What's this legalism here? The standards for a criminal trial are not appropriately imported into historical inquiry. We want to know what happened based on the evidence.
Moreover the idea that this group to whom these remarks are addressed presume that white Americans are innocent, etc., is so ludicrously false that it is hard to accept that it is put forward as something to be taken as true. This is not the National Association of Scholars here; this is the LBO list. Every one of us accepts the view stated by Doug, "the truth is awful enough," that is, the truth about what the white settlers did to the Native Americans. No one here thinks that Custer and Sheridan, etc. were "innocent."
However, that does not answer the question about the intentional spreading of smallpox by means of using infected blankets.
, any transmission of deadly epidemic
> from
> whites to Indians might have been on purpose.
"Might have been," true. Now go out and prove it.
Nor should you be
> able to say if someone says "the transmission of
> small pox was on purpose" they are "making up"
> facts or
> are to be brought up on charges. The evidence _as a
> whole_ discussed in the U of Col report does not
> support "accident" more than "on purpose".
What the evidence of the report supports does not go to what happened but to what WC did to support his claims. He misrepresented sources, He made up stuff. He cited as evidence things he ghostwrote himself. He did this for years.
>
> There are people , scholars, etc saying that the
> transmission was accidental, yet no one is bringing
> them up
> on charges for making a statement without enough
> evidence to support it, despite that the evidence
> is
> _not_ stronger for their claim than for the opposite
> claim of "on purpose". [CB]
Making claims without evidence is bad, but it's different from making up the evidence. Once is just bad scholarship. The other is a scholarly crime. If people are making claims of accidental transmission without evidence, they should be rapped on the knuckles in the journals. That is scholarly debate. If they fabricate evidence for their views, that's another story.
Collective guilt is for Germans, not
> Americans who are by definition well intentioned but
> who have
> occasionally in the past handled things poorly.
Collective guilt is a bad idea for anyone, don't you think?
>
> This is why Jews that died of starvation and disease
> in concentration camps are rightly considered to
> have
> been murdered but NA's who die of starvation and
> disease after having been put onto a reservation
> that is
> under the command of someone who has openly stated
> that "the only good Indian is a dead one" are
> considered victims of a tragic accident.
By whom?
************
It's a fact that Charles and John are ignoring, maybe an unfair fact, but a fact nonetheless, that given that "the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas of the age," that critics of the existing order have to assume the burden proof.
Yes, the standards are higher for us. To get any credibility, to survive the firestorm that comes from challenging the prevailing assumptions, we have to make sure that every "i" is dotted and every "t" crossed. Surely this cannot be a surprise? Are we entitled to assume that our perspective is widely shared and argue from it as the null hypothesis? We are not. Even if we are as good as the average middle of the road scholar, like David Abraham, that is not good enough. They get slack we don't. Even if we are better than they are, we either need an independent basis that secures our positional institutionally (like Chomsky's linguistics), or a great deal of luck. Finkelstein's at DePaul --he's better than lots of people at prestige institutions, but frankly he's lucky to have the support of DePaul. Some of us, who like to think we did come up to the higher standards imposed on the left, got canned anyway, or never hired.
WC's greatest crime, politically, is not that he lied about the evidence for his work -- that is only a scholarly crime -- it is that he took advantage of the tremendous luck of getting a tenured job at a decent school, and instead of using it to put our quality work that could withstand attack, lies, calumny, and misrepresentation the way Chomsky's or Finkelstein's can, he indulged himself in all those sins himself. I am really surprised that it is not totally obvious that he has done the cause of committed scholarship real harm and made it much more difficult for other scholars with more honesty and integrity who have critical perspectives to enjoy the opportunities he has squandered.
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