You remember “historian” Michael Bellesiles. He won the Bancroft Prize a decade ago for his wildly falsified history of guns in America. He lost the prize — and his reputation — when real historians of firearms like Clayton Cramer proved Bellesiles was a liar who created his “history” according to a surreal anti-gun agenda.
You wonder how a man like Bellesiles can ever come back. But he keeps going like the Energizer bunny. And it seems he goes right on fabricating and prevaricating according to his own agenda.
Per J.F. (with head-shaking thanks) and via the good work of Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy, here’s the first hints of doubt and more serious questions.
Gotta admire the patient blogger-diggers who go through the historical and news record when Bellesiles’ own professional publishers won’t bother (despite the risks they’re already taking in publishing a known fraud). But even on casual reading, before any fact-checking at all, the story Bellesiles wrote in this case reeks. It reads like a sentimental propaganda tale and its “facts” don’t mesh with anything even an average news junkie knows about the military and the Iraq war.
Simon Romero of the New York Times does the same type of Made-up-Facts ™ job when writing one of his “hit” pieces about Venezuela.
Another Made-up-Facts ™ guy is Jackson Diehl at the Washington Post.
Maybe it’s just what they learn in journalism school.
Cheers.
I suppose we should all just file the incident away and see if it shows up later as a self-referential tool. After all, if there is deliberate falsification involved, it was not done for no purpose. He’d want to cash in on it later.
(Perhaps the evidence is in probate records, which manifest themselves only to Bellesiles’ distinguished intellect and smashing good taste? Sorry, couldn’t resist. 🙂
It’s also technically possible it’s a deliberate false flag, a disguised but true story designed to draw out criticism that can be quickly denounced as pedantic. “See how quick the frothy-mouthed wolves are to jump on the poor man?” and similar waving-the-bloody-flag rot. We don’t know for sure (and probably never will), but it’s not like it hasn’t been done before, and there is ample proof that no stunt is too juvenile for the victim-disarmament crowd…
In a world where legislators can, with a straight face, claim that taxation is “voluntary” and that unemployment checks “create jobs”, nothing should surprise us, and we should keep Voltaire’s words in mind: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Well, we’ll see what happens next, won’t we?
I found it amusing that “Arming America” was eventually republished by an outfit called “Soft Skull Press”.
Seems appropriate.
I’m sure all his data is beyond reproach and was found by him personally on computer discs buried with dinosaur mummies in undiscovered Mayan pyramids in downtown Topeka, thousands of years ago by Visitors From Beyond the Stars and Outside Time. We are just too grounded in reality to be able to see or decipher them (or understand the information without his Glorious translating ability).