In June, 2003, President Bush tried to discredit any critics who dared dispute his artfully twisted intelligence assessments of Iraq by slinging the worst name he could think of: “Revisionist historians is what I like to call them.” This was intended as something more than a schoolyard taunt or an allusion to the sort of pseudo scholars who would deny, under a blizzard of footnotes, the existence of the Turkish massacre of Armenians. In the political context of the moment, it seemed a warning to all who would dispute the monarch's version of reality.
Rigorous revisionism is, of course, at the heart of historical practice, and to practice it in the face of a state-endorsed orthodoxy can require a considerable measure of gall, as well as craft. No country easily accepts a figure like Charles Beard, who, as the avatar of the Progressive School of historians, informed Americans that the founders were wealthy landholders employing ideological trappings to garland their self-interest. But, without revision, what? Without Marcel Ophüls, who practices a filmmaker's version of revisionist history in “The Sorrow and the Pity,” it would have been far easier for the French to go on ignoring their complicity in the deportation of Jews to the death camps. The assault on the American Indians; the ruthlessness of European colonialism in Africa; the decision-making process that led to Hiroshima; the reëvaluation of Presidential reputations—these are all, unendingly, fodder for “revisionists” who go on challenging accepted truths and complicating the story of the past.
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