Revisionist Fantasies
PACHTER, HENRY M.
Revisionist Fantasies Empire As a Way of Life By William Appleman Williams Oxford. 226pp. $14.95. Reviewed by Henry M. Pachter Professor of political science, Rutgers University As a critic...
...The one new wrinkle in this book is that, for the first time so far as I am aware, Williams explicitly expands his revisionism to include World War II...
...Reviewed by Henry M. Pachter Professor of political science, Rutgers University As a critic of the so-called Cold War, William Appleman Williams was one of the first and most original—if not the most rigorous—spokesmen for revisionist history...
...Since Williams apparently reads the National Guardian, he knows that Israel is not seen as an embarrassment to the State Department—if only he would go there and ask...
...thwarted Russia's legitimate goals, we are further told: "Their strategic aims were as valid as those of the U.S...
...Indeed, Williams' sorry effort largely reiterates the thesis of his earlier books: The key that always unlocks our past is "imperialism...
...Williams remains blithely unmoved by the most horrible crimes, so long as they are committed by anyone other than the United States...
...Those who somewhere may have gotten the idea that there was a genuine threat are solemnly warned against "the imperial propensity to externalize evil" —as if the Holocaust and all the misery, barbarism and destruction of the War never would have happened had we refrained from projecting the evil in our own souls onto Germany and let Hitler have his way...
...The U.S...
...Enough—there are some revisionist historians with whom it is useful to debate, but Williams is not one of them...
...created 17 million jobs safe from bombs...
...his true face appears in his final chapters, where he discards the pacifist mask and repeats the stale Stalinist lies of the '40s and '50s...
...That canard is attributed by Williams to "some observers," but it soon becomes clear from the context whom he chooses to believe...
...but rather as its tool to dominate the oil sheikhs...
...It contains no documentation, no index and, apart from a self-advertisement for the author and his disciples, not a single footnote...
...It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Williams is simply an appalling naif...
...Examples of Williams' novel interpretations can be multiplied: "The unconstitutional bombing of Cambodia did more to destroy the fabric of that society than the incursion of the North Vietnamese...
...Sad to say, although it appears under the imprint of a university press, this summary of his world-view falls well below even the modest standards of his previous works...
...Non-American varieties of imperialism are utterly invisible to him...
...for example, he dwells upon native American Indians as victims of white American aggression, yet it seems never to have occurred to this historian that they also had their empires...
...What I find most rankling about such isolationism is its combination of callousness and self-righteous cant...
...American penetration of the Middle East "became a major theme of imperial diplomacy with the advent of Zionism...
...Williams assures us, for instance, that the Allied strategy was designed to exhaust Russian strength: "While the Russians lost 20 million lives, the U.S...
...Surely Williams knows that General Eisenhower withdrew from Czechoslovakia and two German states to fulfill the Crimea Conference accords, and that Roosevelt went back on pledges to Poland, Romania and Bulgaria in compliance with Soviet demands...
...treating Iran as vassals" (one supposes he means "fiefdom" here...
...Just as King Midas' touch turned everything into gold, wherever Williams casts his eye he sees the evil machinations of the American usurpers, especially those of Anglo-Saxon provenance...
...Finding it difficult to accept that we live in a community of nations long organized into states, he dreams of a foreign policy that takes no notice of the existence of states...
...It is imperialism, too, when Monroe fights against pirates in the Caribbean or encourages the Greek war of independence from the Sultan, when Jackson deals harshly with South Carolina's Nullification attempt, Lincoln struggles against the secession of the slave states, merchants ship cowhides from Spanish California to Boston, and Walt Whitman's exults over the extent of American freedom...
...He is pleased to think that Hoover would have kept us out of the War that the villainous FDR embroiled us in by breaking off trade relations with Hitler and refusing to recognize Japan's occupation of Manchuria: Roosevelt demonstrated his lust for empire and therefore provoked Hitler to attack...
...The hostages in Teheran are "prisoners taken for the U.S...
...He says that Mao Zedong was prepared to forsake Russia for a Western alliance even as late as 1949...
...Similarly, his selective, blinkered vision has American farmers, or "agricultural capitalists" as he calls them, fomenting war in 1898 to sell their surplus grain to China and Cuba—even though China only purchased .2 per cent of our total export, and the sole buyer of American grain in Cuba was the Spanish garrison...
...He writes in the tradition of the Icarian Socialists, who settled in America in order to leave the rest of the wicked world far behind...
...Herbert Hoover remains the hero of his fantasies...
...and that "South Korea, with the overt or tacit approval of the U.S., provoked the North Korean attack of June 1950...
...that the same year Khrushchev had offered the West an accommodation, even though he wasn't to arrive in Moscow from his job in the Ukraine until late December...
...No attempt is made to discuss the relevant literature or acquaint the reader with the great debates about interpreting American history...
...Occasionally Williams outdoes himself...
Vol. 63 • October 1980 • No. 19
