Saturday, June 04, 2005

A LEFTIST CLAIM THAT CONSERVATIVES DISTORT HISTORY!

(I have lifted this post from an article by Lester Dent)

Mr. Pinkerton showcases the views of historian Dr. Michael Vlahos of Johns Hopkins University, who previously demonstrated his moral equivalence approach to history by claiming Jean Calvin was the historical equivalent of Islamist mullahs today. Here, he puts forth the thesis that President Bush and his administration have “launched a radical campaign of reshaping American historical thinking.” The examples he cites are:

* Bush speaking about the American Revolution being followed by years of chaos

* Bush saying that the Articles of Confederation failed miserably

* Rumsfeld saying “Freedom’s untidy”

* Laura Bush saying the struggle in the Middle East is akin to the decades leading to the American Civil War

According to Dr. Vlahos, the Bush doctrine aims to change the world, but the first step is that America must be diverted from its “tradition of governmental prudence and realism in the setting of objectives, at home and abroad.” Bush and his “neo-conservative advisors” (Liberal code alert: Read “Jews”) are “seeking to deconstruct U.S. history, making way for constructing a newly fashioned vision of America’s future.”

When I read this thesis, I actually burst out laughing. Is Dr. Vlahos denying the first two statements about history? Was there chaos after the Revolutionary War? Does the fact that the young nation disenfranchised 3 states in the initial presidential election say anything about this? Do the long and contentious debates leading to the Constitution say anything to this? What about the fact that there was no uniform currency for years (with each state minting their own), and that states were blockading other states commerce on waterways as well as negotiating treaties separately with foreign governments? Is Dr. Vlahos familiar with the Shays Rebellion in Massachusetts, where mobs of farmers rose up and were repulsed by armed militia (part of farmer rebellions from New Hampshire to South Carolina)?

Is he prepared to defend the Articles of Confederation as a success, when they clearly were a failure (leading Alexander Hamilton, among others, to call for their redrafting or replacement and the genesis of the Constitution)? Read any history of the U.S. Constitution and you will understand this. This is (or should be) high school stuff, Doc.

Is freedom tidy, say, compared to totalitarian states where speech is controlled and dissenters are jailed or executed? Where Dr. Vlahos would “disappear” for writing against the sitting government, but the trains run on time? Can this historian look at the 2000 election debacle and the conspiracy theories that still swirl in the minds of the uninformed, not to mention the hysterical drama that passes for Senate debate today, and say freedom does not lead to a certain amount of “untidiness”?

Context, Dr. Vlahos, is generally important. Your attack on Laura Bush “rewriting history,” blatantly ignores that she was speaking not just about the Civil War, but about human rights – in particular, women’s rights and the rights of minorities. She noted that at times in American history people campaigned and fought for those rights that are only now emerging against serious opposition of a class which profits from the inequality in the Middle East. Can this noted historian not see some parallels between the Kurds and Shia under Saddam – repressed, murdered, enslaved and relegated at best to second-class citizenship – with the plight of African slaves in the U.S., each fighting toward equality after armed conflict toppled the power structure that repressed them?

To read this piece, you would think that President Bush and company are ordering history books to be re-written. I wonder where Dr. Vlahos’ outrage was when the New Jersey Department of Education re-wrote their history standards in 2002 to omit references to George Washington, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. How many interviews did he give denouncing the California Federation of Teachers in 2002 when a representative spoke before the State Assembly against a bill which would have required study of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence because, "We don’t feel that it is essential for students to know these documents.”

Where was the opinion piece by Mr. Pinkerton decrying the rewriting of history when Kenneth C. Davis in 1990’s Don't Know Much About History elided "Forbid it, Almighty God” from the middle of the famous Patrick Henry quote that ends, “but as for me, give me liberty or give me death" (along with other religious statements from within famous quotes)?

Where were these two protectors of the sacred history of the United States when the National Center for History in the Schools, based at the University of California at Los Angeles, published an official-sounding National Standards for United States History in 1994? Lynn Cheney noted, as the former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities that had initiated the project, that while the “standards” failed to mention that Washington was our first president, and Madison was the father of the Constitution, they managed many references to the Ku Klux Klan and Joe McCarthy. Missing also were Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, and Neil Armstrong (although George Washington Carver was noted).

