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Revisionist Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition

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This book is a collection of essays from Dr. Martin, the bulk of which were published in the 1960s in a small libertarian paper, Rampart Journal. The writing style may be a bit dense for some people, and Martin's cutting sarcasm regarding conventional history will certainly offend others, but this book is still worth a read. Several of the essays, such as his summary of the "Peace Now" movement of 1943 deal with little known topics that simply have not been explored by mainstream historians. His two best essays: one on the Cold War, and the other a summary of the work of Harry E. Barnes, however, are worth the price of the book. Martin's discussion of sociologist, historian and journalist Barnes provides a good summary of the latter's career, and his interest in using history to promote international peace. The essay on the Cold War, however, has strongly influenced my interpretation of history and foreign policy. Martin argues that the Cold War was, in the final analysis, an Orwellian conflict, used primarily for controlling domestic populations, and was never an actual conflict between nations, the rulers of which, Martin argues, had more in common with each other than their differing ideologies suggest. The war he suggests, was primarily fought as an element of domestic policy. In this he anticipated some of the later new left critics of the Cold War. Now that the Cold War is over, I can't help but wonder if the "War on drugs" and our new "War on Terrorism" might not fit under the same rubric. In any event, reading Martin is a challenge and delight, and is highly recommended for those with open minds. People easily offended should avoid his books.

James J. Martin's REVISIONIST VIEWPOINTS is "must reading" for those who have been deluged with canned historical accounts and conventional studies by those who should know better. The "Court Historians" have been either too timid or too politically connencted to write an honest assessments of events since World War I and especially World War II. This book should make an honest reader think.

The essay titled "On the 'Defense' Origins of the New Imperialism" gives a clear account of the U.S. policy since the end of World War II. Political adventures in extending U.S. control have been defined as "National Defense." If there are no actual enemies, U.S. policy makers invent them to justify huge defense budgets government contracts to the politically connected plutocratic rich.

The essay on conscription or the military draft has been connected to this defense spending. In spite of the Thirteenth Amendment, which forbade slavery and involuntary servitude, conscription has been used as part of this scam. Martin also uses the public record including military reports to verify that military conscription has not produced type of military hero that is presented in media entertainment.

James J. Martin's assessment of Fascism is the best this writer has ever read. All the fake attributes to Fascism as a politically disapproval word is undermined in this. Martin deals with the economic policies of the "wicked fascists" and concludes that these policiies were similiar to those of the New Deal. In fact, there is an essay dealing with John Maynard Keynes' GENERAL THEORY which was translated into German. Keynes is clear that his economic theories were more easily applied to a totalitarian system rather than to a system of laissez-faire capitalism. Martin also cites historians and political writers who have tried to come to grips with Fascism without the "Fascims is bad" analysis. For example, Martin cites John T. Flynn's AS WE GO MARCHING and Ernst Nolte's THE THREE FACES OF FASCISM.

The interested reader should read the essays titled THE BOMBING AND NEGOTIATED PEACE-1944 and "THE RETURN TO THE 'WAR CRIMES'-'WAR CRIMINALS' ISSUE in tandom. Martin memorializes the members of the Peace Now who tried in vain to get a negotiated peace in 1944. Their efforts obviously failed, but had their suggestions been followed by U.S. policy makers, the emergence of Big Communism and the Cold War would have been mitigated or eliminated. Martin mentions that war criminals are those on the losing side in a war. The charges levelled against the Germans and Japanses military and civilian leaders could have been levelled against the "Allies." By the way Hannah Arendt makes the same case in her book EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM. What may surprise readers is that Martin cites the very liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas who was clear that the trials were unlawful and arose under ex post facto law which the U.S. Constitution clearly forbids.

Martin's essay titled "American Mass Media and Stalinism" should be read with "The Defense Origins of the New Imperialism mentioned above. Martin demonstrates that many of the Cold Warriors were sychophants who lauded "Good Ole Uncle Joe" (Joseph Stalin)during the 1940s only to look likes fools when their "gallant ally" actually kept the spoils of war which has been the nature of the winners of wars for 6,000 years. Martin uses the public record to demonstrate that the patriotic loud mouthed Cold Warriors actually supported Stalin's Big Communism. These revelations should make anyone question the rationality and supposed staunch anti-Communism that emerged since World War II.

