Fools, Frauds & Fakes 15

Harsh terms I agree, but I think you will agree that these words are not too harsh and certainly deserved for the people described herein. Read on.

In the interest of full disclosure I will say that most, but by no means all, of what is contained in this essay is sourced by the 2005 book Hoodwinked :How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture by Jack Cashill. Except for quotations, the conclusions and apothegmatic observations are my own. The author of Hoodwinked is not a quidnunc, but a dedicated truth seeker who is an award winning (yet winning awards is not a guarantee of honest and respectable achievement as you shall see) writer and producer whose articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Fortune and The Weekly Standard magazines. His book is well worth the time and money.

Almost as big a problem as the miscreants who have perpetuated these frauds or just plain goofily wrong ideas are the compliant enablers and apologists on the left, especially in the mainstream media who are umbrageous in their outrage when their statements and motives are questioned. Incredibly, or maybe not, long after many of these ideas had been undisputedly exposed for what they are, the denials and excuses continued and some even to this day.

Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out
When Lady the brach may stand by the fire and stink.

King Lear, I, iv

Who was Walter Duranty? Why none other than a Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent of the New York Times. And why did he win a Pulitzer? He was the New York Times Moscow bureau chief from 1921 to 1934 reporting on the conditions in the Soviet Union, calling Joseph Stalin the world’s “greatest living statesman”, and saying the famine in the Ukraine, North Caucasus, and elsewhere in 1932-33 “is mostly bunk.” In his seminal book, The Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest, Senior Research Fellow and Scholar-Curator at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, estimates 7 million people died in the 1932-33 famine, 6.5 million died as a result of ‘dekulakization’, and 1 million in the Kazakh catastrophe for a total of 14.5 million premature deaths between 1930 to 1937. Some bunk. Duranty was widely acclaimed by liberals as the authoritative voice of what went on in the USSR during his stay there, never mind that everything he said and wrote turned out to be a tissue of lies, distortions, and cover-ups. The formal recognition of the Soviet Union by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 was greatly facilitated by Duranty’s bogus reporting.

When Jayson Blair was canned by the New York Times for making up extensive, but fairly innocuous stuff he complained that Walter Duranty was enshrined in the NYT hallowed hall of Pulitzer winners on the 11th floor of their building with only a small asterisk beneath his picture and this disclaimer in fine print: “Other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage.” There was brief chatter during the Blair episode about pulling Duranty’s Pulitzer, but it quickly faded. Jayson Blair felt hard put by when he was fired for being a lying scoundrel while Duranty was largely not censured for being a much more destructive lying villain. I am not altogether unsympathetic towards the scoundrel.

Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers - now there are a pair you would not want to draw in a card game. Hiss was a Soviet spy who was convicted of perjury and sentenced to prison in 1951. He was defended by practically all of the left in the United States at the time and some even now. President Harry Truman initially proclaimed him a victim of the rabidly anti-communist right until the FBI showed him evidence of Hiss’s culpability. Truman then said, why that SOB, except he didn’t use abbreviations, was guilty as sin. Truman was a plain speaking and honest man – one of the best presidents of the 20th century in my opinion. Anyway, Hiss spent the rest of his considerably long life (b. 1904 – d. 1996) insisting on his innocence. There was never much of a doubt at the time about his guilt and with the opening of the Soviet archives after the end of the cold war and the Venona papers, a vast collection of Soviet Union messages the US government had intercepted and decoded from 1942-46,being made public there was absolutely no doubt. Doubtless from whatever domain he now resides, Hiss is still claiming he was a close buddy of Hoover, Nixon, et al. and as innocent of spying as say, the Rosenbergs and Mata Hari. When Hiss died Peter Jennings said that Hiss had protested his innocence until the end of his life and implied there was still considerably doubt that Hiss was indeed guilty as charged. Perhaps the late Peter Jennings will add his voice to that of Hiss’s in the attempt for posthumous vindication.

