Revisionist History

I was back home in Seattle from Japan a number of years ago and my dad brought out the packages from Amazon that I’d ordered (they were books that would have been too expensive to ship to Japan). He raised his eyebrows on one book* with a conspiratorial-sounding title that had to do with the CIA and its dark history.

“Whattya wanna read that kind of stuff for?” said Dad, shaking his head. I can’t remember my answer. My answer now is,

• because approved history books and school texts are written by the victors, to support the status quo, and are full of lies.

• because no matter how slick the latest Ken Burns documentary is, I know it’s full of propaganda.

• because our entertainment media romanticizes and glorifies agencies like the FBI and CIA, to the point that I’m often rooting for the “bad” guys.

There’s another big reason we need revisionist history: Repentance!

I asked Pastor John this question: If a man, in order to be forgiven, must repent of his evil ways, can the same be said for a nation?

PJ- Absolutely.

Dan-Are you familiar with Isaiah 13:11 and Romans 1:18?

PJ- Yes.

Dan- Can you tell me what they have in common with each other? (I was sort of putting Pastor John to the test.)

PJ- They both deal with going astray. Ignoring the law and living sinfully.

Dan- Bingo! I was testing you! Are you as good at reciting scripture when given chapter and verse as you are at the reverse?

PJ- I’m pretty good at both.

Here are those passages:

Isaiah 13:11 - I will punish the world for its evil and the wicked for their iniquity. I will end the haughtiness of the arrogant and lay low the pride of the ruthless.

Has our nation not engaged in iniquity? Have we not been haughty and arrogant and ruthless?

Romans 1:18 - For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness,

Have we not been unrighteous? Have our nation’s ‘authorized’ sources not suppressed the truth?

And since repentance only comes when we have knowledge of our sins, so a nation must acknowledge its sins before it can repent. And if official/authorized history is written to protect the status quo of the victors, and not to reveal the truth, then the truth needs to come out via revisionist history.

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* I can’t remember the title of the CIA book, but thought it might be Dark Secrets so I typed in “dark secrets the cia” in the Brave search engine. It didn’t show any such book among the early results, but the AI answer generator was quick to point out,

Based on the provided search results, here are some dark secrets revealed about the CIA. (Here I will just list the title of each category of CIA secrets or crimes, and leave out the added explanatory paragraph.)

Extraordinary Rendition and Secret Detention/Torture and Coercive Interrogation/Mind Control and MK-Ultra/Biological Warfare Experiments/CIA’s “Dark Prison”/CIA’s Secret Coffee Shops and Surveillance/CIA’s Mysterious Statues and Art/CIA’s Secret Museums and Archives/CIA’s Assassination Plots/CIA’s Secret Funding of Film and Literature

After that long list of abuses, the Brave AI search engine concluded: These dark secrets reveal the CIA’s involvement in human rights abuses, illegal activities, and covert operations, highlighting the need for transparency and accountability in government agencies.

Good! For now, the Brave search engine agrees with me. And so does Professor Drake.

“In order to have a critical understanding of history, instead of a propagandistic understanding of history, we need to look at revisionist history; people who look at the documents that are left out of the official accounts.” - Richard Drake

Richard Drake teaches history at the University of Montana. He was educated at St. Michael’s College (B.A. 1963), Brown University (M.A. 1965), and the University of California, Los Angeles (Ph.D. 1976). He spent the 1969-1970 academic year studying at the University of Padova. He has taught at UCLA (1973-1976; 1978-1979), UC Irvine (1976-1978), Wellesley College (1979-1980), Princeton University (1980-1982), New York University (summers 1980 and 1981), and since 1982 at the University of Montana. In April 2017 he became the inaugural holder of the Lucile Speer Research Chair in Politics and History.

Enjoy the interview above!