Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • August 28, 2013 Revulsion from revisionism? A colleague recently sent me a quote that I found abso- lutely hilarious. “It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evi- dence rather than the other way around, like so many revi- sionists today. It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narra- tive form, to discover a theory of a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.” -- Barbara Tuchman. Let us take Tuchman at her word and look at her back- ground and at some of what she wrote, notably the two books that won her Pulitzer Prizes in 1963 and 1971. Let us arrive at a generalization and a theory. Tuchman’s grandfather was Henry Morgenthau Sr., a brilliant attorney and real estate investor and U.S. Ambas- sador to the Ottoman Empire. During the Turkish outrages against the Armenian population, Morgenthau denounced the Turks and raised millions of dollars for the relief of the Armenians. Morgenthau also wrote a book in which he tried to blame the Kaiser’s Germans as the instigators of the Armenian outrages. I know people who lost relatives in the Turkish outrages and none of them blamed the Germans. Some of them cred- ited German missionaries for rescuing Armenian women and children. I know of no Armenian historian who cites the Kaiser’s Germans as instigators. Tuchman’s father, Maurice Wertheim, was the owner of The Nation, for many years the voice of the American far left. The late Susan Sontag was a brilliant woman who told the truth as she saw it. Sontag said after the collapse of the Soviet Union that you could have obtained a better under- standing of brutal Soviet Russian repression by reading the middle-class, small-town Saturday Evening Post and Read- er’s Digest rather than The Nation. I am impressed by Son- tag’s honesty and courage. Favorable mention of Reader’s Digest on the left used to be grounds for verbal lynching and probably could have cost you your tenure at Columbia or NYU. Tuchman’s uncle was Henry Morgenthau Jr., close friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the key stooge for Harry Dexter White, Stalin’s top man in the Roosevelt adminis- tration. Morgenthau Jr. was so dense that he probably did not know White was a Soviet agent, but he was a talking head for a man lauded after his death as a hero of commu- nism by Vitalii Pavlov, White’s key contact and a retired lieutenant general of the KGB. Under White’s manipulation, Morgenthau Jr. was the first federal official to suggest Japa- nese-American relocation, described by the American Civil Liberties Union as the worst abuse of Constitutional rights since the end of slavery. White was subsequently denounced by the FBI as a Soviet agent to President Harry Truman shortly after FDR died. A statement by FBI Special Agent Ladd made it offi- cial in 1950. Pavlov confirmed it in 1996 in a memoir. The Nation still denies White’s guilt as a vile calumny against a brave little liberal. After her graduation from Radcliffe, Tuchman worked at the Institute of Pacific Relations, where her boss was Owen Lattimore. Lattimore was denounced by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others as “the man who lost China.” There is a certain arrogance in the idea that China was ever ours to lose. White recommended Lattimore to FDR as the man to send to China to advise Chiang Kai-shek in the war against Japan. Before the Anti-Comintern Pact -- later known as The Axis -- Chiang had been sustained by German military advisors who helped him fight the Chi- nese communists to a standstill. Hitler pulled them out. Before they left, the Germans told Chiang to write off North China because the food base was inadequate and the Japanese lacked the manpower to control the land. The Germans told Chiang to fight the Japanese from the south where food was ample. Lattimore then nominated General Joseph Stilwell as Chiang’s military adviser and told them to keep fighting in the north. In the interest of being objective, Lattimore and Stil- well both spoke Chinese and Stilwell -- unlike Lattimore - - was a patriotic American. In the interest of being honest, Chiang and Stilwell, separately and together, bungled the war against Japan on the Asian continent so badly that the Japanese were still winning when the bombs began to fall on Japan. Xue Yue, the one Nationalist Chinese general who was ready for a hero’s death, asked the Americans to air-drop supplies so he would have enough ammunition for a last stand in Hengyang. Nobody was interested. Stilwell pre- ferred to fight a grudge match against the Japanese who had kicked him out of Burma two years before. Stilwell, now in failing health, was effectively sacked, and was replaced by U.S. General Albert Wedermeyer. Jonathan Fenby, an English newsman who covered China and spoke Chinese, said Stilwell was a good man but not a good general. The new American general presented the Chinese Nationalists with his own plan to defend China. Madame Chiang Kai-shek looked over the Wedermeyer Plan and said, “This is just what the Germans told us to do.” Meanwhile, White cut off Chiang’s credit and ruined what was left of the Chinese economy. Once the Japanese were defeated by U.S. submarines and air raids, efforts to ward off the Chinese communists were soft-peddled. Lat- timore also recommended that the U.S. write off Korea, a country where most people were pro-American and anti-communist. He stripped