Clio, the ancient Roman muse of history, was first and foremost a teacher. The lessons of history, the Romans knew, were the guideposts for the future. Since Herodotus, all historians who remain true to the traditions of historiography abide by rigid rules. Cicero said: "The first law for the historian is that he should never utter an untruth."
The first, and most important, rule is to report history factually, objectively, without bias or propagandistic intent. The second is to learn from what has gone before and correctly apply those lessons to current events. Responsible historians do just that. And that is why we have been sounding the alarm over the war brewing in the Balkans, which the plutocratic elite has decided the US should not only participate in, but actively instigate. That is our mission here at THE BARNES REVIEW, to warn against commission of the mistakes of the past, as it was for our namesake, Harry Elmer Barnes, as well as a raft of others whose names are swept under the rug of plutocratic history.
Barnes was the ground breaker. His revisionist work after W.W.I, Genesis of the World War, published in 1926, was the first to free itself from Allied wartime propaganda, being based on the original sources and monographic literature of the key players of the period. The famous English historian George Peabody Gooch said of this book: "No other American scholar has done so much to familiarize his countrymen with the new evidence, and to compel them to revise their wartime judgments in the light of the new material."
After W.W.II, his Struggle Against the Historical Blackout started the revisionist struggle anew. Other leading lights in the revisionist movement include William Henry Chamberlin, journalist, foreign affairs student and historian, Percy L. Greaves, advisor to the Senate Minority Committee investigating Pearl Harbor, George A. Lundberg, world famous sociologist who insisted that the study of history, applied to social problems, could improve humanity's lot; George Morgenstern, a courageous reporter whose book, Pearl Harbor, the Story of the Secret War, (1947) was among the first to relate the shameful facts of the background of the attack based on first-hand sources, and William L. Newman, historian and author of The Genesis of Pearl Harbor (1946) who told the real story of the betrayal of our country by FDR and Co.
Charles Callan Tansill, the outstanding professional historian of American diplomacy, likewise told of the double-dealing, propaganda and betrayal of American interests in his America Goes to War (1938) and Back Door To War ((1952). Professor Charles Austin Beard completes this partial listing of distinguished writers. In fact, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, a collection of revisionist writings by the historians mentioned above, edited by Barnes, was dedicated to this man who gave the final years of his life to the thankless yet courageous task of establishing the tenets of revisionism. And it is this book, more than any other, which explains the present to us by relating past manipulations of the elite that led us into war, just as they are doing today in the former Yugoslavia.
All thisÑand much moreÑis literally the background of THE BARNES REVIEW. Our mission, each month, is threefold: to present historical subjects containing nothing but the facts, to make readers aware of the propaganda and internationalist bias inserted into so much of today's reportage of history, and to make clear the lessons to be drawn from mistakes made in the past.
For instance, we know what disasters have resulted from America's wrong-headed internationalist and interventionist policies dating from the Spanish American war, through both world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, the Middle East, Haiti and today in the Balkans. These wars have diminished our national security, lowered our standard of living, reduced our prestige among the so-called community of nations, and caused untold grief to the widows and orphans of millions of American servicemen killed throughout the past century. They have profited only the internationalists and capitalist billionaires. The former, failing to convince the people of the "joys" of living in a multi-cultural, one world dictatorship, have gone on the warpath to achieve their ends. The latter need constantly expanding markets for their overproduction of goods and the ever-growing interest payments they receive from their issuance of debt-based money to the hard-working populations enslaved by their control of the money system.
The foreign policy mistakes we have made in the past, in fact the very recent past, are so obvious you would think that both the American public and Congress would immediately realize the imminent danger of war in the Balkans, where our 20,000 troops are sitting ducks for some of the toughest, fiercest and best warrior people in the world, who have been at each other's throats for millennia and who will unite only to turn on the interloper who dares to interfere with their traditional slaughter of one another. There is no question in our minds that the American people themselves do not want this Balkan war, but they still remain under the thrall of the banking, media and political elite who piously proclaim we are "waging peace," an Orwellian phrase if ever there was one.
Our stories in the past year have pointed out the sheer foolishness of our meddling in the affairs of Haiti, the Balkans, Vietnam and both world wars. We've alerted our readers to the dangers of the impending balkanization of our own country, due in large part to our internationalist foreign policyÑthe influx of immigrants from war-torn or impoverished lands. History teaches that conquerors are eventually conquered themselves by those they thought they vanquished, through immigration and cultural change brought about by the shifts in population and the attempts by the conquerors to govern, and then assimilate, the conquered.
As long as we interfere in the affairs of others, either with military might or through economic colonization, we will reap the whirlwind of what we have sown. These are the stories the other history magazines out there should be carrying, with these lessons implicit; instead they paint a rosy picture of "progress" toward a one-world government, and how we will eventually all live in peace and harmony, thanks to the efforts of much-admired utopian dreamers, such as Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Karl Marx and other "progressive" thinkers of the early part of this century. But it will be the peace of the enslaved and the harmony of the slave master chanting the beat to which we must all labor to fill our quotas on the Global Plantation.
That is what THE BARNES REVIEW is all about; to teach us to stand up as men, just as our forefathers did, to resist tyranny and the blandishments of those who would have us give up our freedoms in the name of the "greater"Ñread "global"Ñgood. We follow a fine tradition, one we are proud of, one which is indisputably American and more humane than any other idealistic solution ever devised to solve our problems. That is, to take care of ourselves first, to preserve our cultural, historical and national identity and to lead the world by our example and not by force.