In-Depth Articles – 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…

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…

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…

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’…

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…

American Press Beating Familiar War Drums

2022-03-232022-03-26 David Martin

We didn’t have to look far to find the opening quote for this article. It was right there on my AOL News. Check it out: They are a distinct minority in their own party and, for that matter, their country: Republican holdouts amid an ever-widening consensus that Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine poses a mortal threat to American interests. A far right wing of the Republican Party tightly bound to former President Donald Trump is fighting to push the GOP toward the “America First” isolationism that underpinned his 2016 presidential bid. For the first time since Trump’s rise, his party is pushing back. These are the first three paragraphs for a pro-war-participation propaganda piece that AOL has picked up from…

“John Lennon’s” Greatest Hit

2022-01-282022-01-28 David Martin

There was some excitement in my friend’s voice. He had just stumbled upon what he described as a really extraordinary piece of rock music. Even more interesting, it had been up on YouTube since November of 2019 and it had had only a little more than 1,400 views, which probably means that fewer than 1,000 people had listened to it, because many of those views had to be by people coming back for more. The song is called “Don’t Believe,” and it’s rather deeply buried away as the tenth of eleven songs on an album called “Listen to the Picture” produced in 2010 by a band called Abracadabra.[1] The songs are ostensibly taken from the soundtrack of an obscure little…

Deranged Court Historian, Douglas Brinkley, on Jan. 6

2022-01-072024-01-19 David Martin

One might think that the remarks of the well-known historian, Counsel on Foreign Relations member, Douglas Brinkley, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the breach of the Capitol Building, ostensibly mainly by people protesting what they perceived to be the theft of the 2020 Presidential election, would be embarrassing to the other members of his profession. To compare that relatively mild dust-up to Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and even the Holocaust has to strike any sensible person as complete lunacy. We have noticed, though, that those who practice his trade in the United States, at least in our lifetime, are really not very much interested in anything so bothersome to them as the truth. Apparently, it has been the…

The Early Thai Reports, the Press, and the Abbey on Thomas Merton’s Death

2021-12-152021-12-15 David Martin

by David Martin and Hugh Turley The Trappist monk Thomas Merton might well have been the most significant Roman Catholic thinker and writer of the 20th century. His 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, sold over 600,000 copies in its original hardcover edition and, in one version or another, has remained continuously in print. Its Kindle edition as of this writing has 803 customer reviews, with an average rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars. Merton was a prolific writer. The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, lists 106 books that he authored, 42 of which were published before his mysterious violent death on December 10, 1968, while he was attending a monastic conference near Bangkok, Thailand.…

“Dean of Cold War Historians” on James Forrestal

2021-10-252024-05-18 David Martin

His name is a simple one, but it is not a common one, and it’s not often in the news, so that makes it rather easy to forget. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to call it up. All you have to do it to turn to the “senior citizen’s memory,” the Internet, and search “dean of Cold War historians.” It doesn’t matter whether you use Google, Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo. They all agree that the native Texan, Yale University history professor, longtime George W. Bush friend and admirer and CFR member, John Lewis Gaddis is the man. When it comes to what Gaddis has had to say about a vitally important American leader in the early years of the Cold…

Vince Foster’s College Goes Full Woke

2020-10-152022-05-14 David Martin

I graduated from Davidson College in 1965. President Bill Clinton’s deputy White House counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr., who died violently and mysteriously in 1993, graduated in 1967. My senior year there I was the secretary of the Young Democrats Club and Vince was a member. At about the same height, we also matched up against one another in intramural basketball. I had known that the college had changed quite a bit since our graduation, but developments in the past two years have come down on me like a ton of bricks. Had Vince lived, I don’t think he would recognize his old college. Unfortunately, from all I have seen lately, Davidson is not all that atypical of colleges and universities…

Life in the Confederate Army

2020-03-202022-12-24 David Martin

Not Fighting for Slavery There is no chain so heavy or yoke so oppressive as that which men will unwittingly place upon their own necks, or bend their necks to receive, while being beguiled and led along by liberty shriekers under their pretended banner of freedom. – William Watson On February 16, I sent the following email to the 14 members of the history faculty at my alma mater, Davidson College, as well as to one emeritus history faculty member. They were all open copied. At the same time, I blind copied 148 members of my class. At the closing of the email, I identified myself as a member of the graduating class of 1965: My freshman English professor…

