 All right, well, welcome to the historical revisionism panel. And I don't think we need to do extensive introductions for our speakers. It's going to be me, Tom DiLorenzo, and Tom Woods, all of whom you've already heard from. And I assume we'll speak about things we've already spoken about before, except maybe just in light of why creating better and good historical narratives is important. And so it's 30 minutes. We'll each speak for around 8, 9, 10 minutes. And then we may have, I don't know, witty retorse to something the other person says or something like that. But yeah, we're happy to share our views on this. And I couldn't come up with any brilliant intro on this. So I'm just going to steal a paragraph from Ralph Raco. Ralph, who was a historian, he gave a speech back in 1986. And he started out with this paragraph. He says, it's a curious fact that of all the disciplines, it seems that history, more than philosophy or economics, determines people's political views. We might consider this unfair. We might think that economics has more to say about what people should think about competition and antitrust. Philosophy has more to say about what people should think about natural rights. But in fact, most often it seems that it's history or interpretations of history that will influence the positions that people take. So of course, we all know some people who like to dwell in the world of deep philosophical arguments. And often those people find those things the most convincing. And that's what will change their mind or multi-step, complex economics arguments. But for a lot of people, myself included, what we prefer in many cases is more of a narrative, a story that tells us the human side of things, of events, and how they unfolded that help illustrate certain truths. And this is the process, of course, of writing history in many cases, is trying to get at the truth of the matter and its causes in many cases as well, and the factors that were important in that. And we can see how history, historical writings, the historical narrative really influences people's thoughts about a lot of things if we look at some of the examples. And chief among these is the story that people get about the Industrial Revolution. That's probably one of the most important historical narratives that really determines people's views about capitalism. It's not a philosophical or a logical thing that convinces people whether capitalism is good or bad. It's their idea, the images put in their head by historical stories and narratives that they've learned over the years about the Industrial Revolution. And so people know, even if they're not particularly well educated, but especially educated people, they're familiar with the story where in the 1750s and right up till about then, people lived on farms and they may have had simple lives but they had decent lives and they were in control of their own lives and people mostly left them alone and things were pretty good. But then they started building the factories which historians later called the dark satanic mills. And people then were forced to work in these things and while they had been fine, their standard of living went into steep decline. They were forced to labor 18 hours a day and these horrible settings, darkness and disease reigned, children had their hands chopped off by machines. And this of course was all to the net negative because these people had been perfectly fine and happy before they were herded into these factories. And people know this, they just know that that's the way it was. And so teaching people based on some economic argument alone that that's the incorrect view of how capitalism actually works, it has limited success. And so historical narratives about showing that actually people's standard of living was brought up. As we know from good history that's been written in the last 100 years from economic historians, we know for a fact that actually the standard of living went up during that time period. But actually enemies of capitalism, they dodge and they weave around that sort of thing. So yes, people's standard of living and their incomes went up, but actually people were more unhappy because they weren't in a setting with trees and flowers anymore. And so it's not money that matters, it's about your subjective feelings about your life. And so they've always got new arguments where it's not money anymore, whereas socialists always used to argue that socialism makes you better off. The historical narrative showed that it did not in fact do that, so we shifted to other things about capitalism then ruins the environment. So then you have to come up with a historical narrative to combat that, digging up the facts, doing history. That requires a lot of work. There's other areas too where the historical narrative determines people's knowledge in a big way. For example, another thing that Ralph liked to point out was people's views of the Middle Ages being completely wrong. His quote on that was this was maybe the biggest next to the myth of the Industrial Revolution, one of the biggest historical frauds perpetrated by Renaissance humanists and French philosophs. We all know that the Middle Ages was horrible, horrible time, where kings were just chopping off people's heads. People saw like a Monty Python movie about the Middle Ages, so they know what it was like. They know that it was stupid and that people thought if they were sick it was due to like a ghost. Those people were dumb, they weren't smart like us. And people learn this from this historical narrative and what does that mean to their view of the world? It means then that all the things from that time period, so the extreme decentralization of political periods, the lack of modern democracy, this ruin to the world, it kept us in the dark ages and was only with the Enlightenment and the Renaissance which of course brought absolutism, huge bureaucracy, standing armies, large states. That's when finally people started to have a secular and enlightened way of living. And so that's just ingrained, that's in there, that's in people's heads because that's from their view of history. And then