Two of the later essays in this book are instructive. Martin's essay titled "REVISIONISM AND THE COLD WAR,1946-1966" shows that a correction of previous historical errors and propaganda have been difficult to overcome. This is a good essay in that any thinking individual could easily see how phony the Cold War was. Yet, those who incited Cold War hysteria refused to acknowledge anything about World War II which created the Cold War and planetary enemies.

The last essay in this book is titled "HISTORY AND SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE" which is instructive on how popular "history" has undermined honest history and in turn honest political and historical response. Martin scoffs at the notion that history and education has become part of the entertainment business.

REVISIONIST VIEWPOINTS is well written. Martin is in elite company in the readabiltiy of his work. He does not cite arcane and obscure sources in his work, and his citations are from the public record if one wants to confirm the veracity of his conclusions. This book should be followed by Martin's book titled THE SAGA OF HOG ISLAND AND OTHER ESSAYS IN INCONVIENT HISTORY. Martin was never challenged with the work in these books. The answer to this fact is that his work is unanswerable.

The dean of living revisionist historians is at his brilliant, provocative best in these essays on "war crimes," Allied terror bombing, Fascism, the draft, the American mass media's wartime love affair with Stalin, America's postwar "defense" imperialism, and more! Indispensable for the revisionist scholar, excellent for the thoughtful young student.

In an article published just after James J Martin's death in 2004, his interviewer Jeff Riggenbach made the following comment. "He didn't regard himself as a "revisionist," ...so much as an "additionist" - the fellow who comes along after the historical accounts have been written and adds what's been (inadvertently or deliberately) left out."

Martin's "additionist" approach is clearly and brilliantly on display in this fine collection of well crafted essays. Where else would you learn that a 1946 Roper poll asking "Do you think we [the USA] did or did not deliberately provoke Japan into making war against us?" had 14 percent of replies nationally, and 22% on the west coast, respond in the affirmative. Where else would you learn of John Foster Dulles's earlier more realist and anti-'collective security' viewpoints, views almost diametrically opposite those he implemented when Secretary of State? Where else would you learn of the mawkish (in the original sense of the term, meaning "maggot" like) behaviour of allied 'journalists' at the scene of Tojo's attempted suicide? Even to those who have spent decades studying war and peace in the modern world there will surely be something new to find in Martin's essays.

The other reviewers listed here have done a good job in providing a snapshot overview of the contents of his essays. There is little I can add to what they have said other than a few passing impressions.

Despite mainly being penned in the 1960s, all the essays are still quite topical. Indeed his analysis of the relationship between Defense and "the New Imperialism" could have been written yesterday, especially as America's post-Cold War foreign policy has reached a new crisis. The conscription essay is fascinating, and Martin imagines conscription was here to stay. Yet it was only a year or two after this book was published that the "All Volunteer Army" was ushered in. Of course conscription could return, the ruination of the National Guard in the middle east might force the issue. Despite the misprediction here, my guess is that Martin would not have been that surprised that it was Nixon, a conservative, rather than his liberal rivals who utlimately ended it. His discussion of the still unresolved debate over the definition of fascism provides a great overview full of excellent quotes for any student. With fascism, real or imaginary, back in the news Martin's essay is probably more relevant today. I can only imagine what he would of thought of the bastardised modern neologism "islamofascism" ...and those who use it. Further mud to muddy waters perhaps. His item on "War Crimes" is another essay of renewed importance today. The bad precedent of the Nuremburg trials have become the model for the trial of Slobodan Milosevi' and to a lesser extent Saddam Hussein. Martin's analysis of victors' justice applied to losers for the purpose of reinforcing new regime political control in the vanquished territory would seem to apply perfectly to the Yugoslav case. Martin believed the war crime trials had their real roots in Stalin's show trials of the 1930s. There would seem to be nothing in Nuremberg's offspring to contradict him. His essays on Harry Elmer Barnes and historical revisionism provide an insightful hypothesis to help explain the comparative triumph of revisionist thinking post-WW1 versus their failure to dent the orthodoxy, at least in the public mind, post-WW2. Martin notes that after WW1 virtually all the incumbent governments were kicked out thus removing so many self interested roadblocks to revisionist advance. Not so after WW2 where incumbent administrations mostly continued and where the now rival victors on both sides of the Iron Curtain had a shared interest in an orthodoxy that lumped the blame for WW2 entirely on the defeated.

