History S Greatest Libels

George Orwell said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” Liberals understand that they win victories today by distorting the record of our past. For all their devotion to the merits of tradition, conservatives think a great victory, such as the confirmation of Clarence Thomas, is the end of the battle. Liberals never concede the historical record, and neither should those who believe in limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty. In History’s Greatest Libels, Steve Byas takes the battle to the Left, challenging head-on their politicized distortions of the past.

This book argues that there exists no natural, evolutionary history of free speech. It also challenges interpretations that rest upon discovering an 'original understanding' about the First Amendment. This interpretive history of the law of libel highlights the complexity and historically rooted nature of legal concepts and legal consciousness in the U. S.

A strange and repugnant mystery of the twentieth century is the durability of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a clumsy forgery purporting to be evidence of the supposed Jewish plot to rule the world. Though it has been exposed as a forgery, some apprentice brownshirt is always rediscovering it, the latest in a line of gullibility that includes, most famously, Henry Ford. Recently it has been translated into Japanese and circulates once again with renewed virulence in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1924 in Germany the Jewish author and journalist Binjamin Segel wrote a major historical exposé of the fraud and later edited his work into a shorter form, published as Welt-Krieg, Welt-Revolution, Welf-Verschwörung, Welt-Oberregierung (Berlin 1926). Translator Richard S. Levy, a specialist on the history of anti-semitism, provides an extensive introduction on the circumstances of Segel's work and the story of the Protocols up to the 1990s, including an explanation of its continuing psychological appeal and political function.