Weekend Reading: "Reason's" Special Revisionism Issue
Via Mark Ames:
Nick Gillespie: Did Reason Really Publish a "Holocaust Denial 'Special Issue'" in 1976? Of Course Not!
Of course it's not a Holocaust Denial "Special Issue"! Only three of the seven articles--Greaves's "FDR's Watergate: Pearl Harbor" about how the real story is how the communists destroyed that anti-communist bulwark that was Imperial Japan, App's "The Sudeten German Tragedy" about just who were the real victims here, and North's "World War II Revisionism and Vietnam"--take the neo-Nazi line!
Seems to me Nick Gillespie would be much better saying: "I am profoundly embarrassed. When you make it your business to publish unpopular ideas, sometimes you judge wrong and publish ideas that are unpopular for good reasons. Reason did that in February 1976."
Instead, Gillespie writes:
Did Reason Really Publish a "Holocaust Denial 'Special Issue'" in 1976? Of Course Not: "Ames is correct that some of the contributors...
...to that issue developed an interest in or were fellow travelers with that most pathetic area of study known as Holocaust revisionism or denialism. That scurrilous topic is not the focus of any of the articles in the issue.... Various authors discuss, among other things, what sort of foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Franklin Roosevelt may have had and how actors other than Nazi Germany bear some responsibility for the start of World War II. Some of the material holds up.... Much of the material from the issue doesn’t hold up, which is hardly surprising for a magazine issue published almost 40 years ago....
Reason is happy to acknowledge missteps and mistakes while also forcefully pushing back against blatant misreadings of our past and current work.
You don't sound too happy, Nick: missing an opportunity to acknowledge missteps and mistakes? Perhaps because you don't want to give Mark Ames an inch under any circumstances?
And, of course, what catches my eye most is the big ad predicting triple-digit inflation by... 1978:
