(By the way, this is not _ad hominem_. Your characterization of Churchill as "irredentist" is racist, not you)
It is shockingly racist for you to use a term like "irredentist" to refer to a Native American liberationist. It is equivalent to Holocaust denial in Europe. "Irredentist" is used , for example, to refer to WWI-WWII era ,imperialist Germans starting world wars to "recover" territory. Churchill is a Native American activist raising the legitimate protests of Indians against the world-historic genocidal usurpation of the Western Hemisphere by Europeans. In other words, he is the absolute opposite of an "irredentist". You seem to have no sense of the distinction between oppressed and oppressor nations, a critical left concept. "Irredentist" is a totally wrong concept to apply to the leaders of oppressed nations who are protesting imperialist usurpation of their land !
The left should be _defending_ Churchill. You are on the right, not left, when you pile on at this critical moment. The fact that you are getting support from the right and criticism from the left should make you stop and think what you are doing. The left certainly shouldn't be following your example. We would be giving the left a bad name if we didn't criticize you for lining up with the imperialists and racists.
I guess you mean well. Get a grip, comrade.
Charles Brown ( not related)
^^^^^^
Thomas Brown :
I think the two phenomena are related. Were the left more "nitpicky about factchecking individual claims", it would be less vulnerable to such attacks. Reading Churchill reveals that he is not of the mainstream left. He is an irredentist ethnic nationalist, closer to Milosevic than anyone else I can name off the top of my head.
The left should have taken the lead in criticizing Churchill and his ilk.
Instead, the left gave him kneejerk support, and is now paying the price in taking the blame for him.
I published in the midst of the right-wing firestorm only because my findings would not have been taken seriously before. I'm getting support I don't want from the right, and I'm getting uninformed ad hominem criticism from the left. Sometimes the world is upside down.
The left should never have fallen for the post-revolutionary chic that led to people like Churchill and Dohrn obtaining tenured positions. Now the left is getting beat up for owning these folks whose values would be abhorrent to most.