David Martin – Heresy Central

The Korean War: A History

2024-08-282024-11-10 David Martin

A review If one were to read just one book about the fierce and very destructive war that took place on the Korean peninsula 1950-1953, this rather short (268 pages counting the endnotes) 2010 effort by Bruce Cumings, the retired chairman of the department of history at the University of Chicago, would not be the one that I would recommend. To the contrary, it would be just about the last book I would recommend if the reader were to go into the subject knowing very little. What it would be especially good for, though, would be reinforcing the leftist prejudices that the typical American college student takes away from his or her experience in higher education these days, particularly if…

The Ballad of Patrick Knowlton

2024-08-202024-10-03 David Martin

Headline: Witness in [Vince] Foster death loses conspiracy appeal Washington Times, January 9, 2001, p. A7 Before he’d arrived at the end of the line A little publicity would have been fine, Shedding some light and putting some heat Upon all those justices’ honorable feet. Patrick Knowlton, The key to the Foster case. Patrick Knowlton, The man the press erased. But they wait till the court in their wisdom refuse To give him a hearing to bring us the news. It’s a story, alas, that is getting quite old; A citizen’s wronged; then he’s out in the cold, And once it’s too late, the public is told. Patrick Knowlton, The key to the Foster case. Patrick Knowlton, The man the…

Leonard Rawls, Wilber Hardee, and Hardee’s Restaurants

2024-04-182024-05-12 David Martin

Creating a Chain-Restaurant Foundation Myth Who founded the Hardee’s restaurant food chain? It should be a simple question to answer. What does Wikipedia have to say about that on its “Hardee’s” page? The first thing one might notice on the right-hand summary panel, even if he didn’t know it already, is that Hardee’s is a gigantic restaurant chain and that it was one of the earliest fast-food hamburger chains. The date of founding is given as June 23, 1960, while Ray Kroc hadn’t begun to turn McDonald’s into a nationally franchised chain until just five years before that, in 1955. As of February 2016, Wikipedia tells us, Hardee’s had 5,812 locations. In addition to the United States, it had restaurants…

Richard Petty’s Hometown and the U.S. Military

2024-04-102024-04-11 David Martin

The famous Petty stock-car-racing family is quite representative of the very American sport, generally, in that its members come from the small Piedmont North Carolina town of Randleman. From Wikipedia we learn that, as of 2020, Randleman had a population of 4,595, but as late as 1980, only 2,156 people lived there. Doubtless, this more than doubling of the population reflects the fact that it is becoming a bedroom community for the larger cities of Greensboro and High Point to its immediate north. Just over three quarters of its residents are non-Hispanic whites. Actually, although Randleman is usually listed as Richard Petty’s hometown, he and the Petty family are from the much smaller community of Level Cross, just to the…

Illegal Israel

2024-03-042024-03-04 David Martin

More Money for Israel Fuel beneath a cauldron of hate At the heart of the Middle East mess; Protecting an ethnic-supremacist state, Defending its right to oppress. With the current wanton slaughter of Palestinians in which the state of Israel is currently engaged, it’s almost enough to give outlaws a bad name. Even NBC News puts the current death toll in the war in the small area of Gaza at 30,000, and anyone can see from the nature of the destruction of housing complexes, hospitals, schools, churches, and refugee camps, that most of the victims are Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children. The fact of the matter, though, is that Israel is, indeed, an outlaw state and it has been…

Deep Roots of the Current Gaza Slaughter

2024-02-082024-02-09 David Martin

In our previous article about the napalming of refugees by the Israelis during the Six Day War, we quoted extensively from the 1971 book by the Canadian A.C. Forrest, The unHoly Land. That is also the primary source for this article. We must remember that the residents of the Gaza Strip are almost all the descendants of the people who were driven from their homes and their land in Palestine by the genocidal terror tactics of the colonizing, primarily European-origin Zionists in 1948 in the wake of the patently unfair UN partition of Palestine. We have been sold on the notion that this awarding of a majority chunk of Palestine to these Jewish refugees was a sort of payback for…

Genocidal Israelis Napalmed Civilian Refugees

2024-01-29 David Martin

We should hardly be surprised that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague has found that there is a basis to proceed in the case brought by the government of South Africa against Israel for genocide in its attack on Gaza. Israel has a very bad record in matters such as this, most notably, in its ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. Less well known is its barbaric behavior during and immediately after the Six Day War of June 1967. At least those who are familiar with the event know that the Israelis shot up lifeboats and even dropped napalm on the deck of the USS Liberty during that war. Less well known is its use of napalm…

