or any academic or professional field that uses the facts of a long historical past to analyze a point of the actions of a crisis event, let’s use the Covid Pandemic, which lead to some seismic cultural changes, like many companies getting rid of the concept of the office/business building that all their employees had to gather together every day..largely because that’s the way it had always been done. Many companies are allowing their employees to work from home, meet on line in a group software program, and work far more efficiently than all 2000 employees compressed together in floors filed with cubicles. There’s also the added benefit of no longer needing a 20 story building of huge expense that requires electricity, water, and natural gas for heat, the money eating but essential large air conditioning, State, City, and Federal taxes on corporate propert, and a dozen other “critical, must have” profit eating building expenses a company with a huge staff that all work remotely saves the company serious money…build maintenance and operating costs are a huge parasitic drain on a yearly budget that has no return on often expensive manditory “costs of doing business“
There is universal agreement that in a tertiary corporation, the need for a single large office building or complex has been proven to be an inefficient, anti-employee environment relic of the past. It’s the same with our centralized school system. It is far more efficient and cost effective to eliminate the “large School” model and hold classes remotely than pay for busing, building maintenance, immense school costs of providing text books (the prices of which are ridiculous), and the money spent on the basic bills we all pay, just for a whole school district of old money pit schools. Nobody is disputing what the facts are.
But let’s say your a theoretical physicist, and within your field, a large group of younger millennial physicists start a break off faction of “revisionists” who are attempting to write an alternate history based on collecting scraps of information to formulate a theory that Einstein didn’t write those 4 papers starting with the E=mc2 theory, the “fabric” of space-time can be warped by matter and energy, and the big one: that space-time is relative rather than absolute, as an objects movement and how it experiences time is relative to the objects around it..(at least that’s how I remember it states), we’re all actually written by his wife, who was also a scientist but I believe was incapable of creating such creative revolutionary world-changing discoveries when you investigate her academic past. Imagine that facts don’t matter to these “Revisionists” who are antithetical to empiricists..they create an alternate conclusion and search for the slightest obscure evidence to support it, or they’ll look for unrelated events to say “well conditions here and actions there support our revisionist view..dismissing decades of data collected by us “Orthodox” - a sarcastic label professionals that don’t deal in unsubstantiated alternate theories based on assumption, supposition, and pseudo science. That was going on in field, a civil war between us “Orthodox” historians..an implication that we don’t think for ourselves, and the “Revisionists” who think they’re writing the New Testament and painting all past research as just reenforcing the so called “Party Line”. If you haven’t experienced this in your field, I can’t tell you how insipidly untenable it is to get in a “debate”…it’s hard to debate history with a millennial with a bachelors from Kutztown University about anything..about “Who really started the Cold War“
This was a very controversial argument when the revisionist faction began to question the facts of The War Scare of 1946. I could go into great detail but these are the facts.1). Soviet officials had stated their western counterparts that the Soviets were serious about the eradication of capitalism in Europe. 2). with his country in ruins, Stalin was targeting taking over the Middle East by first expanding deep in the Balkans, broke the “Naughty Agreement“ made behind the Americans back to carve up Europe into countries of influence by the Soviets or the west. The British sold out the Poles to the Russians in exchange for Greece and the other Mediterranean countries to ensure British domination of the Middle East..which Stalin broke immediately and started a civil war between the communists and the majority that were not. Even further, Stalin was desperate to expand to dominate the Middle East to gain access to all the oil reserves while Russian oilfields in the south were utterly destroyed and would take a decade to repair. Stalin began to amass forces and threaten to invade Turkey, which would kick down the gate a give Stalin a free path to Iran, Iraq, and the rest of the oil rich gulf states. However, they falsely assumed that England and the US relations would become strained to the ambitions of the already dead foreign policy of Imperialism, and the United States wouldn’t come to Britain’s aid if the Soviets invaded the Middle East. They were wrong. They first underestimated severely the conviction in the leadership and toughness of Harry Truman, who responded in a major show of force by sending almost all of the Atlantic fleet into the waters between Turkey and where Stalin was massing his forces, then making an official proclamation that any attack on Turkey would be cause for the United States and its allies to declare War on the Soviets and attack with the full might of the American Military. What Truman was saying to Stalin is if you think we won’t drop atomics on your forces..turning them into beaded glass, we won’t stop until we nuke the Kremlin. What Stalin didn’t know is America could build maybe 3-4 bombs at best, not enough to accomplish what he implied in Truman’s very stern response, and the American public, after 2 World Wars of sacrificing American boys in a War not of our making, would be apoplectic about becoming embroiled in another European war less than a year after WWII ended. Truman was an experienced poker player and knew logistically Stalin couldn’t supply the “Red Steamroller“ with just the basics of fuel, ammunition, air cover, or even feed his troops attempting to invade the Middle East.
