To the Editor:
Mel Olson recently declared that I was perpetrating a hoax. I suggest he makes that charge on a flimsy foundation.
Serious historical writing must pass muster through the American Historical Guild in order to be successful. The Guild, generally compliant with liberal establishment policies, is unmerciful in critiquing differing opinion. This has been particularly true when a daring writer meddles with the memory of President Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor.
History students planning to not only research but to write and publish do well to understand that to deviate from the establishment line is to commit academic suicide. The official Guild position is that America and its president were totally unaware of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.
In large part because of the Internet, there is now voluminous documentation from American, British and Dutch sources that the president was goading the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor -- but intentionally did nothing to warn the island commanders.
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The Historical Guild in its liberal stance can logically be assumed to be Democratic in political persuasion. When Mr. Olson writes that eight investigations provided no public evidence that FDR was complicit in the Japanese attack, he is factually accurate. However, both houses of Congress which investigated were controlled by Democrats. Political reality deemed it beyond imaging that a Democratic investigation would indict a popular Democratic president. They didn't.
Supposedly because of national security reasons, the actual investigated artifacts were sequestered for decades in hidden vaults. Robert Stinnett, after 17 years of research for his blockbuster book "Day of Deceit," wrote "Though the Freedom of Information Act freed the foreknowledge (of the attack) documents from the secretive vaults to the sunlight of the National Archives in 1995, a cottage industry continues to cover up America's foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor."
The Guild's modus operandi is ruthless for noncompliant writers. Such was the fate of George Morgenstern's "Pearl Harbor: The Story of a Secret War." The 1947 book ran the calculated gauntlet of ridicule by Guild historians. The book was said to be "a pack of unsubstantiated opinions by a mere journalist." In 1948 even premier liberal historian Charles A. Beard, when he also implicated FDR in "President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War," was dismissed by his colleagues as senile.
If a history teacher, being a Democrat and a liberal, teaches U.S. history and uses Guild-approved textbooks, it is quite apparent why he would protect the memory of his fellow Democrat, no matter where the truth lay.
Warren Thomas, Forestburg
