As we remember Pearl Harbor 71 years ago today, we are reminded of the many sacrifices of the Greatest Generation who led us through through some very difficult years which included the Depression and a world war.

Unfortunately, there are revisionists attempting to rewrite our history, including liberal college instructors intent on spreading a false doctrine on America's campuses. Earlier this week, I had an opportunity to hear Thomas L. Eastwood give a lecture on how revisionists, including these professors, have been influencing our historical perspective of World War II, especially the Pacific War against Japan.Eastwood spent 27 years in law enforcement and an adjunct professor at the Defense Security Institute in Virginia, where he specialized in Investigative, interview and interrogation tactics. A recipient of the Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Award, Eastwood credits the late military historian Stephen Ambrose, and film directors like Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks for bringing history to the forefront of our media-driven popular culture with such film classics as "The Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific."Eastwood said Hanks received less acclaim for "The Pacific" due to the revisionists' view that Japan was a "bad war" and that America used some brutal tactics rather than being a liberator of nations. They point to America's use of the atomic bomb against Japan and the fact that many Japanese Americans were deterred in camps in the western U.S. during the war.What revisionists ignore is the enormous casualty rate that would have resulted with a U.S. land invasion against Japan. President Harry Truman learned from Gen. George General Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, that an invasion would cost at minimum one quarter of a million casualties, and might cost as much as a million, on the American side alone.In 1992, UCLA was given a two-million-dollar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education to develop new standards for history books for grades five through twelve. The results of that effort are appalling. Some history books give little mention or completely ignore the contributions of great Americans such as Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, or the Wright Brothers. George Washington's presidency is often ignored as is his famous farewell address.Russian philosopher Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned: "To destroy a people you must first sever their roots." And political commentator/author Patrick Buchanan said: "To create a 'new people,' the agents of our cultural revolution must first create a new history; and that project is well advanced."We should all be concerned about the focus from the radical left to rewrite our history. Many parents are oblivious that their child's history book may contain more information on Madonna than George Washington, but it is happening.We must fight the liberal threat to trash our history, a legacy that The Greatest Generation fought so hard to protect for us seven decades ago.By Jim Zbickjzbick@tnonline.com