U.S. history – Heresy Central

Oliver Stone on the Japanese Surrender

2026-07-182026-07-18 David Martin

Not in this writer’s lifetime has a book challenging the central accepted tenets of U.S. history received so much publicity as Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States, which was serialized in reduced form in ten weekly parts on the CBS cable subsidiary Showtime. Search the authors’ names and book title with Google and on YouTube and you will find that almost everyone on the left has either given them a good review, a softball interview, or both. In the uncritical interview category, they have enjoyed the attention of Democracy Now, RT, C-Span, PBS, and one that goes beyond favorable to fawning on The Young Turks. You can doubtless find more. This positive attention is…

Martial Machismo: At What Cost

2026-07-142026-07-14 David Martin

A good work of art, though it may be the product of one person’s experience, is timeless and universal. By that standard, the song “At What a Cost”* by Mark Lentz is, to my mind, a great work of art. In war, there are always the grand planners at the top, but the actual dirty business has to be carried out by other human beings at the bottom. The price paid by those at the bottom seldom weighs very much in the calculations of the grand planners at the top, and if there is folly in the plans, no one sees it better than those at the bottom. Listening to “At What a Cost” the first lines that come to…

Pollyanna on Vince Foster and our Presidents

2026-07-122026-07-12 David Martin

Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think. Look into the pewter pot To see the world as the world’s not. – A. E. Housman For the same effect, on the other hand, you could read The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton by noted American historian, William E. Leuchtenburg. Leuchtenburg, as amply demonstrated by his latest book, is the very personification of what is wrong with the American history profession. Here is how his publisher, Oxford University Press, describes him: “The author is a renowned historian who, among other achievements, was elected president of all three major national historical associations and has served as a presidential election night analyst for NBC.” …

Letter to a Historian over Foster and the Clintons

2026-07-112026-07-12 David Martin

In my most recent article I take America’s professional historians to task one more time for the mainly propagandistic role they seem to be playing in interpreting what has gone on in the country. In that small verbal match I believe I supported my charge of intellectual laziness quite thoroughly against one very minor member of the profession. Noticing how he shrank away from the major issues that provide the underpinning for the case for skepticism about the current campaign against the Confederate battle flag, a stronger charge of intellectual cowardice might well be in order. And in that quality, I fear that he is representative of his entire profession. William Leuchtenburg, with more than a dozen books to his…

Key False Document in the Thomas Merton Death Case

2026-06-292026-06-29 David Martin

In the paper that we presented to the Thomas Merton Symposium in Rome, “What We Know about Thomas Merton’s Death,” we noted that on the subject of Merton’s death, Michael Mott’s authorized biography, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton has been treated as the ultimate authority, that is, up until we published The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation in March of 2018. Unfortunately, the International Thomas Merton Society (ITMS), which has 45 U.S. chapters, conducts four-day conferences biennially, and publishes the quarterly Merton Seasonal and the Merton Annual jointly with the Thomas Merton Center of Bellarmine University, in a most benighted fashion, still seems to be treating Mott’s flawed and dishonest work as definitive. In one vital part of…

American Betrayal

2026-06-232026-06-24 David Martin

A Review “How cynical!” was my thought when I saw that Diana West, on the page preceding the introduction of her second book, had quoted the words of Jesus Christ. It’s from the third chapter of the Gospel of John, verses 20 and 21 on the Godliness of openness and truth as opposed to the darkness and deception necessary for evil to thrive. West is Yale educated, grew up in Hollywood, and is a major promoter of the interests of Israel. With American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character I was expecting a replay of her very shallow, propagandistic The Death of the Grown-Up. My opinion began to change quite rapidly when, in her introduction, I heard for…

Lying about Bombing

2026-06-15 David Martin

On Monday, February 14, a very powerful bomb in Beirut killed former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri and 13 other people. No evidence has been produced as to who might have placed the bomb. That did not stop the major American news media from pointing the finger of suspicion at the government of Bashar Assad of Syria, even as they were reporting the news of the tragedy, and the United States government has withdrawn its ambassador from Syria in “retaliation,” as if Bush and company were certain that Syria was to blame. On Wednesday, February 16, 2005, the “liberal opposition” newspaper, The Washington Post, surged to the front of the pack of hounds baying for strong measures against Syria with…

Remember the Liberty!

