WORDISM: WISHTORY | nationalsalvation.net
My business is finding good, short ways to express what everybody knows. The problem is that to do this, I have to write an article. One good term to express what people already know is worth any number of articles.
Wishtory tells us that George Washington cut down the cherry tree. No one can read history with any accuracy if he is not always aware of wishtory. You simply cannot understand any history at all if you do not realize the reason the information in the history book is produced.
The moment WWII ended there was a huge demand for African Great Civilizations. Before that, it was generally agreed that there weren't any.
So suddenly books poured out about Great African Civilizations. Somebody was writing Wishtory, either those before or those after World War II. But this is the only place you will hear it discussed.
The first thing any writer, academic or popular, does is to figure what will be published and what will sell. It really is publish or perish in academia, and the number of editors is very limited and they all think exactly the same.
By definition, publish or perish means that those who publish determine your fate. If you even suspect that that group does not have a lot of common points of view, you are a fool. Every daily newspaper has almost exactly the same items on page one and page two and so on. Every journal is edited by someone who, like newspaper editors, came up in the same school.
Everybody knows this. Nobody SAYS this.
The line above should be very familiar to BUGS readers.
An editor of an academic journal dreams of having one of his articles published favorably in a national magazine. Every academic writer dreams of the same thing. So when Time had a front page story about the African Eve, those who wanted to publish turned to anything they had to back that idea up or copy it.
As I said, when the first quick look at KGB files did not show any reference to Alger Hiss, it was a front-page story in our local liberal chain newspaper. A little later extensive files were found on Hiss, but they were not mentioned in the paper.
So if you were in a publish or perish situation and you had information on Hiss, which part of the info would you send in?
I have known men who fought for at least thirty countries in World War II. All of them agree that, if it were not for the Italians, American soldiers would cover the pavement as the jokes of the War.
You won't read that, and you know WHY you won't read that. But nobody THINKS about a thousand things like that.
Every Soviet documentary ended with a statement of why everything there proved Stalin was God. Every BBC documentary ends with a sermon about how all that has been said can be fitted into Politically Correct Wishtory.
If you publish or perish, you either don't get tenure or you learn what will be published. This is life or death.
In a perfect society what would be published would be what is true. People who believe in a perfect society are normally given Prozac and if that doesn't work they are sent somewhere quiet for the protection of themselves and others.