The Reason Lincoln Had to Die

[mikegriffith1]

(11-28-2018 04:38 PM)GustD45 Wrote:  I just did a google search of Don Thomas and found nothing except a link to this thread and Amazon and Barnes & Noble links to buy the book. I just joined this list about a week or so ago and am jumping in to a fairly hot discussion I see. Ms Verge is, rightly so, jumping on this. I have not yet read anything that Mr. Thomas has written, but have seen a video on YouTube.

In reading through the replies in this thread to Thomas's first book, I see that they fail to address the vast majority of his arguments and documentation.

I am nearly finished with his first book. A good chunk of it is simply irrefutable. One might not like the facts he documents, but they are facts nonetheless.

Quote:Ms Verge I will say I agree he will have to live with it as you have been with the Surratt Society for so long and have worked with many luminaries in this field.

The "luminaries" in this field have been writing in an echo chamber for decades, oblivious to the mountain of facts that destroy the military tribunal's tale. This field is one of the worst echo chambers I've ever seen. There is no reasoned, critical peer review. As long as a book toes closely enough to the military commission's story, it is applauded and approved. If it does not, it is either ignored or summarily rejected with appeals to authority and with nit-picking that avoids dealing with most of the evidence the book presents.

The Pearl Harbor case used to be like the Lincoln assassination case still is. For about 30 years, all "mainstream" authors on the subject followed the story spun by the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack (1945-1946) and its apologists. The committee's majority concluded that the local commanders in Hawaii, Admiral Kimmel and General Short, were almost entirely to blame, that they failed to make adequate preparations and to take adequate precautions, and that the Roosevelt administration did nothing seriously wrong in the months leading up to the assassination. For a good two or three decades, numerous books were churned out that heaped scorn and blame on Kimmel and Short and that exonerated FDR from all blame. The few books that challenged this position were scorned as "revisionist" and were deemed to be "outside the mainstream of Pearl Harbor scholarship."

But this began to change when a slew of admirals and other military experts, citing declassified files and other disclosures, began to challenge the standard view. These authorities were high-ranking and/or distinguished and credentialed enough that their arguments could not be brushed aside with appeals to authority and summary dismissals.

Nowadays, most Pearl Harbor scholars reject the attacks on Kimmel and Short and place a great deal of blame on the Roosevelt administration for withholding an enormous amount of intelligence from Kimmel and Short.

A similar event happened in the George Custer/Battle of the Little Big Horn (LBH) field. For many decades, the standard, dominant view was that Custer acted recklessly and irresponsibly and that Reno and Benteen (his two ranking subordinates) performed capably. For at least the last 30 years, this view has been thoroughly rejected by the vast majority of Custer/LBH scholars. In fact, the last several major and acclaimed books on the case all vindicate Custer and argue that Reno and Benteen shirked their duties and failed to support Custer the way they should and could have.

But the Lincoln assassination field is still a vast echo chamber, an echo chamber (1) that rejects any and all books that seriously challenge the official story, no matter how well documented and persuasive those books might be (and many of them are very good), and (2) that uncritically and automatically repeats even the silliest myths put forward by the military tribunal.