Whitaker Chambers was a most unusual fellow. He joined the communist party in 1924 and remained a zealous and committed member until 1938. Along the way he was an editor for the communist newspaper in the USA, The Daily Worker, and a spy for the USSR, being the contact man for Alger Hiss. Chambers had an epiphany in 1938 when he quite the party. As related by Jack Cashill, in the Chambers book, Witness, Chambers tells the following chilling story: “A German diplomat abandoned his Soviet sympathies literally overnight. His daughter, not comprehending the change, told Chambers how it happened; ‘He was immensely pro-Soviet, she said, and then – you will laugh at me – but you must not laugh at my father – and then – one night – in Moscow – he heard screams. That’s all. Simply one night he heard screams.’ Chambers did not laugh. He understood. Those screams just did not penetrate the mind. They penetrated the soul. The man who has not yet lost his humanity finally understands that those are the screams of another human ‘soul in agony’.” The eventual realization that under the Soviets, the “Evil Empire”, millions of people were murdered; terrorized; forcibly displaced from their homeland, with many parents being separated forever from their children; and literally countless innocent citizens starved and worked to death in the Gulags seemed to have escaped the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Noam Chomsky, Lillian Hellman, Alger Hiss, and many more who apparently had or have no humanity and no soul. Or they were or are simply incredibly blind, and willfully so, to reality. In any case these sorry excuses for humans clearly did not even hear a whisper, much less a scream.

Margaret Mead was one of the most famous anthropologists in the world. Her fame started when she published her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928 at the age of 26. Over the years she became the grand dame of anthropology, writing many more books, receiving numerous awards, and serving on several anthropology and natural history boards. Is there a fly in this anointed status? Only one several orders of magnitude larger than a horse fly as it turns out. A dominant theme in Mead’s book on Samoan society and in later books is that in these relatively unsophisticated cultures the people honestly express uninhibited mores and therefore did not have the sexual and interpersonal relationship hang-ups characteristic of Western societies. That sounds charming and innocent. Mead was anything but. According to Jack Cashill, Mead claimed that in Samoan society, given the scarcity of taboos, homosexuality was common, illegitimate children welcome, prostitution harmless, and divorce simple and informal. The casual familiarity with sex led to a culture in which “there are no neurotic pictures, no frigidity, and no impotence, except for the temporary result of severe illness.” Better still, Samoan-style openness dissolved the proprietary tensions – “monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy, and undeviating fidelity” – so problematic in a possessive American culture. Mead concluded that the difference between Americans and Samoans had nothing to do with biology and everything to do with culture. The social environment entirely differentiated Americans from Samoans. The anthropologists, the media, and the public bought her theory completely. At the time of her death 50 years after initial publication Coming of Age in Samoa was still selling 100,000 copies per year. Much of what Mead wrote and postulated was based on her interviews with two teen age Samoan girls.

A young New Zealand anthropologist named Derek Freeman was so entranced by Mead’s work (and why not?) that he went to Samoa as a school teacher in 1939. After Freeman had been in Samoa for several years and became fluent with the language little by little he saw that what Mead had written was seriously wrong. The dominant religion in Samoa had been Christian for a hundred years before Mead set foot there so with that overlay her descriptions should have been suspect, but were not, from the start. After returning to New Zealand and then to London for more studies, Freeland returned to Samoa, going to the very island where Mead had interviewed the two girls. They told Freeman they had made up all the stories they related to Mead because they thought that was what she wanted to hear and said if Mead had ever expressed doubt as to what they said they would have told her the truth. Freeman corresponding with Mead, pointed out many of Mead’s claims which Freeman believed could not possibly be true. Mead ignored him and went ahead with a new edition of her book in 1972 without any corrections. Freeman published his own book in 1983 Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth exposing how Margaret Mead had gotten it so wrong. Why did the labile Ms. Mead allow herself to be hoaxed and write such a book of fiction? She wanted to believe what she wrote even though she had to have known it was largely untrue. When Mead went to Samoa in 1926 she told her husband of three years she would not leave him unless she met someone she loved more. She met someone, in fact several some ones. Married and divorced three times she had numerous affairs during and between the times she was married. She even had a fling with the female assistant of her doctoral advisor. Quite simply she was a sexually frustrated debauchee rebelling against the moral strictures of a conventional upbringing in a middle class family so she constructed this society in the Pacific Islands to suit her own moral and sexual proclivities.

I am reluctant to include Alfred Charles Kinsey in this essay not because he was less culpable than the others, but because he was more. His story is unsettling and disgusting to the point that I will leave it to you to read the evidence of the gross details of his depravity in Jack Cashill’s book or in the authoritative biography of Kinsey by respected historian James H. Jones. If Margaret Mead was merely a libertine, then Kinsey was a pervert and child molester and Kinsey’s wife was not much better. Kinsey was raised a devout Methodist, but lost his faith while attending Harvard. Intelligence was not a deficiency with Kinsey - he was the valedictorian of his high school class – it was his complete lack of moral character. He eventually became every bit as hostile to God and religious people as Rachael Carson. With the exceptions of Martin Luther King and Alex Haley this godlessness is a common thread through the lives of the people described in this essay.

