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03/25/2008: "All Revisionism is Labeled "Distortion""

Baker will restate, sardonically, facts that are already powerfully implicit in his anecdotes: "Twelve million people still held to Franklin Roosevelt's basic principle of civilization: that no man should be
punished for the deed of another. Franklin D. Roosevelt was not one of them."

He'll steer the reader toward certainty about hugely controversial historical points (e.g., that America baited Japan into attacking; that Churchill's aggression made Hitler's violence worse; that a workable peace might have been had, at several points, in lieu of total victory; that pacifism was the best response), all of which his unorthodox method, by its very nature, can't honestly support, given that it denies all the traditional hallmarks of historical argument: direct comment, abstract analysis, deep engagement with the existing scholarship.

And so Baker sometimes lapses into the crime he means to correct: He simplifies the narrative he's trying to complicate, distorting the truth as badly as any pious acolyte of the Greatest Generation myth.

[ The victors write history; that doesn't mean they're right. The problem is that badly researched and biased revisionism discredits itself. ]



http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/45308/index1.html