At Last – Real History Is Being Revealed

By James Donahue

The advent of the Internet and the concept of video documentaries has opened the door for researchers and photo journalists to reveal information long held back by the corporate controlled media. The information that is now pouring out is radically changing the way America and the world is looking at the history of everything . . . from the wars right down to religious dogma.

A story by Valerie Tarico for Alternet strongly suggests that the Internet is playing a major role in causing a loss of religious followers. She notes that an October 2012 report by the Pew Research Center found that for the first time in history less than 50 percent of Americans identified themselves as Protestant Christians. The same kind of decline is occurring in Catholicism and other world religions.

"Religions have spent eons honing defenses that keep outside information away from insiders," Tarico wrote. "The outer wall is a set of behaviors aimed at insulating believers from contradictory evidence and from heretics who are potential transmitters of dangerous ideas. Such defenses worked beautifully during humanity’s infancy. But they weren’t really designed for the current information age."

Even more compelling have been new and shocking revelations concerning the United States leadership contained in a book, America’s Stolen Narrative by Robert Parry, offered through the Truthout website, and a ten-part video documentary prepared by Oliver Stone, based on the work of historian Howard Zinn: The Untold History of the United States.

The Stone series can be found by cable television viewers on the Showtime movie channel. It also may be offered for sale soon in video packs.

The Stone documentary series starts with World War II and its aftermath, but examines the political trickery that occurred during the 1944 Democratic National Convention that removed President Roosevelt's Vice Presidential partner Henry A. Wallace and replace him with Harry Truman. That shift, the documentary suggests, may have changed the course of American history since Wallace was less likely to have made the decisions Truman did at the end of the war. It was no secret among those close to the president that Roosevelt was extremely ill and they correctly guessed that he would not live out his final term.

Truman ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in August, 1945, even though he probably knew that Japan was attempting to surrender before the bombings. He also sent American forces into Korea for the "police action" that turned into the first conflict designed (we were told) to stop the spread of the world threat of Communism.

Stone then follows the nation's actions after Korea that brought us into Vietnam and constant warfare thereafter. The documentary offers a revealing look at the forces that brought about the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, the erection of the Berlin Wall and then the collapse of Soviet Socialist Republic. It notes that President Ronald Reagan rejected an offer by Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev to halt the arms race and dismantle all existing nuclear weapons.

The films examine the many complicated facits of American history right up through the Kennedy assassination, the Bush years in office and concludes with President Barack Obama, failing to cast a positive light on any of the elected presidents or their cabinets. Stone concludes that America has been constantly building the industrial military complex warned about by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and moving toward world dominance. Ironically it was Eisenhower who began the post-war military arms build-up under the belief that a powerful military would keep the nation safe.

Concerning Parry's book, reviewer Mark Karlin called it "a thoroughly researched account of how the Republican Party and neocons have conspired to create a false narrative about America's political and constitutional history."

The book documents how the Nixon campaign, to win the presidency, undermined peace talks that might have brought the Vietnam War to an earlier and better conclusion in 1968. The book also suggests that the Reagan campaign conspired with the revolutionary Iranian government to hold the US embassy hostages captive to help him defeat incumbent President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.

Parry, much like the Stone documentary, ties together the many disasterous U.S. foreign policy decisions that helped the neocons and right wing Republicans rise to power. Karlin writes that "Parry connects the dots from the sabotaged Lyndon Johnson Vietnam peace talks to the deceptions that led to the Iraq War and beyond.

Parry writes in Chapter Eight: "But the end result of the failed investigations into the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush meant something else for the American people. They were left wandering in a wilderness of false narratives, trying to chart their future on a map drawn by liars."