Harry Elmer Barnes :: essays research papers

In 1952, Harry Elmer Barnes wrote a timely article, "How Nineteen Eighty-Four Trends Threaten American Peace, Freedom, and successfulness" as the final chapter of the classic re tranceist anthology, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. Barnes analyzed George Orwells classic novel as a work of prophecy and sounded the alarm to puff the "1984" trends prevalent in the America of his day. Barnes argued that propagandists and "court historians" were fashioning a present, based on a falsified and inaccurate telling of the past, that was designed to meet Establishment desires to go into in world wars. Ironically,Barnes article was omitted from the first edition the collection.(1)Barnes may be best remembered as the author of the generally accepted definition of "revisionism," "Revisionism means secret code more or less than the effort to correct the historical record in the light of a more complete collection of historical facts, a more calm political a tmosphere, and a more objective attitude." (2) Barnes had discovered that a more nearly accurate version of the history of the First demesne War was only possible after the fighting had ended and the emotional excesses had lessened. He was unable to predict that similar corrections of Allied propaganda and popularized conceptions of the methods of warfare in the Second World War would meet even sterner resistance.Today - half a century after the conclusion of the Second World War - it would be fair to expect a less emotional environment, one in which historians, researchers and writers were free to examine the actual causes of the war as well as the atrocities act by both sides in the conflict. However, those and other topics are more forbidden than ever with the greatest taboo surrounding analysis of the fate of Europes Jews and others in what has coiffe to be known as the Holocaust.In 1950, three years prior to Barnes article concerning "1984" trends another author, Ray Bradbury, set out a foreboding vision of the hereafter in a short story titled, "The Fireman." Later, Bradburys story would be renamed Fahrenheit 451 after the temperature at which paper catch fires. Fahrenheit 451 describes a horrific future in which millions of books are banned and firemen set fires instead of extinguishing them. In order to maintain a society of brainwashed, "happy" people, the firemen kick down doors and burn the hated volumes along with the homes that housed them.Barnes would never have suspected how fast the world would progress from the "1984" trends he identified to the trends Bradbury identified in Fahrenheit 451(3).