do in history are concerned, almost everything passes unnoticed, and people who don't pay attention to the changes (like the recent incident at CPAC when a young delegate began to speak about how good American slavery was) tend to be ridiculed. Revision based on "new" documents and other new information or new interpretation of existing source material is central to ALL scholarship.
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I'm going to do some deconstruction of some of the more outrageous attacks on what I wrote, but first I need to get a few things straightened out about the use of the epithet "revision" when it's applied to a scholarly endeavor. I also think there's some residual xenophobia involved too, but that's a more difficult claim to make because I don't know how old all of my attackers were (and yes, age makes a difference here). I've done some reading on the various players in the Enola Gay controversy and I've come to the conclusion that the complaints about my presentation of the event were ideologically based, not rooted in fact. I generally try to stay out of controversy in my own diaries, but the problems that comments headlined "Warning to all readers of this diary" and "The scholarship on the revisionist side is awful" caused seemed to me to require more than just a "thanks for your comment" approach.
#Descriptions in enola gay exhibit series
Two weeks ago, I wrote a diary in this series called "Dropping the Bomb on Japan." I was surprised when it recapitulated the Enola Gay controversy of 1996, and I would have said it turned into a gun diary only that would be insulting to the RKBA people who generally, as is traditional here at Daily Kos, trade in facts.