Pearl Harbor vs. 9/11

2019-12-082019-12-08 David Martin

(Piece originally written by Dave Martin in 2014) When asked the question, “What impresses you more about George W. Bush and Barack Obama, their absence of intelligence or their absence of integrity,” a ready answer comes to mind, and it is clearly not the same for each. But in the case of Bush’s first Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, I think you will have to agree that it’s a tough call. That was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw in the pages of The New York Times that Rumsfeld had essayed a comparison between the momentous events in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and in New York City, Arlington, VA, and Shanksville, PA, on September…

JFK, Mass Media, and the Origins of ‘Conspiracy Theory’

2019-10-102019-12-08 James Tracy

By James F. Tracy (Originally posted at MemoryHoleBlog on November 22, 2018) Prefatory Note on Censorship in Academe This study was written in 2013-14 as part of my academic research as Associate Professor of Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University. I have had numerous papers addressing news coverage of historical events published in academic journals over the past two decades. However, this was the first attempt to offer a scholarly treatment of a research object related to a conspiracy–how the news media “framed” New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s JFK assassination inquiry. When I presented the paper at the Association For Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Montreal Conference in 2014 the panel respondent congratulated me on what he deemed…

NPRavda Features Double Agent Ruddy

2019-10-042023-02-20 David Martin

The late Wesley Pruden, when editor of the conservative Washington Times, once observed that, “At NPR all the guys sound like girls and all the girls sound like guys.” He was right on the money, I thought, but, curiously, that’s about the harshest thing I think I’ve ever heard said about National Public Radio from a right-wing commentator, or by any commentator, for that matter. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and the rest of them regularly rip into CNN, MSNBC, the three major TV networks, and The Washington Post and The New York Times, but I don’t recall ever hearing any of them say anything at all about this very influential organization that is partially funded by taxpayer dollars. You have to wonder…

The Carolinas, Jews, and China

2019-09-202023-07-15 David Martin

Sidney Rittenberg died on August 24 of this year, ten days after his 98th birthday. He was probably the most famous American collaborator with the Chinese Communist regime of Mao Zedong (We are not counting Chinese government official, Israel Epstein, as American, although he had his book, The Unfinished Revolution in China, published during the crucial five years in which he lived in the United States). Like Epstein, Rittenberg got long obituaries in The New York Times and The Washington Post. They might not have been as glowing as Epstein’s, but they were far from being as negative as they might have been for this long-term leading turncoat and propagandist for the murderous Mao regime. Although the Times seemed to treat him with some approval by headlining…

James Forrestal’s “Anti-Semitism”

2019-07-192023-12-18 David Martin

(This article is adapted from Chapter 2 of my new book, The Assassination of James Forrestal. Terms of Opprobrium “Anti-Semitic”, “conspiracy theorist” Throw in “isolationist,” too. We don’t need laws to limit out thoughts When labeling language will do. The year was around 2004, as I recall, and I was attending an in-house lunchtime lecture by a professor from Georgetown University at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington on the subject of President Harry Truman’s racial integration of the United States military. I beg the indulgence of the readers, but I have completely forgotten the professor’s name. I do recall, though, that he was quite obviously Jewish. During the question and answer period after his lecture I suggested that…

James Forrestal’s “Breakdown”

2019-07-052019-07-29 David Martin

Chapter 32 of Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley’s widely acclaimed 1992 biography of America’s first Secretary of Defense, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal, is entitled “Breakdown.” It begins like this: Forrestal was present at Louis Johnson’s swearing-in ceremony at the Pentagon on the morning of March 28 [1949]. Shortly thereafter, in accordance with custom, he drove to the White House for a final good-bye to the President. To his surprise, Truman had assembled the entire Cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other government dignitaries, and there followed a second ceremony, this one honoring the retiring Secretary of Defense for “meritorious and distinguished service.” The President, beaming and ebullient, added his personal congratulations in effusive terms, and the audience warmly applauded the…

James Forrestal, the Great Patriot

2019-05-302020-01-10 David Martin

(Note to readers: The following article is the introduction to my new book, The Assassination of James Forrestal, with hyperlinks added.) Fear Factor The truth may be there to see. But it won’t, like magic, appear. You must seek it diligently, And not be restrained by fear. James Vincent Forrestal was born on February 15, 1892, in the town of Matteawan, New York, on the Hudson River in Dutchess County between West Point and Poughkeepsie. In 1913, the town merged with adjacent Fishkill Landing and adopted the name, “Beacon,” after Beacon Mountain, the most notable landmark in the small urban area. His father, also named James, had emigrated from County Cork in Ireland to the town in 1857 at the age of…