James Forrestal, Harry Truman, and Israel

2023-12-242024-05-14 David Martin

Alison Weir, the former journalist who heads up an organization aptly named, If Americans Knew, chose an equally appropriate title for her very popular 2014 book, Against Our Better Judgment, The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel. The fact of the matter is that the better judgment of the United States was, unlike today, well represented by its foreign policy leadership in 1948 when Palestine was most inequitably divided into Jewish and Arab parts by the United Nations, and the Zionist leaders of the Jewish part announced the creation of the brand-new state of Israel. President Harry Truman made his decision endorsing the partition over the solid advice he received by the experts in his…

The Zionist Mentality and Method

2023-10-282023-10-31 David Martin

We originally posted this review of a book published in 1992 on our web site on December 20, 2010. With what appears to be a new push to expel the native Palestinians by force from Gaza, based upon a terrorist attack in Israel of questionable provenance, the book and the article have taken on a new relevance. Whatever public pronouncements they might have made on the subject, the Zionist leaders, from the beginning right up to the present day, have had the intention of supplanting the non-Jewish resident population of Palestine, to be replaced with Jewish immigrants. In deliberations among themselves there has been little dissent from this goal; the differences have arisen only in how the goal should be accomplished. …

CIA Finally Pulling the Plug on Biden

2023-09-142023-09-14 David Martin

According to Fox News’s Jesse Watters, the signal to Traitor Joe Biden could hardly have been clearer: Make no mistake: Ignatius’ column is more than a suggestion- it’s a marching order. When American intelligence wants to put out a hit, they feed it to David Ignatius and today, Ignatius pulled the pin on Joe Biden’s 2024 run. He’s turning Washington’s whispers into a rallying cry. The American intelligence community has to tie up their loose ends. Even the media is falling in line: admitting the Democratic party is a dishonest monolith. A mob that can’t function when it’s fractured. The Biden-Kamala ticket is being cancelled in its entirety and the intelligence community is making a calculation. He’s talking about Ignatius’…

Lawrence of Arabia and Yevgeny Prigrozhin

2023-09-022024-03-14 David Martin

Most people find it quite easy to believe that the airplane crash that killed Yevgeny Prigrozhin, the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, who had led a mutiny against the Russian government, was no simple accident. In fact, word has leaked from U.S. intelligence that an intentional explosion brought the airplane down and that President Vladimir Putin was behind it. The CIA would have some familiarity with such methods. The contrived “accident” is right there in their assassination manual as an expedient form of secret assassination, allowing the perpetrator to deny responsibility for something deemed not to be a murder at all and attracting little attention. An airplane crash is not on their list of contrived accidents, but it takes…

Propaganda Press

2023-08-142023-08-17 David Martin

To the tune of “Rock N Roll Train” Keyboard warriors Big time liars Selling us a fantasy Loaded up with treachery Throw it out, pitch it Believable they’re not Yes, they’re adding to our rot Shout it out, “Screw it” Strike while irons are hot We’re tired of fantasy Seeing through treachery Propaganda press (Serving us a poison brew) Propaganda press (Serving us a poison brew) Propaganda press (Serving us a poison brew) Propaganda press (Serving us a poison brew) One hard pounded drum La créme de la scum No shame in their perfidy Stooges for the Agency Shake ‘em, drop ‘em Believable they’re not We ought to make it for them hot See the light, tune ‘em out Come…

About those White House Surveillance Cameras

2023-07-182023-07-19 David Martin

We’re hearing a lot these days about all those surveillance cameras at the White House after the discovery of that small bag of cocaine and the 11-day “investigation” to determine who left it there that came up empty. Here is Miranda Devine in her skeptical July 16 article in the New York Post: Even more astonishing [than the supposed absence of fingerprints on the plastic bag] is that, in a complex bristling with security cameras, the Secret Service said no surveillance video footage exists because the baggie was located in a “blind spot.” But where, on the day of his death, July 20, 1993, were all those security cameras in the early afternoon when Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W.…

The Most Under-Reported Big News Story

2023-06-022023-06-02 David Martin

It’s definitely Tara Reade’s defection. One has to be a real news hound even to know that Joe Biden’s accuser has taken refuge in Russia. This looks like a very rational decision on Reade’s part to me. The very light reporting given to her allegations all along was a very bad sign for her, suggesting that she would never get any protection from our nation’s molders of public opinion. One could imagine reading about her unfortunate “suicide” almost any day. Had Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the “DC Madam,” demonstrated Reade’s prudence, she would, in all likelihood, be alive and well today. While on the subject of underreported defections to Russia, we should not forget about John Mark Dougan, who used to have a Wikipedia page.…

Did Thomas Merton Have a Love Child?

