Inconvenient History

The Challenge to Revisionism

With the launch of a new historical journal, one devoted specifically to inconvenient history, history that challenges and at times may make us uncomfortable, we must look back at that first generation of self-named revisionist historians and their intellectual victories and challenges. Although the case has been made that revisionist history is as old as…

Human Smoke

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, by Nicholson Baker. Simon & Schuster Inc., New York, 2008. 576 pp. bibliography, indexed. Nested near the end of Nicholson Baker’s first book, The Mezzanine, is an oddly memorable scene. Set apart from the novel’s famously annotated escalator ascent, the scene finds Howie…

In Defense of Internment

In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War Two and the War on Terror, by Michelle Malkin. Regnery, Washington, DC, 2004. 376pp. Michelle Malkin is a conservative columnist and blogger who, since 9-11, has become a strident advocate of enhanced scrutiny of foreigners in the United States, particularly those of Muslim…

After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation

After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, by Giles MacDonogh. Basic Books, New York, 2007. 618pp., illustrated, with notes, bibliography, indexed. A recent work with some refreshing angles on the post-WW2 occupation of defeated Germany is always welcome, minimally at least as a small antidote to the continued appearance of Holocaust-related works…

The Chief Culprit

The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II, by Viktor Suvorov Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2008, 328pp., illustrated, with notes, bibliography, indexed. The post-1945 war crimes trials in Nuremberg are underway and the international press excitedly covers the proceedings. The tribunal itself consists of justices not from victor powers but from wartime…

Christopher Hitchens and His Critics

Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left, edited by Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, New York University Press, 365 pages, 2008. With an Introduction by the editors, this book collects many prowar propaganda pieces written after 9/11 by former socialist and critic of American imperialism Christopher Hitchens, along with various critiques of…

The Myth of Natural Rights

The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays, by L.A. Rollins, Nine Banded Books, Charleston, WV, 2008. 304pp. When I first read L.A. Rollins’ The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays, I wasn’t really sure how to react. As revisionists, we’re not really used to people taking us seriously. Sure: we’re used to getting…

The Prohibition of Holocaust Denial

“Once any idea is expressed…no matter how repugnant it may be to some persons or, simply to everybody, it must never be erased by the Government.” – Kurt Vonnegut On 8 July, 1981, the sovereign nation of Israel became the very first country in the world to specifically outlaw “Holocaust denial.” The Israeli Knesset passed…

Atomic War Crimes

The further one seriously studies history, and particularly the World War Two period, the more striking is the disconnect between what is popularly believed and what actually happened. Perhaps the reading public continues to shrink, not only in the United States but around the world, while information and opinion are generally retrieved from television and…

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