I'd like to add that Martin's writing style is excellent, fluid, informative, unpretentious and often sprinkled with sly humour. Even his footnotes are excellent, and sometimes a delight to read. His long footnote in the final appendix essay "History and Social Intelligence" dealing with the life and times of Arthur Schlesinger is a pocket satire worthy of Mencken.

There is perhaps only one substantive criticism that I'd make of "Revisionist Viewpoints". It lacks an index so digging back into it to ferret out your favourite Martin addition or footnote is not as easy as it could be.

Anyone who is tired of the same old establishment take on history should read this book.Included are accounts of conscription,war crimes trials,defense spending,propaganda,terror bombing,the cold war and other topics,all of which challenge official narratives and conventionally oriented accounts.

_Revisionist Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition_ by individualist anarchist James J. Martin, published by the libertarian press Ralph Myles, consists of a collection of essays which focus on a revisionist perspective of history, particularly emphasizing the entry of the United States into the Second World War and the subsequent loss of civil liberties which resulted from that. Martin is very much against unnecessary war, showing the absurdity of modern war, and the manner in which it results in a concomitant growth of a bureaucratic state. Indeed, in today's world, the state has become virtually all powerful, routinely persecuting those who dissent from the political status quo. In addition, the United States has sought to achieve imperial ambitions routinely declaring war on countries which do not directly concern its fundamental interests. Furthermore, the state now routinely encroaches upon the civil liberties of individuals, confiscating their property through excessive taxation, and cracking down on dissenters. These essays are particularly important in the light of the times in which we live.

This book takes a look at many of the issues surrounding the growth of the state following the Second World War, including examinations of imperialism and the misleading use of the term "defense", an examination of conscription showing the unconstitutional nature of this policy, an examination of the question of fascism showing how the term "fascist" has been applied indiscriminately and that unless understood in terms of economics (the state going socialist in an attempt to defeat communism once and for all, c.f. Ernst Nolte) has no real meaning, the use of bombing by the Allies and the negotiated peace, "war crimes" and "war criminals" arguing that the Nazi war criminals were tried under an ex post facto situation in which they were accused of breaking laws that did not exist at the time they allegedly broke them, the American mass media and Stalinism showing how the liberals of the time who so strongly advocated for war against "fascism" actively supported Stalinism until later this position became inconvenient for them, and a discussion of the Cold War arguing that the Cold War existed mostly in the heads of those fighting it in that the elite in the United States and among the Soviets did not significantly differ from each other in any substantial way. The book also includes appendices featuring discussions of Keynesian economics (a preface to the little-known German edition of Keynes' _General Theory_, meditations on the early writings of John Foster Dulles who before he became a diplomat wrote against the war, and a discussion of history and social intelligence featuring the work of revisionist historian blacklisted by the Roosevelt government Harry Elmer Barnes. Particularly interesting are Martin's discussions of the origins of warfare. In line with others such as Lawrence Dennis, Martin argues that war involves an attempt to unload excess production when other means have failed. Indeed, Dennis believed that war existed as a sort of "make work" project much like the building of the pyramids among the ancient Egyptians. In addition, Martin discusses the supposed hoax "The Report from Iron Mountain" showing how what this document says about war is very much in line with the writings of others such as Dennis. Martin also has much to say about the wars fought to allegedly "rid the world of fascism". Martin shows the ephemeral nature of the term "fascist", so often used by Marxists against their opponents. Indeed, for the Marxist fascism represents an attempt of the capitalist state to squelch the social revolution. Interestingly, Martin suggests that the war against fascism may be perceived as an attempt to destroy capitalism once and for all, the state heading in the direction of socialism during war. Martin also shows how many of the same liberals who became Cold warriors actively supported Stalin during the Second World War. Martin is particularly hard on Churchill who although claiming to be a "conservative" made some extremely adulatory remarks towards Stalin during the war. Later of course, Churchill was to make his iron curtain speech and thus began the Cold War period. Martin argues that both the United States elite and the Soviet elite while engaging in the Cold War sought to actively crush their own citizens, by having the state actively encroach upon their civil rights. These are particularly interesting remarks in light of the situations which occurred at the time of war. In today's world we face a similar situation all over again, with a so-called "War on Terror" in effect and successively infringing upon the civil rights of United States citizens. Martin's essays are essential reading for understanding the nature of the warfare state and the times in which we live. It is unfortunate that few will come across them.