2026-06-082026-06-08 David Martin

Most Americans have never heard of the Israeli, Ephraim “Eppie” Evron. A half century ago, in May of 1967, he was deputy chief of mission in the Israeli embassy in Washington and in that ostensible capacity had a meeting with President Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office on May 26. From all indications, as we learn from Phillip Nelson in Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas, Evron was likely the real power in the embassy as the top Mossad official there. An even more interesting thing about Evron was that he was “one of the main conspirators” in the infamous Lavon Affair, a failed plot in 1954 by Israel to bomb U.S. and British facilities…

The Forrestal Murder and the News Media

2026-06-032026-06-03 David Martin

Fool’s Paradise Welcome to the American aquarium Where life can be lived without care. If you swim only where you’re supposed to, You won’t even know that you’re there. But thanks to my curiosity An upsetting thing came to pass: I followed the trail of a mystery And I discovered the glass. I wrote those lines in 1998. At that point I knew virtually nothing about James V. Forrestal, whom President Harry Truman had appointed as America’s first Secretary of Defense in 1947 after the creation of the Department of Defense by the National Security Act of the same year. I had recently read David McCullough’s biography entitled simply Truman, which has a short section on Forrestal’s decline and “suicide,”…

Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Epstein, and 9/11

2026-01-262026-01-26 David Martin

JAN 26, 2026 Somehow I missed the news when it came out last November: Emails show convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had a tight friendship with MIT professor Noam Chomsky that spanned discussions about vacation, politics and included an apparent letter of support from Chomsky…. A WBUR review of the emails shows despite Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute, Chomsky stayed in close contact with Epstein into at least 2017. Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noted activist and philosopher. The apparently close social relationship between the two men, 25 years apart in age, one from the academic, the other from the financial world, only came…

Arguably the Most Important Historical Book of the Century

2025-09-192025-09-19 David Martin

Amazon customer review of The Assassination of James Forrestal on September 8, 2025 This book is the seminal work on James Forrestal’s death, and in many ways his life and plans after his government service. Martin obtained the crucial “Willcutts Report” from the Navy, which confirmed long-hidden facts about Forrestal’s death, most importantly that the verdict of suicide was never actually medically or legally established, that there was broken glass in Forrestal’s room suggesting a physical struggle, and that the Greek prose transcription supposedly triggering Forrestal’s suicide was not written in his own handwriting. Martin also presents the remarkable finding that Forrestal’s driver and Bethesda hospital employees were forced to transfer out of Washington by the Navy immediately following Forrestal’s death,…

What Thomas Merton’s Authorized Biographer Revealed and What He Concealed

2025-09-042026-02-03 David Martin

Catholic Monk Thomas Merton, famous mainly for his unexpectedly wildly popular 1948 memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain, and in trouble with the U.S. government because of his anti-Vietnam War writings, died suddenly in Thailand in 1968. His biography, authorized by, and with the cooperation of, Merton’s home abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, was published in 1984. At that point, essentially all that the public knew—or thought they knew—about Merton’s death was what John Wheeler, the Associated Press reporter based in Bangkok, had written in his wire service report the day after the death, and what Brother Patrick Hart of the Gethsemani Abbey had written in 1973 in the postscript to The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. Wheeler, citing anonymous “Catholic sources”…

The Korean War: A History

2024-08-282025-09-20 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Mark Middleton, Meet Daniel Best

2022-06-252024-06-02 David Martin

I posted the first version of what would expand into the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression on March 7, 1998. There were 13 originally, expanding in stages to 17 by the end of 1999, where it has stayed. No changes were made in the original entries. The choice of “Dummy up” for the first technique is looking better with every year that passes, despite what would appear to be much greater difficulty than before in keeping a lid on important information, what with the numerous ways that one can be informed these days. It’s beginning to look as though, similar to George Orwell’s 1984, what I wrote as a description is being taken more and more as a prescription. Take…

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…