Will those who distort history be confronted?

I wonder whether those extolling the "black armband" opinion (for that's what it is) of history, who compare what happened a long time ago with the values and mores of today's society will be called on their rewriting of history?

A pretender in the US has been called out and now faces court, trying to litigate against those who exposed him as a plagiarist and liar.

R.G. Robertson, author of Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian, said he was glad that Churchill’s supporters did not sway the regents.

“I’m glad that scholarship, or the ideal of scholarship, won out over somebody’s weird view of political correctness,” he said. “I’m happy that it happened, that he’s been found out, and, by his peers — meaning other university people — and been called what he is, a plagiarizer and a liar.”

Robertson’s book was among those cited by investigators as having been mischaracterized by Churchill.

“Facts are facts and truth is truth, and when you’re dealing with history I think it doesn’t need to be distorted by people with a warped political objective,” Robertson said.

From LGF.

"Is there now a human right to an airbrushed history?"

It appears so.

Rewriting history has been the order of the day for many years now, we've seen it in Australia with the History Wars' differing versions of history between historical fact and history defined by feelings. (Note the stoush regarding Aboriginal history and the white-man's treatment of Aboriginal people playing out between Manne and Windschuttle. )

Dr Paul Moon has written This Horrid Practice in which he has spoken of pre-colonial cannibalism and, in the same vein as Germs, he has said it was caused by rage and anger, rather than the desire to consume the "mana" or traits of the person consumed. A complainant has taken this issue to the HRC because they claim that the book "describes the whole of Maori society as voilent and dangerous".

The HRC is playing it down for the moment, pointing to a high threshold that needed to be met to avoid unnecessary incursions into the right to freedom of expression. That is all well and good. But one needs to ask why we have allowed such a stifling atmosphere to develop where the immediate response if someone is offended is to clamour to authorities about a breach of human rights. Am I the only one thinking that if we shut these places down, we might just learn to cope with robust debate and return to an atmosphere where free speech is cherished rather than chastened? The ability to run off to some Big Brother bureaucracy is weakening our Western fibre.

Janet Albrechsen has covered the use of Human Rights law to enable revisionism in history in her column this week.

There was once something honourable about human rights. They were limited to the essential rights that most reasonable people can agree on. The right to vote, the right to a fair trial, freedom of speech, the rule of law and so on. But the human rights project started going awry the moment we started drafting up great compendiums purporting to list all the rights of man.