Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • May 4, 2011 extolled today. The man who spoke made a contribution to his country through honorable military service in World War II, but telling the younger generation he saw the emperor come aboard the U.S.S. Missouri makes no contribution whatsoever to the objective understanding of history. Shigemitsu and Nomura were both peace advocates until members of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s cabinet forced Japan’s hand, but people who think Shigemitsu was Hirohito and who never heard of Yoon Bong-Gil are clueless when it comes to understanding how we got into the war, and will probably remain so as long as the popular press confuses history with patriotism of the My-Country-Right-Or-Wrong variety. Another guy at the Ridgewood Library showed a photograph of a car with dead civilians inside as evidence of Japanese strafing of civilians at Pearl Harbor. Everybody in Hawaii knows that the four men in the car – three IrishAmericans, one Hawaiian-American – were killed when a U.S. Navy shell hit the road nearby. Fragments from the same shell killed a 12-year-old girl. These are the facts. The myth of “civilian strafing” was invented to cover up a “sneak attack” that the White House knew about. It’s junk history, just as Holocaust denial is junk history. The no-survivor myth of the Little Bighorn got started because of a similar embarrassment. The United States had forced a war on the Lakota (Sioux) and Cheyenne because Custer found gold in the Black Hills. The miners who flooded in and started killing and perpetrating violent crimes against the Indians screamed bloody murder when the Indians started to fight back. These were the same sort of miners who had all but exterminated the disorganized, largely peaceful Indians of California, the unsung genocide of American history because no one wants to talk about it. Congress ordered the Indians to report to their agencies in the dead of winter. Most of the Indians said they would come in to talk in the spring when the snow melted. Instead, they got a “sneak attack” on March 17 that hit a Cheyenne village and drove the formerly neutral Cheyenne fugitives into an alliance with the Lakota. The government then scrapped the Sioux Treaty of 1868 and invaded the Sioux-Cheyenne country with a three-pronged invasion. The Indians defeated General George Crook at the Battle of the Rosebud, but Custer didn’t know this. On June 25, 1876, his scouts located a big village at the Little Bighorn River. Custer peered down into the Indian village, saw nothing but women, children, and dogs, and assumed the men were out hunting buffalo or antelope. He told some of his officers – in front of Trumpeter Giovanni Martini – that the Seventh Cavalry would ride down into the valley, round up the women and children, and hold them as hostages so the warriors would come in and surrender to get their wives and children back. The Little Bighorn was not a “Sioux ambush.” The Little Bighorn was a sneak attack that failed. Unbeknownst to Custer, the “empty” village was full of Lakota and Cheyenne men and teenagers sleeping off a huge intertribal dance the night before. When stray bullets hit some women and children, the warriors shook off their initial panic, picked up the repeating rifles they had bought, often at government-licensed trading posts, and fought. Two companies of the Seventh Cavalry disintegrated under an avalanche of Indian gunfire. The others contracted away from the village, but not fast enough. The Indians – most of them on foot – outflanked the soldiers and shot them to pieces. Custer and his brothers, nephew, and brother-in-law – well behind the skirmish line of slaughtered enlisted men – fought a sort of “last stand” with about 40 sergeants, corporals, and trumpeters, the experienced soldiers. Captain Myles Keogh, “that gallant Irishman,” died surrounded by a dozen loyalists. A lot of the other enlisted men ran for it. They didn’t make it. Heroism to the last ditch was a factor for the Custer and Keogh parties, but most of the soldiers, home-grown kids or immigrants who signed up for three square meals and a sack to sleep on, gave a very bad account of themselves and died running or begging. “It was a rout, a stampede. The men fought badly,” Captain Frederick Benteen said surveying the corpses two days later. The poet Longfellow dared to point out that the government had wronged the Indians: “Say that OUR broken faith wrought all this ruin and scathe.” Some people temporarily wanted the Indians exterminated, but they got over it after the leaders had all been killed in battle or murdered by deception. Then Hollywood wrote us up a moral victory: blonde athletic Custer, laughing in the face of death as his men lie dead or dying all around him. Cassilly Adams’ famous full-color Anheuser Busch lithograph was hung up in 2,000 U.S. Army mess halls during World War II to teach bold volunteers and scared draftees how to face those who don’t surrender and don’t show mercy when you surrender. We’ve been fighting ever since, about once every 20 years. Now we’re in their countries, not our own. Maybe that’s why the Little Bighorn is still relevant. A revisionist historian is a historian whose prejudices don’t concur with your own prejudices. For people who want to understand the reality of the world today, the revisionist historians are often the only ones worth reading. That’s why I’m proud to be a revisionist historian. The fact that you can’t get mainstream books published without three degrees from Princeton, Yale, or Harvard could have something to do with it, too. Telling the same old lies over and over again isn’t viable without Establishment credentials. Once you’ve got those credentials, the chance that anybody who knows better will be able to get equal time for a rebuttal is nil. People who are still taken seriously by the general public sometimes write books that recycle the same bogus facts that have been foisted off on the good-natured American public for the past century, in some cases. If people continue to take them seriously, the whole nation is at risk. Witness the entire career of Stephen Ambrose, who once wrote a Custer book with heap big mistakes, or Iris Chang’s “mathemagic.” Witness the fact that most Americans don’t understand that Muslims eat halal food and accept Jesus as a major prophet. The American people have been propagandized under the guise not just of education but of entertainment. Bangbang-bang, the Good Guys kill the Bad Guys. If the Good Guys lose, they lose as heroes. This kind of swill can’t be allowed to influence our foreign policy for the 21st century. We no longer have a monopoly on the atomic bomb. We’re having a heck of a time getting people who are deployed to go overseas. We’re not going to be able to foist our glowing self-image off on the rest of the planet anymore. On May 4 at 9 p.m., the History Channel will take a look at the Little Bighorn. A number of scholars, experts, and fanatics, including Yours Truly, attack or defend the premise that one man, Frank Finkel, escaped from Custer’s Last Stand and lived until 1930 in Dayton, Washington. The Little Bighorn is a great fulcrum to launch a look at what really happened, because we revisionists don’t run the risk of being assassinated by soreheads whose crimes are exposed. Most people, even in the various Custer associations, today feel compelled, however grudgingly, to tell both sides of the story and admit the Indians had a case. As a harmless example of why more recent history can be perilous, I remember a dear old man, since deceased, who spoke at a Memorial Day event. He had been a cook on the U.S.S. Missouri and had seen “the emperor” come on board the battleship in Tokyo Bay to surrender at the end of the war in 1945. Of course, he hadn’t. The man he had seen was Mamoru Shigemitsu, walking with a limp because he had had a leg blown off by a bomb disguised as a water bottle and thrown by a Korean patriot assassin in Shanghai in 1932. Admiral Kisasaburo Nomura, a six-footer who served as special ambassador to the United States just before Pearl Harbor, had lost an eye in 1932 to the same exploding water bottle. The Korean who threw the bomb, Yoon Bong-Gil, became a national hero in his own country and is still Revisionism seen as mandatory relevance Ridgewood High School Junior Victoria Pan has been awarded the Volunteer Service Award from President Barack Obama. She was selected for this prestigious awarded after being named a Prudential Spirit of Community Award recipient. Student Environment Action Advisor Anjali Shah recommended Victoria for the award based on her positive attitude and strong sense of responsibility to the environment. She was the founder of the Switching off the Light energy saving program at RHS that has been taken up by other organizations. Victoria has also participated in a leadership program, Alliance for Climate Education, with teachers and students from New York. She is pictured here with Principal Jack Lorenz, Guidance Counselor Margret Friedrich, and Ms. Shah. Prestigious award