>If you are wrong, and he is in fact
>fired, then your essay will have helped ensure that a tenured academic
>with unpopular opinions was fired for those opinions - regardless of
>the truth or falsity of your essay.
Yup. Churchill isn't known primarily as a scholar, but as a political figure. He's not in trouble for fucking up a footnote - as Jon Wiener shows in his book Historians in Trouble (I'll be posting the radio show with my interview with Wiener in a day or two), rightwingers can screw up massively and suffer no consequences, but a leftwinger can get fired over relatively minor errors. Finding errors in Churchill's scholarship is, in the current context, assisting in a politically motivated persecution.
I am glad Thomas Brown joined the list to explain his motives. He's removed any doubt about where he stands.
Doug