You won’t find mention of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, or J.E.B. Stuart, but you will find the Civil War giants Belle Boyd, Rose Greenhow, Charlotte Forten, Robert Elliott, Hiram Revels, Blanche Bruce and B.S. Pinchback.

History is being re-written by liberals every day, turning the Pilgrims from people fleeing religious persecution into “people who take long trips.” It is historical revisionism when Columbus Day is turned into “Indigenous People’s Day” (my response to that is – who had a greater impact on our lives today – Columbus or the Indians?). I remember my son’s middle school history book had two pages on Sacagawea, with a flattering illustration, and two paragraphs, without a picture, on George Washington.

Dr. Vlahos worries about political speech used as analogy? When the very textbooks are being re-written to eliminate “Eurocentrism” and provide a balance of politically correct “historical figures” regardless of their actual contributions to history. Where, pray tell, was Dr. Vlahos’ condemnation of the New York Times headline, “A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam” October 31, 2001? You know, 36 days before the Taliban were vanquished. Is comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam a proper analogy, Dr. Vlahos, or is it re-writing history?

What about Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam"? Maybe in Dr. Vlahos’ world, faulty historical analogies are acceptable if your name is Senator Edward Kennedy?



THE POLITICALLY CORRECT AIDS STORY IS A LIE

Even the article below fails to note that anal intercourse is the preferred method of contraception in Africa so no wonder so many women get AIDS there

"Ninety-nine percent of AIDS and HIV cases in Africa come from sexual transmission, virtually all heterosexual. So says the World Health Organization, with other agencies toeing the line. Massive condom airdrops accompanied by a persuasive propaganda campaign would practically make the epidemic vanish overnight. Or would it?

A determined renegade group of three scientists has fought for years – with little success – to get out the message that no more than a third of HIV transmission in Africa is from sexual intercourse and most of that is anal. By ignoring the real vectors, they say, we’re sacrificing literally millions of people. These men are no crackpots. John Potterat is author of 140 scholarly publications. He began working for the El Paso County, Colorado health department in 1972 and initiated the first U.S. partner-tracing program for AIDS/HIV.

Stuart Brody, soon to become a full professor in Psychology at University of Paisley in Scotland, has published over 100 scholarly publications, including a book called “Sex at Risk.” Economist and anthropologist David Gisselquist has almost 60 scholarly publications and is currently advising the government of India on staunching its potentially explosive AIDS epidemic.

These renegades note that one indicator the role of vaginal transmission is overplayed in Africa is that it hasn’t played much of one in the U.S. Here 12 percent of AIDS cases are “attributed to” heterosexual transmission, meaning victims claimed to have gotten it that way. Of these, over a third are males. Yet San Francisco epidemiologist Nancy Padian evaluated 72 male partners of HIV-infected women over several years, during which time only one man became infected. Even in that case, there were “several instances of vaginal and penile bleeding during intercourse.” So even the small U.S. heterosexual figure appears grossly exaggerated.

The chief reason it’s so hard to spread HIV vaginally is that, as biopsies of vaginal and cervical tissue show, the virus is unable to penetrate or infect healthy vaginal or cervical tissue. Various sexually transmitted diseases facilitate vaginal HIV infection, but even those appear to increase the risk only slightly. So if vaginal intercourse can’t explain the awful African epidemic, what can? Surely it’s not homosexuality, since we’ve been told there is none in Africa. In fact, the practice has long been widespread. For example, German anthropologist Kurt Falk reported in the 1920s that bisexuality was almost universal among the male populations of African tribes he studied. Medical records also show that African men who insist they’re straighter than the proverbial arrow often suffer transmissible anorectal diseases.

Yet almost certainly greater – and more controllable – contributors to the African epidemic are “contaminated punctures from such sources as medical injections, dental injections, surgical procedures, drawing as well as injecting blood, and rehydration through IV tubes,” says Brody. There are many indicators that punctures play a huge role in the spread of African HIV/AIDS. For example, during the 1990s HIV increased dramatically in Zimbabwe, even as condom use increased and sexually transmitted infections rapidly fell. Or consider that in a review of nine African studies, HIV prevalence in inpatient children ranged from 8.2% to 63% – as many as three times the prevalence in women who’d given birth. If the kids didn’t get the virus from their mothers, whence its origin?

