I'm afraid it'd be a lot of people talking about what they don't know much about. Also, I gotta say, it makes me nervous that pissing on Churchill's scholarship will contribute something to minimizing the horror of Indian genocide. Doug
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Back in the mid-nineties there was a smear campaign disguised as a question of scholarship mounted on Martin Bernal's Black Athena. The charge was led (among others) by Mary Lefkowitz, a Classics scholar who wrote a refutation called, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History.
This issue was heavily, exhaustively, and authoritatively debated by academics and scholars on several e-lists. The scholarship on what role Egyptian and sub-Saharan African societies played in the development of the ancient world (and therefore Western world) was a deeply divisive issue where prejudice seemed more than evident.
Lurking just below the surface of this debate were the old European race theories, 19thC Linguistics, Sociology, and Classics studies that attempted to trace Euro roots to the Aryans, or baring that then directly to the Mycenaean Greeks---a western world with no Egypt and especially no Africa.
At first I was very sceptical about the interaction between the Egyptians and early Greeks. As it turned out an archaeologist in these debates had made a career of `digging' in the coastal waters and islands in the Aegean sea and had found a broad artifactual record of on-going commerce with the Egyptians in the Mycenaean era (abstract:http://home.gwu.edu/~ehcline/SWDSAb.html), Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, Eric Cline:
``Additional evidence has also emerged indicating direct and indirect contacts with Mesopotamia, a larger volume of Cypriot and Italian imports than previously imagined, a possible Hittite embargo against the Mycenaeans, and a possible Egyptian embassy to the Aegean in the time of Amenhotep III. The data indicate that Bernal is correct in hypothesizing substantial Aegean contacts with, and possible influences from, Egypt during the late second millennium BC. There is, however, no archaeological, pictorial, or literary evidence to substantiate Bernal's claim that the Egyptians ever "exercised some kind of hegemony over the [Aegean] region." The only suggestion that such an event ever occurred is found in Greek mythology, but these tales have not yet been substantiated by scientific evidence. There is also no evidence to suggest the presence of Syro-Palestinian enclave colonies in the LBA Aegean. The data which do exist are indicative of peaceful diplomatic and commercial expeditions sent between the Aegean, Italy, Egypt and the Near East; although they also suggest that these international trade and contacts were as complicated and as politically motivated 3500 years ago as they are today.''
In other words there was plenty of evidence for something slightly less than what Bernal advocated, but entirely against what Lefkowitz maintained. The weight of evidence fell on the Bernal side---although not all the way over to the `Socrates was Black' school.
I did some digging and found out that Lefkowitz had written her book with a grant from the Olin Foundation. That fact said it all. This was rightwing sponsored scholarship with an agenda. As one very funny Chicano guy said, `Who would have thunk it. Lefkowitz linked to weapons of mass destruction!' Hilarious. (This WMD crack was aimed at M. Albright who was carrying on during this time about Iraq---justifying the UN embargo)
Now, I suspect if somebody goes digging into the influence and money surrounding the attacks on Churchill, they will find plenty of Rightwing (and/or Christian) dirt.
In the meantime, the actual question of whether or not the US Army deliberately started or helped spread the small pox epidemic in 1837 seems much less controversial in US history, than the controversies in the Black Athena debate.
But getting back to Churchill's position. The most serious question is how to fight this. My suggestion would be to set up a academic conference with Native American and Hispanic American scholars, and go over the small pox, genocide, Indian and Mexican American wars. There are a lot of important historical questions worthy of informed discussion---and an opportunity to present papers for those struggling in academia. There is always a good chance that more research would develop an even worse indictment against the US as an occupation force in the Indian and Mexican territories. (Lots of resonance with current events.)
Maybe I sound Pollyanna about this, but I think such an academic oriented conference could help the fight against the rightwing assault on `multiculturalism' in the US academy. After all the Right is spreading a rhetoric of the Pox, performing ethnic cleansing through the disease of words that symbolically scar, disfigure, mutilate, and erase history.
Judging from the Bernal-Lefkowitz controversy, while nobody was convinced either way unless they were open minded to begin with (and many more were than had been assumed in advance), it helped clear the air. Afrocentrism wasn't harmed or discredited and the Eurocentrics were not validated. It became clear that the ancient world (including the early Greeks) were profoundly multicultural from the beginning.
CG