The 2004 movie Kinsey starring Liam Neeson was a paean to Kinsey and his “pioneering and important” work in human sexuality. While the movie at least obliquely references Kinsey’s weirdness, the issue of his undeniable depravity and criminal conduct was never even suggested. Kinsey has been and still is celebrated for his work in documenting the sexuality of the American male and female which was not even the Zeitgeist of the “liberated” late 1960’s and its anything goes “flower children”, say nothing of the later 1940’s - early 1950’s when his books came out. Far from being feted he should have been prosecuted and incarcerated as a pedophile. If you have doubts on that score then I challenge you to read the aforementioned references. The erroneous figure of the American population being 10% homosexual was perpetrated by Kinsey as a result of his interviewing a disproportionate number of homosexuals and other sexual deviants. The actual figure is between 1% and 2% as estimated by thorough and honest anthropologists - still far too many for comfort, but not as ridiculous as Kinsey and his acolytes would have it. I would have to conclude that Kinsey was the Primus inter Pares of all the malefactors written about in this exposé.

Ever wonder why some American icons are subjected to pejorative evaluation without undue censure redounding upon the critic and others are not? Of course that is a rhetorical question – we all know the answer. The two American presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who are widely recognized as our greatest presidents have had their critics who were not immediately drawn and quartered. It has been pointed out that Washington as general of the revolutionary army lost most of his battles with the British; as president, submitted inflated personal expense accounts to congress; and was standoffish and aloof with people, even with personal friends. Without any persuasive evidence at all, Lincoln has in recent years been portrayed as a homosexual and black historian, Lerone Bennett insists that Lincoln was a racist who absolutely who did not free a single slave or had any desire to help black people. In our now ‘enlightened’ age being a homosexual is often to claim morally superior status even to the point that a popular TV series was named Queer Eye for the Straight Guy when the use the term ‘queer’ was consider decidedly homophobic. Perhaps it is like the ‘n’ word which is verboten when used by whites, but acceptable when used by blacks. To me insulting and uncivil speech or actions are not to be condoned when used by anyone towards blameless people. Still I don’t believe there is any intent to compliment Lincoln.

Have you ever heard any criticism of Martin Luther King, especially after he was assassinated? When King graduated from the Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951, given his humble test scores, he clearly was recommended for doctoral studies at Boston University based on race. On his doctoral dissertation King lifted whole passages from other people’s work without attribution, a practice he was to follow his entire career. King even swiped key passages from others for his famed “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. Because King associated with shady characters who were either communists or communist sympathizers, J. Edgar Hoover, often illegally, tapped his telephone, discovering that King was not a communist, but was having extra marital affairs. Martin Luther King was a cynosure of the civil rights movement and a distinguished American who made positive contribution to this country and the world, but he also had character flaws. When proof of King’s extensive plagiarism came out in 1990 the mainstream media, including the Atlanta Journal Constitution, New York Times, and New Republic sat on the story. Other liberals made excuses for King’s plagiarism, defining it, according to Jack Cashill with euphemisms such as: “mining, welding, quarrying, yoking, intertextualization, and voice merging.”

The 1976 book Roots: The saga of an American Family by Alex Haley was a huge success both commercially and artistically. Jack Cashill wrote: “The mini-series based on the book captured more viewers than any series before it. 130 million Americans watched the final episode alone. And Haley won a special Pulitzer Prize for telling the true story of a black family from its origins in Africa through seven generations to the present day in America.” So far so good – the problem is that the rest of this story is not so good, in fact not good at all. Even more that M.L. King, Haley plagiarized great gobs of what he wrote and what he didn’t steal from others he simply made up. Haley’s story of his ancestors in Africa was pure fiction. Sorry folks, but there is no “Kunta Kinte” in Haley’s or the ancestry of anyone else. The author Haley plagiarized the most was Harold Courlander a white man who had written a novel titled The African. The Courlander book earned its author $1400. Alex Haley made $2.6 million in hard cover royalties alone. In 1978 Courlander sued Haley in a U.S. District Court in New York for copyright infringement. During the trial Haley denied he had even read Courlander’s book The African. When it became obvious that passage after passage of Haley’s book was taken from Courlander’s novel the federal judge, Robert Ward, stopped the trial and told Haley and his attorneys that they would have to settle out-of-court else the judge would have to pursue perjury charges against Haley. The case was settled for $650,000. It is rich that Haley purportedly wrote the true story of his ancestors much of which was based on a book of fiction! One would have to be decidedly silly to think the myrmidons of the news media published the results of the trial. Of course they did not. Still I have more of a feeling of pathos than contempt for Alex Haley and indeed respect for Martin Luther King in spite of his all too human peccadilloes.