more recent things of course, the Great Depression, right? This is another view of history that guides people's views of capitalism and the view of government, right? We know that in the 1920s there was completely laissez-faire unbridled capitalism and that the greed of capitalists produced the Great Depression somehow and that government stepped in and solved that problem. And it's because of government's continued intervention that we haven't had that same problem. Except for the, of course, the financial crisis that came afterward and immediately preceding that, the world somehow slipped right back into unbridled laissez-faire capitalism and then it was fixed. So we're always slipping into unbridled laissez-faire capitalism but fortunately the government steps in to solve the problem. This is a narrative people believe. And then we need to keep writing good history, right? We have good people overcoming a lot of these objections. Murray Rothbard's The Great Depression, one of the best history books written about the Great Depression. It doesn't rely just on economic arguments. It reconstructs history. It's a lot of good economic history, extremely important there. And but what about in more recent history, right? We're still writing the history of the financial crisis in 2007, 2008. We have to get that right. We have to make sure that the images that people have in their brains about that period are the correct ones, that it was an unbridled laissez-faire that produced that problem. And then the history of COVID, right? What's the history of that going to be? Is the narrative that everyone has in their head, oh, there was this disease and totally natural. We don't know where it came from but somehow it appeared one day and everyone was gonna die except the government locked down everything and they forced people to get vaccines. And fortunately, thanks to that, we came through it. Things were all right. Thank government. That's the narrative they're gonna write. That was what a lot of the history books are gonna say. Somebody's gotta write the history books that don't say that, that say something different. That requires work, that requires effort. And so that's why the historical revisionism is so important. And so we've got some guys over here who do a lot of that sort of work, have done a lot of the yeoman's work and bringing out the historical facts that are usually ignored. And I'm gonna have them come up and talk a little bit about that, about some of their own historical work. And so we'll start with Tom Di Lorenzo and Tom will talk a little bit about his projects on that, Tom. Okay, yeah, on the question of why revisionism is important, I wrote down a quotation by a guy named Eric Blair, who said this quote, who controls the present controls the past and who controls the past controls the future. Eric Blair had a pen name, his name pen name was George Orwell who said that. And so that's a well-established fact. And just a few comments regarding some of my own research. When I was doing research on Lincoln and the Civil War, I ran across some statements by Kenneth Stamp who was a one-time president of, I think it's called the American Historical Association, one of the big associations of academic historians who came right out and said, this was in the 1960s. He said, we need to rewrite the history of the Civil War and Lincoln and all that to support the Johnson administration agenda, the great society and the civil rights laws and all that. And I learned and so they did. And so they did. And so there seems to have been a demarcation of some of the older research I ran across in my research by people like William Archibald Dunning who was a Columbia professor at Tom's alma mater at the turn of the 20th century. And he did this fabulous research and he had a number of PhD students who all produced dissertations that turned into books. And you read these books and you read this research and you could never tell if he was taking one side or another regarding the Civil War. It was all just really good research on what happened and who was involved and so forth. And that all changed. That all changed especially beginning in the 1960s. And Eric Foner, who was also one of Tom's professors at Columbia. Oh, you avoided Eric Foner? Yeah, he's a well-known Civil War. He taught the Civil War course in a graduate program in history, I guess, at Columbia for decades. I think he's retired now. He said the same thing. I ran across a quote of him saying the same thing, rewriting history. And of course, isn't that what we used to criticize the Soviet Union for doing? Rewriting Russian history to make themselves, to aggrandize themselves. And so that's one of the things that motivated me to do this kind of research. And then you got those. So those are the left-wingers who I'll point to and these so-called right-wingers or whatever you want to call them. The Straussians, led by the late Harry Jaffa and his minions have done a lot to rewrite the same history. And there's a book called The Legacy of the Civil War by Robert Penn Warren, the famous poet and novelist, all the King's men, Robert Penn Warren. And he was asked by Time Magazine to write a book on the centennial of the Civil War in 1960. And one of the things he said in there is that the war gave the US government a treasury of virtue. And by that, he meant whatever the US government did from then on was virtuous by virtue of the fact that it was the US government that was doing it. And he pointed to our interference in World War I and World War II, whatever, Vietnam War. Had he gone on and he lived to this day, he would have said the Iraq War, the Afghanistan, you know, it's the US government that is doing it. And then he said, however, to believe this about all this virtue, you have to forget a lot of history. You have to forget that Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, pledged his everlasting support for Southern slavery, even endorsing a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with slavery. He began his first inaugural address by promising to never touch slavery. The War Ames Resolution of the United States