> I agree with Doug.
Well, I agree with what you say below, and never meant to suggest anything to the contrary (I don't think I did). That's why I wrote in my first message on this subject that Brown's timing was lamentable. But I'm not so sure that waiting for the "proper" time to set things straight is as easy as you seem to imply (though in this particular case, Brown should've just waited a year or so).
-- Luke
> I care a lot about scholarship. It 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