As much as some would wish to make political hay of it, how Davy Crockett fell at the Alamo matters little.
There are plenty of versions of Crockett’s heroic death — from Mexican soldiers, women survivors of the battle, the alcalde of San Antonio at the time, and others.
One account though, in the diary of a Mexican lieutenant, Jose Enrique de la Peña, a supposed eyewitness as well, alleges that Crockett and a half dozen prisoners were executed by Mexican Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna after being overpowered and disarmed.
Today every truth or falsehood is accepted or denied based on how it either pleases or annoys the arbiters of political thought. So this alternative history, although published in Mexico in 1955 and garnering little attention until the present, has been declared the correct one by the new mindset in the U.S., whose tendencies almost always lean towards what demeans and injures the nation.
Historiography is often swayed by this kind of partisanship since every chronicle is written by the conquerors and then erased by revisionists.
Common sense, however, is more difficult for either group of censors to stamp out —requiring some sleight of hand to make the de la Peña diary more palatable.
The misdirection in this case is what relevance the manner of Davy Crockett’s demise has, when he and some 200 other Texans accepted certain death holding off an army of thousands of troops for 13 days.
To delve into the gruesome last moments of anyone’s end in those valiant circumstances is unseemly, as the average person instinctively realizes.
Great events, of course, are almost never plainly black and white, and that doubtlessly goes for last stands against overwhelming force.
And notwithstanding activists’ ceaseless and negative reinterpretations of our collective past, history need not always have a malicious, lying and conniving aspect; sometimes things just work out one way rather than another.
It wasn’t just 300 Spartans, for example, holding the pass at Thermopylae.
Seven hundred brave Thespians refused Leonidas’ order for the rest of the Greek force to retreat and perished fighting to the last man as well.
Yet whether the Spartans’ odds facing the enormous Persian army were a thousand to one or 100 to 1 1is hardly germane, except perhaps to facilitate axe grinding 2,500 years later.
And those sharpening blades seem to have one particular family of nations in their sights. If it isn’t the United States’ saga being slandered and humbled, it’s one of America’s allies having its annals negatively rewritten, its courageous episodes diminished.
The remaking of history currently underway uses partisan wrecking balls that conveniently only swing in one direction: at the foundation of the culture and traditions of the West.
So Israel too, as America’s staunch partner in the Mideast, is unquestionably a prime target. The Jewish people’s "Alamo," the fortress at Masada, has likewise also come under intense scrutiny lately.
Where are the skeletons, it’s being asked, of the thousand defenders under rebel leader Eleazar Ben-Yair, and those of their families, who fought to the end and then committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans?
Only a couple dozen remains have been found and there’s evidence some might be the bones of Romans.
Israel’s enemies and critics seem delighted at the dearth of mass graves, since that also deflects attention away from the Herculean proof on the ground left two thousand years ago, far too massive to ever be erased.
The outlines of Roman general Flavius Silva’s camps and walls surround Masada, as does the colossal 750 feet long, 375 feet high earthen ramp the legionnaires built up the side of the sheer cliffs to the ramparts.
Something stupendous and earth-shaking transpired here, whether the Jewish state’s detractors like it or not.
The details of the past certainly are forever subject to debate but basic fairness and objectivity should insist that heroes such as Davy Crockett, King Leonidas or Eleazar Ben-Yair who gave their lives for what they believed shouldn’t be reinvented by advocates so timid and flighty as to be microaggressed by what others believe.
David Nabhan is a science writer, the author of "Earthquake Prediction: Dawn of the New Seismology" (2017) and three previous books on earthquakes. Nabhan is also a science fiction writer ("The Pilots of Borealis," 2015) and the author of many newspaper and magazine Op-Eds. Nabhan has been featured on television and talk radio globally. His website is www.earthquakepredictors.com. Read David Nabhan's Reports — More Here.
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