Owen To Events Beyond His Control      

Bitter-ender believers in Owen Lattimore’s guilt of….something have found solace in recent years on the interwebs, where a lively trade in half truths and recycled 50s bilge re-convict him on a daily basis. But now, the success of the right wing book trade lets the folks at home learn truths they’ve never forgotten without all that typing and clicking.

Serial offender Stan Evans is back on the market with a tome which rips the lid off that Joe Stalin fellow: apparently he wished ill of the United States! Evans’ latest adventure in these uncharted waters takes him to the best Lattimore Did It tale of all, in which Lattimore  caused Pearl Harbor.

You read that right. Owen Lattimore caused America’s entry into World War Two with his trademark tool:  the memo.

In 1941 Lattimore was advising Chiang Kai Shek, while the US tried to work out a deal with Japan.  Lattimore told Washington Chiang thought the proposal would collapse Chinese resistance to Japan’s invasion.  In this maximum crackpot history, such was the authority Chiang Kai Shek wielded in Washington that the State Department dropped negotiating with Japan, insuring its attack on Hawaii. Thanks a lot, Professor!

Why would the wily academic want Japan to turn their guns on America? In Evans imagination, to protect Joe Stalin from a Japanese  attack on  Siberia. Pretending this was a live option in 1941 requires ignoring 1939, when the Soviets had smashed Japanese forces at the Mongol boarder. And wishing we had dumped Chiang fifteen years early.

Not everybody thinks this is “a meticulous examination of primary sources” or the  “disclosure of formerly secret records.”

 “as has been their practice for decades, the authors equate presence at an event—e.g., Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill at Yalta—with the covert wielding of tremendous influence…When the authors stray from Soviet influence within the United States and shift the focus to the rise of communism in China around the same time, their speculation about the allegedly traitorous activity of named individuals feels even shakier.“

 Evans makes his case the same way all the McCarthy Was Rightists  do: a tease about new material, claims the Venona Papers proved something unspecified about Lattimore, and a rush into the familiar arms of the McCarran Committee,  which concocted its Lattimore indictment from perjured and re-engineered testimony.

 Dino Might?   

Anti-evolutionists are feeling pretty good about themselves, so confident they’ve got the godless on the run that their analogy generation skills are shot.

From the crypto-creationist Discovery Institute’s evolutionnews.org  [clever name to propagandize the unwary evolution-curious!] comes a metaphor for the ages: “Creation scientists” are Mao Tse Tung, and Beijing is theirs!

“After 1949 when China went Communist, American anti-Communists in their anguish turned on fellow Americans, seeking to pin the blame somewhere and prompting the famous “Who Lost China?” debate. Evolutionists lately have been following this same path, bewailing the public’s continued discontent with Darwinism and support for academic-freedom legislation, and looking for someone to blame, even if that someone is on the Darwinists’ own side.”

To ex-Trotskyite Irving Kristol’s  judgement that

                                  “.. there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalis they feel they know no such thing.”

Lets certify that Communisim was feared, but McCarthy was looking for means of doing in domestic enemies.  The fall of Beijing was to cause the fall of Washington.

Later day former leftist Ronald Radosh still swoons for Kristol’s Lattimore stylings.

*After detailing an instance where Lattimore did the opposite of what a communist had asked him to do in editing, the Committee said he was still a bad person, and never mind: “From the communist point of view, a given book or article may be to their interest, even designedly to their interest, though in quantity 95 percent of it is neutral or non communist” [page 95]

So no defense then!