post-war occupied Japan of machine tools and aluminum so that when both the Chi- nese Nationalists and the Americans requested Japanese rearmament during the Korean War, there was no indus- trial base to make rearmament possible. Then Lattimore retired to Mongolia, which may be the only country in the world where he is still commemorated. The communists got to control most of the Eurasian continent. Tuchman does not seem to have considered Lattimore’s exploits as in any way suspicious. She seems to have seen Japan’s war effort as a decision to get out of bed in the morning, without mentioning that Japan was the lead- ing anti-communist power in Asia and that Theodore Roosevelt had agreed to let the Japanese have Korea and Manchuria in return for helping Britain and America keep the Russians out of China and India. In “Stilwell and the American Experience in China,” Pulitzer Prize for 1971, the Japanese had come to China purely to rape and murder, the Chinese Nationalists were all corrupt and expendable dunces, Stilwell was the on-stage hero, and the Chinese communists were obviously the off-stage heroes, though the Chinese communists murdered far more people than Chiang and many more than Hirohito. In “The Zimmermann Telegram,” Tuchman exposed a flamboyant German-Japanese plot to take over Mexico. In “The Guns of August,” Pulitzer Prize for 1963, German atrocities in Belgium -- some of them actually happened -- are recounted, but Russian atrocities in East Prussia are treated as a good joke on the German residents. With “The Guns of August” stuck in school curricula like a lump of cholesterol in the carotid artery, students are insu- lated from revisionists like my friend Thomas Fleming. Fleming’s book, “The Illusion of Victory,” deals with the origins of the war far more objectively than Tuchman’s pre- dictable disclosure that the Germans were the bad guys and the other nations were dupes. No serious historian believes that any more. Terence Zuber, a former U.S. infantry and counter- intelligence officer, makes a strong case in “Inventing the Schlieffen Plan” for Russian military preparations as the catalytic threat for German militarism of the Kaiser’s era, and some modern Russian revisionists agree with him. Pat- rick Buchanan is obviously out of the question, even though he felt the world would have been a better place if Hitler and Stalin had slugged it out without American interven- tion. To people outside the far left, Russia was the big threat after the fall of the Kaiser. Of his former friend Kaiser Wilhelm II, Winston Churchill, who like Wilhelm was a would-be athlete par- tially crippled in one arm, said, “It was not his fault; it was his fate.” Of the world after the World War I Armistice and the Bolshevik Revolution, Churchill said, “After conquer- ing all the Huns, the tigers of the world, I will not be beaten by the baboons.” Churchill wanted the world to wake up to the threat of Bolshevism, which also helped bring Hitler to power, though you are not supposed to say that in polite company. Tuchman wanted the world to sleep on -- and after the fall of the Soviet Union to forget the roles some of her rela- tives and family friends played in the attempted betrayal of America and the free world to the Soviets. In 1985, while she was still alive, Saturday Review, not exactly a fascist tabloid, named Tuchman “One of the Most Overrated People in American Arts and Letters.” This was before Pavlov confirmed that White was a Soviet agent and probably before anybody knew that Morgenthau Jr. had instigated Japanese-American relocation. White’s back- stabbing of Chiang and Lattimore’s patent treason were widely understood from McCarthy’s time, but revisionists who dared to look behind statist propaganda were discour- aged from saying so. Tuchman was a Marxist apologist. Churchill fought Hitler and opposed Stalin. He also wrote better. Letters to the Editor Setting the record straight Dear Editor: While I appreciate the attention your newspaper has given to my $400+ water bill, you have one important fact wrong: My issue has nothing to do with an estimated water bill. My problem with the water company is that they decided at the beginning of the year to skip sending out water bills until the second quarter so they can implement a new bill- ing system. The problem I have with that practice is that they never considered what would happen if a customer had an undetected water problem (i.e. broken water pipe in crawl space) during that time -- which is exactly what happened to me. While it certainly wasn’t the water company’s fault that my water pipe broke, it was their responsibility to come up with a more consumer-sensitive transition plan on how they were going to change their billing process without leaving customers in the dark about their usage during this period. What do I think would be a fair resolution to my situa- tion? Since the water company failed to have in place any monitoring mechanism to detect irregular water patterns during this no-billing period, I think a fair compromise would be to bill me for the same amount of my water bill during this period a year earlier. I have left several messages on Mr. Schrieber’s (Ridge- wood Water Company) voice mail with this suggestion, but he still hasn’t returned my calls. As a newspaper that has always been there for the small- town homeowner, I hope you will continue to bring atten- tion to my problem. Paul Felice Midland Park