Martin Luther King and Alex Haley were relatively benign fellows, who perpetrated a little fraud and lied a bit during their careers, compared to a person who did a great deal of harm to a great many people. That person is Rachael Carson. Yes, she is the author of the widely read 1962 book on the environment, Silent Spring. She could accurately be called one of the first and certainly one of most effective “eco-terrorists.” More so than some of the other rapscallions in this essay, the word ‘despicable’ fits Rachael Carson the best. What did she do to deserve such opprobrium? Let’s count her soul damning sins. First off Ms. Carson had no use for God or anyone who believed in Him. Nature was her god and damn everyone who deviated from her concept of what true nature was. To her the natural enemy of nature was man. Some of the titles of the chapters in her book, Silent Spring, are “The Elixir of Death, Rivers of Death, and Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias.” In the text she throws around terms such as, “toxins, contaminants, hazards, death-dealing materials”, and the inevitable “poison.” One gets the idea that she was death obsessed and comfortable with that philosophy. There are people who perversely seem to derive the most satisfaction in life when they are at their unhappiest faultfinding and blaming best.

The bane of human intervention with nature for Carson was the use of dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT). DDT was invented by a German chemist, Othmar Zeidler in 1874 and perfected as a pesticide by Dr. Paul Muller in 1939 for which he received the Nobel Prize. In her book Carson claimed that DDT was originally tested as an “agent of death” for man. That was a blatant lie. She also quoted Albert Schweitzer when he said “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”; implying that Schweitzer was talking about insecticides when he was actually referring to nuclear war. In fact Schweitzer praised the use of DDT as a means of controlling disease carrying insects during his medical work in Africa.

Jack Cashill tells the story of J. Gordon Edwards who was an environmentalist, park ranger, esteemed entomologist, and legendary mountain climber. When Carson’s book came out in 1962 Edwards read it with great anticipation believing there was actual and potential damage being done to the environment, but he quickly realized that Carson was a liar and fraud. While on duty in Italy in 1944 the soldiers in his company were plagued by body lice which were spreading typhus, a disease which had killed an estimated 3 million people in Europe during and after WWI. After a shipment of DDT was flown from the USA to Italy, Edwards spent two weeks dusting every soldier in his company, breathing in the powder all the while. The DDT worked and an epidemic was prevented. The surgeon general estimated that the DDT had saved the lives of 5000 soldiers.

Edwards found Carson’s book filled with scores of “deceptions, false statements, horrible innuendoes, and ridiculous allegations.” The termagant Carson attempting to whip up a veritable Strum und Drang of controversy claimed there were more bird deaths during the DDT era than before. What she didn’t point out was there were more birds during this time so naturally there were more bird deaths. Edwards had his fill of the prevaricating and false alarmist Carson so he went on a lecture tour and had a fill of a different kind. He took to swallowing a tablespoon of DDT on stage before every lecture. An Esquire magazine article about Edwards in 1971 said he had ingested 200 times the normal intake of DDT. In 1959 unprotected workers had applied 60,000 tons of DDT to the inside walls of 100 million houses. Neither the 130,000 workers nor the 535 million people living in the homes experienced any adverse effects. Edwards cited the 500 million lives saved (Why not say 500 million deaths postpone?) that the National Academy of Sciences attributed to DDT and he echoed the World Health Organization’s affirmation that no substance had ever proved more beneficial to man.

Fate seems to have an ironic and droll sense of inevitability. Rachael Carson died at age 56 of cancer – one of the ills she ostensibly wanted to prevent with her crusade against chemical insecticides. Her bête noire, J. Gordon Edwards, who swallowed DDT like a tonic lived to the age of 84 – dying of a heart attack while pursuing his favorite avocation of mountain climbing.

