21
posted ago by bartbertbirtbortburt ago by bartbertbirtbortburt +21 / -0

Ron Unz's American Pravda Series (https://www.unz.com/page/american-pravda-series/)

Ron Unz was born in California in 1961 to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants and seems to have made a modest fortune in Silicon Valley in the 1990s (nothing near todays tech billionaires though). His "American Pravda" series of articles raises the question "what if most of the historical and political narrative of the 20th century is wrong?" Unz's himself makes the analogy of a young Russian/Eastern European researcher discovering after the fall of the Iron Curtain that most of what they had been taught and what "everybody knows" is wrong, or at least severely distorted. One would expect such a state of affairs within Soviet Communism, but could the same thing have happened in the West? Unz says: "yes."

How could this happen? Unz, through a now lengthy series of articles, argues that Western "history" has been written by Journalists and ideologically motivated academics. There's the gamergate tie in. Some of the content wasn't new to me, some of it was astonishing. I highly recommend the series.

I'm not sure which of part of the series I would recommend beginning with. Because the time period he tends to focus on is the inter-bellum period to the aftermath of WW2 you might consider one of the big ones: "American Pravda: Understanding World War II" (https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-understanding-world-war-ii/). The article I found most jaw dropping was "American Pravda: Our Great Purge of the 1940s" (https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-our-great-purge-of-the-1940s/).

All of his articles have an audio recording, making them pretty easy to digest.