I agree with Doug. I care a lot about scholarship. I matters whether we (and others) get things right. If Churchhill's scholarship is flawed, which wouldmn't surprise me, btw, he should be critiqued for it. But there is a time and a place for everything. You don't add your critique, however valid, when the mob is howling for blood. In some ways it is worse in that context if your critique is valid or at least reasonable. Thar makes it seem as if the mob has a point. You wait until the ruckus has died down and rational discussion is possible.
An anlogy: there wasa lot that might have been said to croticize the work of Herbert Aptheker and other Communist historians and scholars in the 1950s. In the party or left press, taht would have been fine. In the public or mainstream scholarly press, at a time when thesew riters were being fired because of their politics, it would have been disgraceful to do anything but stand up for the righst of these writers to maintain their views and do their work, right or wrong. Once that right is established and relatively secure, then you can take them apart.
I don't think we should swallow without analysis or evidence every atrocity story about what the whites did the Indians. Taht does not mean taht we question that the there massive near-genocidal atrocities. But like the false stories about the Nazis making lampshades out of the skins of Holocaust victims, not every such story is true just because many of them are. No matter: if we have work raising doubts about rthe accuracy of people who are under attack and whose jobs are because of their political views, the decent thing to do is to file them under "publish later" and dust off our ACLU material for the present.
jks
--- Michael Dawson <mdawson at pdx.edu> wrote:
> > Luke Weiger wrote:
> >
> > >Other people do care. We call them "scholars."
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > Doug
>
> It's also about what you do and say to retrieve the
> baby from the bathwater
> when both the tub-tippers and the bathwater insist
> on equating the two
> things. So far, so bad... First MR, now LBO.
>
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