How to parry propaganda

With counter-propaganda of equal or superior quality, of course.

This is not that.

America.

Writes Andrew Romano, D'Souza aims to rebut

what he describes as the four “indictments” [Howard] Zinn and his followers have made against America: “that we stole the country from the Native Americans; that we took half of Mexico in the Mexican War; that we stole the labor of African Americans; and that today our foreign policy and our free market system are forms of theft.”

The first three are of course false if only because the crimes alleged would all have happened long before any of us were born.

Also if, as I do not believe, it is a fact of law that the Indians at some time owned all that part of North America now comprised in the USA it is a silly fact of silly law.

[Aside: The ownership of the oil under the ground by Muslims walking upon it in so much of the world, while only just less silly, has been and is still far more fraught with evil consequence. /Aside]

And it does not impress me one whit more than any Conquistador's perfectly legal claim to take possession of vast continental territories in the New World for his royal sponsor merely by setting his foot on the shore ever impressed Zinn or his America-hating acolytes.

Too, if America was stolen from the Indians was not Mexico stolen from them, as well?

And if a thief later falls victim of another person who relieves him of what was not lawfully his, anyway, is that person also a thief - and, really, why bother to split these hairs?

As for the labor of slaves, well, the claim that anyone stole it is pretty clearly intended as moral rather than legal - making it pure eyewash.

As are, of course, the first two "indictments" if intended - as they surely were - to be moral in nature, concerned with alleged facts of supposed natural justice.

And what about the fourth indictment, really two,

that today our foreign policy and our free market system are forms of theft?

Again, more morality and so more eyewash.

Or rather, more coercive nonsense aimed to threaten and bully, to license hatred, betrayal, and even violence.

As was well said by the founder of legal positivism, laws, in brief, are commands of the state backed by force.

And the state?

In brief, force backed by bullshit - commonly, the bullshit of morality, the bullshit of religion, or both.

Politics is civil war, ultimately the war of all against all, mostly by means other than outright force, its chief weapons being the forms of bullshit just now cited.

Zinn's People's History was a blow against America of a potency that has only grown with the decades.

Oh, Andrew Romano's rebuttal of D'Souza's rebuttal has the same flaw as D'Souza's rebuttal of Zinn.

Still, it is impossible to read his defense of Zinn's indictments, or D'Souza's rebuttals of them, without seeing that all three men are exclusively committed to the energetic shovelling of vast amounts of the most aromatic bullshit.