For Stalin, his army was in shambles after pushing the Nazis back to Berlin. Sukov…their celebrated general, was no tactical genius. He was a butcher who figured he would overwhelm the Nazis with his endless supply of soldiers who faced being machine gunned if they didn’t advance..even when 1 out of 3 soviet solders weren’t given a rifle. They were expected to pick up one from a dead comrade while continuing with a frontal assault. The Nazis could not replace losses like the Soviets could. With few exceptions, the Nazis won the battles but couldn’t hold their positions…like The Battle of Kursk. Fast forward to Stalin’s desperate plan to kick the British and the Americans out of the Middle East, and have all the oil they needed while they repaired their infrastructure… he was counting on the Americans to return to their traditional isolationist foreign policy…if he was wrong, he would have to suffer the humiliation of having to fold his bluff and pull back all his forces out of the region in bitter defeat on the world stage. This event is generally considered to be the start of the Cold War, when Stalin pulled back, gave up on propagating a world wide communist revolution , and tightened his control over the Soviet Bloc nations while concentrating on rapidly rebuild his military as well as his country’s infrastructure. Us “Orthodox“ historians, going by Stalin’s history of turning on his allies immediately, the boldly declared objective of destroying capitalism on the European continent and expanding from there, and his breaking of treaties to take over the Balkans and arm/support communism revolution in Greece, overwhelming evidence shows that Stalin’s desperate aggression to grab as much territory as they can while Britain was a “spent power” and the US was in the middle of pulling out of Europe and cutting down their military forces in what they mistakenly believed was out of economic necessity. He gambled and crapped out, embarrassed and determined to wage a war against the West whenever possible through proxy wars and espionage..a Cold War. This is what happened, the facts are indisputable Stalin’s expansionist policy post WWII was the direct cause of the cold war…unless your a Revisionist.
The revisionist theory is that Stalin was actually an “anti-revolutionary“ who was trying to make a lasting peace with the west. It was the aggression of Truman that they blame for the Cold War, which I would have to consider to look for any real hard data or at newly discovered facts, like a release of declassified communications between Stalin and his advisers discussing how to approach the western powers with this “peace agreement“. I must consider any and all verified facts that support the revisionist theory, but there is zero evidence that this “peace agreement“ was ever an idea in Stalin’s murderous paranoid head. Yet that didn’t stop them from publishing a book drawing evidence by the manufactured correlations of a Polish trade treaty with Britain, and a Czechoslovakian trade show to show the west the were open for business, formulating a theory from those and other unrelated facts to boldy make a totally manufactured collection of “facts” that Stalin didn’t intend to rule the soviet bloc states with an iron fist, when the fact was the Soviets were in such disarray in 1946 they couldn’t impose their will upon them until they secured access to oil, and rebuilt their armies.
This Revisionist movement doesn’t exist in academia, they’d be quickly and cruelly discredited if a revisionist attempted to admit such work as serious research to be peer reviewed. No..revisionism exists, and of course thrives, in popular “History” books for pop culture casuals that shop at Barnes and Noble and love the antithetical revisionist genre. It has been around for nearly twenty years and the movement is a plague upon true works of accurate historical accounts based on years of intense collection and analysis of primary source data..not stolen from some other historians hard work. Yet the Revisionist faction is more popular than ever. It infuriates me to the point that I want to show up at their book signings and bum rush the show by forcing them to defend their faux beliefs in a battle of brain pans.
Just interested if any other field of study is facing this kind anti-intellectual adversary faction as historians are.
- Thanks Argus
michigan.rivals.com
