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In my thirty years as a professor in upper education, I have never witnessed  nor participated in a more extremist, agenda-driven, revisionist conference,  nearly devoid of rhetorical balance and historical context for the arguments  presented.

In both the required preparatory readings for the conference, as well as the  scholarly presentations, I found the overriding messages to include the  following:

1. The U.S. military and its veterans constitute an imperialistic,  oppressive force which has created and perpetuated its own mythology of  liberation and heroism, insisting on a “pristine collective memory” of the  war.

3. War memorials, such as the Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery  (where many WWII dead are buried, including those executed by the Japanese on  Wake Island and the beloved American journalist Ernie Pyle), are symbols of  military aggression and brutality “that pacify death, sanitize war and enable  future wars to be fought” (Ferguson and Turnbull, 1). One author stated  that the memorials represent American propaganda, “the right to alter a story”  (Camacho 201).

4. The U.S. military has repeatedly committed rapes and other violent  crimes throughout its past through the present day. Cited here was the  handful of cases of attacks by Marines in Okinawa (Fujitani, et al, 13ff). (What  was not cited were the mass-murders, rapes, mutilations of hundreds of thousands  of Chinese at the hands of the Japanese throughout the 1930s and 40s. This issue  is a perfect example of the numerous instances of assertions made without  balance or historical context.) Another author stated that the segregation in  place within our military and our “occupation” of Germany after the war was  comparable to Nazism (’we were as capable of as much evil as the Germans”) even  though the author admits, with some incredulity, that he “saw no genuine  torture, despite all the [American] arrogance, xenophobia and insensitivity.“ He  attributes American kindness towards conquered Germans to our ”wealth and power“  which allowed us to ”forego the extreme kinds of barbarism” (Davis 586). Another  author/presenter compared the temporary relocation camps erected by Americans  during the war to Nazi extermination camps (Camacho 206). (This is perhaps the  most outrageous, offensive and blatantly false statement I have ever read in a  supposedly scholarly work).

6. It was “the practice” of the U.S. military in WWII to desecrate  and disrespect the bodies of dead Japanese (Camacho 186). (Knowing this  to be absolutely false, I challenged the speaker/author, who then admitted that  this was not the “practice” of our military. Still, the word remains in his  publication. As he obviously knew this to be false, I can only assume that his  objective was not scholarship but anti-military propaganda.)

The NEH isn’t the first federal agency accused to misusing its funding to  pursue a particular agenda. Most recently, the National Endowment for the Arts  (NEA) was accused of partisan operations when a recorded conference callrevealed government officials asking artists to  design projects in support of the Obama administration’s agenda.