>
> My understanding is that Russian and Polish pogroms in the 19th century were
> officially authorized and encouraged.
Yes, that's true. But there are two points that should be made. One is that there is organization, and then there is Organization. The sort of elaborate zweckrational thinking of the Nazis seems absent from the Rwandan example,
* * *
That was my point in bringing it up. In some ways Rwanda seems to have been like a huge and more vicious Russian-style program than the bureaucratically articulated nazi genocide.
> The
Nazis also seem to have genuinely believe their crazy ideas, whereas the
impression that I got was that the Russian officials were pretty cynical.
* * *
Well, they were violently antisemitic. Butthe were too educated to fall for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. besides, they knew that they had written the Protocols.
> The other point is that much of the earlier activity in Germany and France
had been very much autonomous.
Yes.
> I don't like Norman Cohn's
> writing on millenarian movements all that much,
>
> Why not?
I think that there are several problems with it. The most obvious one is the outright contempt he seems to have for the people he is writing about. That's hard to avoid, I suppose, when you are dealing with a Master of Hungary, the crusaders and whatnot, but when it comes to the Anabaptists activists it becomes clear that he has a hatchet ready for anyone out to provoke radical change.
* * *
OK, though it's been while since I read this.
> His gripe seems to be with radicalism itself, and at this point I think he is reading backwards from his interpretation of the two totalitarianisms of his time. He even hints at the idea that radicalism is comparable to a psychological dysfunction. Conversely there is a far too rosy picture of the medieval church, of the knights, which is quite conservative, and more than just a little bit naive. Though there is a very important point to be made by pointing to the precedents of totalitarianism, Cohn's historiographical point of view seems to be based on projecting 20th century totalitarianism backwards. It's still a very impressive history,
* * *
As long as we are agreed on that.
> we learn about these movements from people who had
theological disputations with them, and though Cohn is aware of this, he
seems to think that it is sufficient to be neutral as to the judgements of
the chroniclers, but by that point the real damage is already done: the
matter has been construed from a theological perspective.
* * *
OK, so he's not Carlo Ginzberg or Christopher Hill. They hadn't even developed those approaches when Coh wrote. But these are fair enough criticisms.
> For analysing religious peasant uprisings, I am huge fan of Ranajit Guha's
work on Indian uprisings - Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency and the
article "The Prose of Counterinsurgency". In my opinion, that's the way to
go. Wrong continent and mode of production, unfortunately.
* * *
What do you think of Hill's stuff on rteligious radicalism in 17th century England?
jks
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