Paul Ehrlich was not a fraud or a liar. He was a good old fashioned fool and fanatic who sincerely believed all of the nonsense he espoused. His exegetic antagonist would be a man named Julian Simon. Ehrlich wrote a number of best selling books – the two most famous were The Population Bomb in 1968 and The Population Explosion in 1991. Among the crack pot predictions he made were: “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people [this writer’s note: the current world population is circa 6.5 billion].” He predicted that by 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million. He envisioned the president of the USA dissolving congress during the food riots of the 1980’s, followed by the United States suffering a nuclear attack for its mass use of insecticides. Jack Cashill opined that Ehrlich was postulating that the United States would get nuked for killing bugs! In his 1968 book Ehrlich’s most optimistic outcome for the world in the next decade or so was that a new Pope would give his blessing for abortion and only half a billion people would die of starvation. The most pessimistic prediction was that worldwide famine would cause a nuclear war and the most intelligent survivers would be cockroaches. And you may have thought I was grossly exaggerating when I said this guy was a real nut case. But don’t think he was some obscure ‘mad as a hatter’ recluse writing out of his basement in his B.V.D.’s. His book The Population Bomb sold 3 million copies and he made 20 appearances on the Johnny Carson show alone. Ehrlich helped push the Sierra Club and Greenpeace to even more leftwing radical positions – which is like encouraging an alcoholic to belly up to the bar more often – and he was, surprise, a founding father of Earth Day. The left just loved him, tendentiously supporting him and his risible theories, ipse dixit. He was awarded a $345,000 MacArthur Foundation grant and the Crafoord Prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel equivalent for environmentalists. Jack Cashill says about him, “In his naturalist faith, and rejection of God, Ehrlich hews to type. Giving Ehrlich the benefit of doubt, his is not the conscious fraud of the bunco artist, but rather the self-deception of the blowhard. He appears to have drunk often at the well of his own snake oil.” It would have been better for him if he had followed Edwards’ example and drank DDT instead.

Julian Simon became tired of hearing Ehrlich’s twin themes of population increase disasters and acute shortages of natural resources so he decided to challenge Ehrlich. Simon attended Harvard on a naval ROTC scholarship and served as a junior officer after graduation until the completion of his tour of duty. He received a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Chicago and then returned to New York to work in direct marketing. Not finding that line of work fulfilling, he went to the University of Maryland as a professor of business administration until he died in 1998. Simon made a famous bet with Ehrlich. He told Ehrlich to pick any five commodities and hold them for ten years. If scarcity caused the prices to rise at the end of ten years, then Simon would buy then from Ehrlich thereby giving Ehrlich the profit difference. However if the prices declined then Ehrlich would have to pay Simon the difference between the current price and what Ehrlich purchased them for. Ehrlich picked chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Not only did the prices decline on all five commodities, but of 35 standard metals 33 dropped in price as did oil and food. Ehrlich paid Simon $570.07 and he paid himself much more in lost reputation. Ehrlich allowed as how the bet might have been a mistake – he could have laid long odds that it was. Simon also had a thing or two to say about Al Gore’s book Earth in the Lurch (well, perhaps the actual title is Earth in the Balance). Simon said, “The book is as ignorant a collection of clichés as anything ever published on the subject.” And he exposed the clichés of vanishing farmland, poisonous DDT, deadly dioxin, and lethal Agent Orange with hard and undeniable data. Al Gore never tried to answer Simon anymore than he tried to justify calling the internal-combustion engine the most destructive invention of man in history.

Sometimes you just can not imagine something as bizarre and incomprehensible as what the loony left comes up with. There was a news story in 2005 which said Ted Turner (now you begin to understand) will join a group, possibly drafted from Comedy Central, to journey to North Korea to save the flora and fauna, especially in the demilitarized zone (I swear on the Bible or Das Kapital, take your pick, that I did not make this up). Coincidentally in the same week a North Korean was on a book tour in the USA. He had been sent to one of the Gulags set up by Kim Il Insane (Sung) when he was nine years old not because of what he did of course, but because his father and grandfather were less than excited about living in a country ruled by one of the most repressive regimes in recent times. The boy eventually escaped from the People’s Paradise of North Korea (he just couldn’t take all that happiness) and came to the West to write a book titled Aquariums of Pyongyang. The now young man told his and other ordinary North Korean’s story on the C-SPAN Book TV program. He retold, as if it needs retelling, the gruesome story of hundreds of thousands of people being sent to the Gulags to labor until they died of overwork, starvation, or disease. It sure is heart-warming to know the egregious Ted Turner and his lefty brummagem cohorts are visiting the People’s Paradise to save the birds and flowers. He follows a long line of fellow travelers who care more about nature than people. This is the same Ted Turner who called Christians “losers” and after the company he founded, CNN, was taken over by the Time Warner Company, but before he was kicked out of the organization, spotted a couple of female CNN staffers working on Ash Wednesday with smudges of ash on their foreheads. Good old tolerant Ted made the snide comment to another person, “Who are they, a couple of Jesus Freaks?” Likely if they had painted a hammer & sickle on their foreheads Ted would have been effusive in his praise for their good taste and support for the Communist International.

When these frauds and quacks are exposed, even if not admitted by the folks on the left, I must say I get a certain feeling of schadenfreude. Forgive me.