Congress in 1861 said, we have no intention of disturbing slavery. This is about saving the union. Lincoln said the exact same thing many times, over and over again. You have to ignore all of Lincoln's speeches in a Lincoln Douglas debates where he said, I as much as any man want the superior position to belong to the white race and things of that sort. You have to forget all of that in order to believe in this everlasting virtue of the national government. And the role of the Straussians in this regard is to keep us in the dark about these things. They have rewritten, Jaffa himself rewrote history. His most famous book is all a book about rhetoric. It's a book about Lincoln's speeches. I told someone this morning who was asking me about this that I could probably make Bill Clinton come out as the second coming of Jesus Christ if I only wrote about the prettier sounding lines in some of his speeches as far as that goes. And that's what Jaffa did in his career. His PhD from the University of Chicago after all was in rhetoric. It wasn't in history or anything related to civil war or anything else. And so you have to, Robert Penn Warren was right. You have to forget all these things in order to buy the idea of, especially of this holy national government. And the new conservatives Straussians are proponents of a highly centralized government and the warfare state, especially the war. So you have Foner and Kenneth Stamp rewriting history in order to perpetuate and expand the welfare state. And then you have these neocons, the Claremont Institute of the Straussians rewriting the same history and joining in with Foner and Stamp and the others to empower the warfare state. When the Iraq war started out, they held a conference at the Claremont Institute, by the way, and they said something and Victor Davis Hansen was there and all these luminaries. And they were saying, they were cheering themselves on. They were patting cells on the back for supporting the war in Iraq because they said something to the effect that this is one of our greatest hours to paraphrase Winston Churchill. And because we were at war again, hooray. And so that's who these people were. And so, and they always, they have seen the rewriting of history not only of Lincoln but other things as a key element. As I've said in my writings, the Lincoln mythology is the ideological cornerstone of the American state, in my opinion, personified by the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, which is covered by the way, inside and eight out with FASIs, F-A-S-C-E-S, the FASIs, the rods held together with straps. And the American, and it was the symbol, you know, FASIs, the word fascism comes from FASIs and they Americanized the FASIs and the Lincoln Memorial by putting cute little American eagles on top of it. If you ever visit the American, so it's sort of a friendly fascism, I guess. You would call that the Lincoln Memorial. And the National Park Service has a publication. I think it's called the true meaning of the Lincoln Memorial and it has the words that they use are, it shows about the importance of authority and the fact that the authorities have the right to punish dissenters, even killing them. Throughout history, this has even involved killing the dissenters, they actually say that in this publication by the National Park Service and this was, the Lincoln Memorial came into being in the 1920s and this was the same period of time when a lot of people kind of like FASIs in America, the American ambassador to Italy, Richard Washburn Child, who was a Harvard graduate like Tom, over here. Will you leave me alone? Was Benito Mussolini's ghost writer and his autobiography, Winston Churchill at the time, said, if I was an Italian, I would have don the black shirt, which was Mussolini's Minions, or black shirts, that was like their uniform. And so this is my theory anyway, and that nobody at that time thought, well wait a minute, FASIs, the fascism wasn't really, it didn't really have a bad reputation in the early 20s like it did by the late 30s and the 40s. And so it was sort of embraced and so my theory anyway is that that's why they're all over the Lincoln Memorial. And so yeah, this stands for authority and I imagine Thomas Jefferson, who also has a memorial on the other end of the ball in DC, would be appalled by this, by this explanation of the meaning of the Lincoln Memorial. And maybe I'll end there, because we only have 10 minutes each or something like that. Go ahead, Tom. Do you mind if I, you're next. Oh, please. Go up there. Thank you. First of all, an apology, I don't know, for some reason, I thought this was just an exclusively Q and A panel and then I realized, oh my gosh, I think I have to prepare something for this. So after lunch, I threw something together, so here it is. All right, so revisionism is a morally neutral term. It simply involves reexamining historical events to see if there had been accurately conveyed and you can be a good revisionist or a bad revisionist and Tom Di Lorenzo just gave you examples of people who were bad revisionists. They looked at a historical narrative and they wanted to change it in order to advance their current day political ambitions. Tom himself is an example of a good revisionist because he just looks at the historical record and he knows that generally the state wants to flatter itself in the way it's portrayed and that includes in the way it's portrayed in history and so he wants to see what exactly happened for real. Now Ryan mentioned the Industrial Revolution and a very nice little book, although of course a lot more research has been done on this subject since this book came out in the 1950s but is a nice little volume edited by F.A. Hayek called Capitalism and the Historians. And in that book, Hayek has an introduction called History and Politics and it's one of my favorite things that Hayek ever wrote. And in there he talks a little bit about the historical controversy about the Industrial Revolution but he also talks more generally about the importance of history when it comes to evaluating current events. He says that if we get history wrong we're gonna get