Good people differ on exactly how much of the HIV in Africa is spread vaginally – including our three renegades themselves. Nevertheless, their findings readily belie the official figures. AIDS studies in Africa, Potterat says, are “First World researchers doing second rate science in Third World countries.” There’s no one reason for the mass deception. In part, once a paradigm has been established it becomes much easier to justify than challenge. “Only a handful [of researchers] are even looking at routes other than sex,” notes Potterat. He also observes that grant donors seem only interested in the sex angle. “Sex is sexy,” he says.

Brody also points out that for scientists to concede they were wrong would be “to admit they’re complicit in mass death. That’s hard to admit that to yourself, much less to other people.” True enough. But for the sake of millions in Africa and other underdeveloped areas threatened by massive new infections, we’d better admit it now."

Source.



There is a follow-up to the above article on Front Page. Some excerpts:

Back in the early 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic was just starting to break out in the three gay communities (San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York), David Horowitz was one of the few individuals who stood up and publicly opposed gay leaders' efforts to subvert the public health system and conceal the nature of the epidemic. Specifically, in the name of "gay liberation," gay leaders denied that sexually transmitted AIDS was almost exclusively caused by promiscuous anal sex, refused to close sexual "bathhouses" which were the breeding grounds of AIDS, opposed testing and contact tracing which were the traditional and proven public health methods for containing epidemics, and promoted the false idea that AIDS was an "equal opportunity virus" when in fact it was a virus threatening very specific communities -- gays and intravenous drug users. For speaking truth to gay power, he was widely condemned by radical activists who demonized him and caricatured his warnings as, among other things, homophobic prejudice. As Horowitz has written in these pages, the success of the gay radicals resulted in a ballooning epidemic that has killed some 300,000 Americans, the majority of them young gay men. The AIDS catastrophe, as he wrote in “A Radical Holocaust,” a chapter in The Politics of Bad Faith, is “a metaphor for all the catastrophes that utopians have created.”

It is interesting that the most basic facts that Horowitz articulated at that tragic time, and for which he was so viciously demonized by radicals, are today considered to be just standard truths about HIV and AIDS. And yet, there has not been one mea culpa targeted in his direction by those who pointed accusatory fingers at him, but who sacrificed countless lives for the idea. Nor have the traditional public health methods that would have contained the epidemic – testing, contact tracing etc. – been restored. Instead, drugs have been substituted for behavioral changes.

One of the reasons that there is no apology or admission of guilt by the radicals is because they continue to dominate the media culture, which is why the lies continue, along with the needless deaths. As Fumento points out in his article, The African Heterosexual AIDS Myth, the official line that AIDS in Africa is being spread heterosexually can simply not be questioned, even though the empirical evidence suggests that it is simply false. Yet because the truth cannot be spoken on this issue, since it poses such a direct threat to the radical agenda, real preventive measures are not pursued and millions of lives are put at stake......

In the early 1980s, in my hometown of New York, it was apparent that AIDS deaths were occurring in transfusees, injecting drug users, and male homosexuals. It was also apparent to the homosexual community that given that affected population, generous federal funding would not be forthcoming. People skilled at public relations developed the "Big Lie": that HIV was a major risk to all, and was readily spread via penile-vaginal intercourse (rather than only by injection or anal intercourse) to otherwise reasonably healthy adults. This lie was understandable given the circumstances at that time. With time, generous funding became available, and the lie was no longer needed for the original purpose.

However, by that time, several political interests became very invested in the Big Lie. Those interests included those who sought to confuse political equality of homosexuals with egalitarian disease susceptibility (I suspect that only a small minority of those promoting that agenda were themselves nominally homosexual). So-called "gender feminists", inspired by the late Andrea Dworkin and her ilk, were keen to vilify intercourse, and hoped to reduce intercourse frequency (in favor of sexual behaviors that were less exclusively heterosexual), as well as to dampen its quality and intimacy (via condom promotion).

In addition to the major role played by the political left, segments of the political right might have been pleased to see a means of enforcing relative sexual continence. People of any political persuasion who, for their own psychological reasons, feared intercourse, also joined the chorus. At this point, there was also a growing AIDS industry of "experts" and "educators" who had a sizable investment (in pride, as well as money) in the Big Lie.

However, it still remained clear to many people that AIDS had not spread into the general US and European population (despite the misleading and inflated "heterosexual" numbers reported by the CDC). At this point, the AIDS situation in Africa became the new device to make people fear HIV/AIDS spread by penile-vaginal intercourse. It was claimed that 90-95% of African AIDS was due to "heterosexual transmission",

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