>Anyway, even if this Muravchik is half right somebody needs to have a talk
>with Professor Herold. People should be able to see clearly how he came
>up with these numbers, whatever they might turn out to be. One can, of
>course, make the point that the whole business of tit for tat body counts
>is sickening, but if you're gonna put a number out there...
There is a popular perception, not limited to ideologues and journalistic hacks, that reality comes with numbers attached to them - all you need to do is to read the them and voila! you have an accurate account. Anyone who came near an actual data collection process knows that such a perception is plainly false. Even in countries with very advanced statistical data collection systems, such as Canada, Australia, the US and most OECD countries, the official statistics are based on a fair amount of guestimates and are constantly revised. The situation deteriorates rapidly when we move outside OECD. In most countries of Africa (with the exception of South Africa) there are no reliable statistics of any sort - most of the published data are guestimates.
Counting the war dead is exponentially more difficult than compiling "pece-time" statistics, because inadequate infrastructure allowing systematic data collection and verification, weak as it was in the peace time, is usually the first casualty of war. At the very best we can come with very broad estimates. The fact that year after 9-11 the officials still do not have an exact number of people who died in the WTC speaks volumes to this.
During my 10 year involvement in international data collection at Johns Hopkins I received numerous requests from journalistic hacks for "impossible statistics" - figures that either cannot be estimated with any reasonable accuracy or are simply too vague to have any meaning (my favorite: "what is the total number of voluntary organizations in the world?"). I came to the realization that journalism is modern docta ignorantia - folks who think they know what they are talking about but have neither time nor patience for caveats and methodological footnotes - and I learned that it comes with the territory. Journalists generally are not stalwarts of analytical thinking.
But what this Muravchik hack does goes beyond the ordinary journalistic docta ignorantia. This is pure propaganda Stalinist- or tobacco-industry style. First, he undermines the person he attacks through guilt by association - by linking him to the "enemy" ideology. Stalinists and Maoists used to label people they assaulted with such colorful epithets as "spit-soiled midget of black reactionism" or "paper tiger of western imperialism." Muravchik's invectives are not as colorful but represent the same line of ad hominem assault nonetheless. Then, he concentrates on one detail among many and discredits it by holding it to unrealistic standrads. Tobacco-industry propaganda claims that the connection between smoking and cancer is less then certain (i.e. probabilistic) and therefore "unscientific". The fact of the matter is that all modern science is probabilistic - the only things that give you certainty are religion and ideology. Muravchik follows the same line of assault - he points out to bona fide discrepancies and claims them as proofs of insufficient factual evidence. Then he proceeds with a pars pro toto fallacy by extending his claim on the entire argument he attacks.
Muravchik sounds like a Russian name. His journalism is a prima-facie Stalinist style propaganda assault. Coincidence?
wojtek