the way we interpret current events wrong. And if we look at history and we think well the 19th century was the century of the robber barons who were monopolists because the free market tends toward concentration and so of course you're gonna have monopolists and they exploited consumers and raised prices and limited production then that's gonna influence the way you think about antitrust law today if you get the historical narrative wrong. So it's important to get history right because history indeed is where so many people look whether they realize it or not to get their current day political views. Indeed, if you look at old photographs or old woodcuts or depictions of people who were working in terrible conditions you think well I guess that's capitalism for you and you remember that from your sixth grade textbook and what you don't remember is the reason people worked in those conditions in those days, it wasn't that the rich people were hoarding all the wealth and they were hoarding all the fancy furniture and all the plasma TVs for themselves and just refusing to share them with everybody. It's that that's what happens when you live in a desperately poor society with very little productivity per capita. That's what happens, it's unavoidable. It's a fact of nature. But as capital accumulation occurs you get out of that problem. So in current events as in history events generally are portrayed in ways that flatter the regime. And we see this all the time in the headlines today. If we didn't have revisionism the headlines of today become the history of tomorrow. And you know how propagandistic even the headlines are, much less the articles. Even the headlines are propaganda. If it weren't for revisionism those headlines would be your history. Now revisionism generally is looked down upon. And of course it would be because the establishment likes the official version. Who are we interlopers to come along and decide that there's a new version of events that we should consider? But the revisionists for example at the time of World War I after that war was over they were not sinister people. To the contrary they very self-consciously imagined themselves as working on behalf of the causes of peace and international understanding. We cannot have the idea that Germany is just a uniquely wicked place. And that's why we had this war take root because then we'll never learn any lessons of anything. If the lesson is, well that one place is really bad. We haven't learned anything about humanity, about war, about the real motivations behind war. And so World War I revisionism that sought to contradict the official decrees of the time that Germany bears sole responsibility and is solely guilty for the outbreak of the war. That whole venture to overturn that and to complicate the question and say reality is much less comic bookish than this was part of a general trend in the 1920s toward bringing about better international understanding. And that involved bringing about the teaching of far more foreign languages that had traditionally been taught in American schools and universities because it was thought that that would advance international understanding. Or the student exchange program where Olaf comes from Sweden and stays in your house and then you understand Sweden better. Well that developed out of the 1920s after World War I also. Even a desire to go back and look at some of the textbooks that were in existence at that time that tended to foster international antagonism by promoting stereotypes about different nationalities. It was thought we have to get rid of that because that's contributing to a lack of international understanding. Revisionism was part of that whole salutary movement. And then of course Ryan mentioned too the Great Depression. If it weren't for revisionism, the only explanation would be, well capitalism just moves in cycles and there was too much wealth disparity between rich and poor so the poor people couldn't afford to buy things and that's why everything collapsed. But given that the collapse was vastly more intense in capital goods industries that produce like machine tools and stuff that no consumer buys, that explanation can't possibly be right so we have to go back and talk about that. The nice thing about the day and age in which we live is that communications are now so rapid and the process of disseminating and acquiring information is now so decentralized that we're observing revisionism occur in real time. As COVID was happening and we got the version of events that said we have this terrible virus and only Dr. Fauci can lead us out of it with masks and social distancing and ruining your life. Simultaneously with that, we had the, this is all BS, look at the charts. Google gives us data about mobility and it turns out that mobility is not corresponding to increased health problems at all. So much for your social distancing solving the problem. And we had all the data coming in and so we were able to give the alternative simultaneously. We don't have to wait three generations for the revisionists to finally come along. We've got it happening simultaneously in real time. Scott Atlas has a book on it, in real time. Or Ukraine, in real time we have Scott Horton telling you this ain't so. We have him telling you that the version of events you're given is meant to feed a certain way of looking at the world, looking at the United States, looking at international relations. Iraq, we got revisionism as it was happening. The housing boom and bust, we got revisionism as it was happening. I wrote a book on it called Meltdown in 2009 saying that the Federal Reserve might have a teensy, weensy bit to do with what's going on here. So again, thanks to all this, we don't have to wait 20 years or 30 years for revisionists to finally say, wait a minute, maybe the new deal didn't solve the Great Depression. That's right, it's happening right now and it's happening in large part thanks to independent-minded institutions like the Mises Institute making possible this great scholarship fighting back against the lies. Thank you. Great, all right, well thank you very much to our panelists.