[lbo-talk] Re: lbo-talk Digest, Vol 16, Issue 19

[T Fast]

> Doug wrote:
>
>> Oh please. This isn't about "scholarship" - it's deeply political.
>> It's about what people are allowed to say in public, and what
>> universities are allowed to teach. It's about admitting the murderous
>> history of the U.S. instead of factchecking a hothead's footnotes. If
>> you can't see that, well, maybe you have a bright future with Marty
>> Peretz.
>
> It's hardly paradoxical to believe that Churchill shouldn't have been 
> fired
> for his odious post-9/11 comments (thankfully, he's no longer in any real
> danger on that score) and that the US government did really nasty things 
> to
> Native Americans while also believing that it's entirely proper for 
> scholars
> to inquire as to what nasty things the US government actually did (e.g. 
> did
> the US Army intentionally create a smallpox epidemic amongst the Mandan?).
> It's also entirely proper for scholars to castigate other scholars who
> publish bullshit (the most charitable interpretation of Churchill's Mandan
> genocide claim) and sometimes fire those who publish intentional
> fabrications (the least charitable interpretation).  I don't really see 
> why
> it's so hard for you to wrap your head around all these seemingly
> uncontroversial notions.
>
> -- Luke

The context and timing are everything here.  It is precisely because it is 
the context of general move to shut down public debate, increase pressure on 
university administrations to police the curriculum of leftish profs, the 
general move to grind down what is left of the US left in the American 
intelegencia, and the move to produce a counter revisionist history by the 
right. In any other context or time it would be possible to actually have a 
discussion about Churchill's relative merits as a scholar.

To have this conversation in this context is to tacitly accept that it may 
be OK to fire Churchill, that it may be OK to strengthen the assault on the 
left in the university, and that it may be OK to further grind dissent out 
of the body politic.  Why is this?  Why is Churchill so important? What 
makes the Mandan controversy so important that all the regressive tendencies 
at play in the body politic should be countenanced?

So one is forced to make a political choice.  And good liberals who pretend 
otherwise are making a political choice to which they then resent being held 
accountable.  If you could show that, or how, the question of Churchill's 
scholarship could be sorted out from this context then I would be glad to 
hear it.  But if you can't, then the claim that, that is all you or anyone 
else is doing is patently false.  So convince us.

Travis