2023-05-032024-07-17 David Martin

The late writer and peace activist, Jim Forest, was a good friend and regular correspondent with the notable Catholic spiritual and political leader, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton, in fact, dedicated his 1968 book, Faith and Violence, to the Jesuit priest and anti-Vietnam War activist, Phil Berrigan, and to his fellow activist, Forest. Forest’s 2008 book, Living with Wisdom: A Life of Thomas Merton, is, for the most part, an excellent introduction to the life and works of Merton. It is a revised and expanded version of the book with the same title published in 1991, which was itself an expansion upon the much smaller Thomas Merton: A Pictorial Biography published in 1979. The 2008 incarnation continues to be…

Getting a Grip on Thomas Merton’s Murder

2023-02-232023-02-24 David Martin

Null Set Decent, intelligent, and a journalist, You know what’s occurred to me? In what has become of America, It’s impossible to be all three. It’s a rare thing for a book to receive a major review almost five years after its publication, but that, in effect, is what happened on the evening of Tuesday, February 14, 2023. The book in question is the one written by Hugh Turley and me entitled The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation. The book was published on March 7, 2018, which happened to be the 50thanniversary year of the mysterious death of the very influential antiwar Catholic monk in Thailand, which was virtually in the heart of the U.S. military’s Vietnam War theater…

Black Like Whom? Mystery Man, John Howard Griffin

2023-02-062024-02-12 David Martin

In our 2018 book, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, we identified John Howard Griffin as one of four key people responsible for cementing in the public mind the belief that the great Catholic monk and public intellectual, Thomas Merton, had died from accidental electrocution. The other three were Merton’s abbot at the Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey, Flavian Burns, Merton’s secretary there, Brother Patrick Hart, and Merton’s authorized biographer, Michael Mott. For the recently published Thomas Merton’s Betrayers: The Case against Abbot James Fox and Author John Howard Griffin, we have delved more deeply into Griffin’s background. The Texas-born journalist and author John Howard Griffin, is known almost exclusively for his 1961 book, Black Like Me. It is…

The Thomas Merton Autopsy that Wasn’t

2023-01-312023-02-04 David Martin

Did the prominent monk, writer, social critic, and opponent of the American role in the Vietnam War, Thomas Merton, strangely succumb to a faulty fan while attending a monastic conference in Bangkok, Thailand? That’s what Associated Press reporter, John T. Wheeler, reported with a dateline of Bangkok on the day of the death, December 10, 1968. One can read that same characterization of the event even today on the web site of Merton’s home Abbey of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky. Thailand was in the thick of the Vietnam War theater of operations at the time. Some 80% of the air attacks on North Vietnam and virtually all of those on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos originated there. America’s…

Amazon Censorship

2022-12-142024-06-05 David Martin

I posted this poem on my web site when the Internet was still in its infancy. Of Swords and Pens The pen may be stronger than the sword, But pens, like guns, can be bought. And battles of words, like battles with guns, Can be unfairly fought. Those who rule know all too well The power of the word, And so they ration carefully The ones that can be heard. In our land there’s little chance That virtue will prevail When “truth” is a consumer good And words are all for sale. That was on April 5, 1998, and the word battlefield has changed quite a bit since then. Back then, control of the airwaves, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies, and…

We Pulled the Plug on the Shah

2022-07-152022-07-15 David Martin

When I first wrote on this subject seven years ago, the title was in the form of a question, “Did We Pull the Plug on the Shah?” With the help of a fairly recent but very obscure book by the American expatriate living in England, Arlene Lois Johnson, The Shah of Iran: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi: Victim of His Times I have accumulated enough additional information to write the title of this brief essay as a declarative statement. The book was published in the United Kingdom by News Source, Incorporated. No date is provided, but Johnson tells me that it came out in 2018. The book is apparently not available on Amazon, and I couldn’t get it to come up with…