_You_ may ignore inconvenient facts turned up by politically motivated (or inspired) investigations. But your "rejecting" them aint worth a puddle of warm spit, as they used to say where I grew up. And if your defense is, "he's an incompetent and fraud but so are you," that is not going to help.
No reason to to expose shoddy right wing scholarship -- every reason to do so. Norman Finkelstein is a model for that, look at his demolition job on Joan Peter's From Time Immemorial. That was a politically motivated attack, btw, obviously; it's just that NF had the goods on Peters. But this is not a substitute for doing your own positive work right. In fact, if you try to expose shoddy scholarship on the level that WC operates, the effort is going to fail and backfire,
Your mention of WC's role in the COINTELPRO investigations underlines my point. WC's lies and falsifications cast doubt on the truth. You can't reason backwards from saying: we know that certain claims are true (about COINTELPRO) and important, so we have to defend someone who made them even if he is exposed as a phony. We cut him loose and seek other bases for support for the true and important claims. (In the case of COINTELPRO we have pretty unequivocal documents, so that's fairly safe.)
This is what Kelly has been saying about the damage WC has done to all of us and to committed scholarship. This ain't the time to circle the wagons around a discredited liar.
--- Aaron Shuman <maruta_us at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm surprised no one's mentioned the effect this
> could
> have on Ward's work on COINTELPRO and imprisonment.
> I'd like to read more about the possible second
> investigation (see brief mention below); the fact
> that
> at least one accusation is centered around El
> Salvador
> makes me wonder if it's targeting this side of
> Ward's
> work now. Would be interested in more articles on
> this, if people have seen them...
>
> When I think of popular authors on COINTELPRO, the
> first person I think of is Ward. Right now, as the
> biggest domestic spying scandal in years is
> breaking,
> with the ACLU turning up more files on environmental
> and antiwar groups every month, it seems, a popular
> "expert" on COINTELPRO gets taken down in a
> wrestling
> match? Bad news.
>
> This possible second investigation offers strong
> support for Carrol's point about the illegitimacy of
> "impartial" investigations launched for political
> reasons: close one investigation; they'll open
> another, and another, until the subject is pounded
> out
> of his position. I can't think of any right-wing
> academic whose work has been subjected to this kind
> of
> factchecking and footnote-reading; on the other
> hand,
> there's Ward, Mike Davis, Michael Bellesiles
> (sp?)...
>
> So to the people on this list who want to
> micro-analyze WC's footnotes, is a solution to come
> up
> with a Left list of bad right-wing professors (a la
> David Horowitz's hit list) and go after their
> footnotes? Or to reject politically-launched
> investigations to begin with?
>
> The lead article on Horowitz's frontpagemag.com
> website this morning is "How Many Ward Churchills?"
> Links to a 50+ page report surveying many college
> campuses; the first chapter is titled "Ward
> Churchill
> Is Everywhere." Hope everyone here has their
> footnotes
> tight.
>
> aaron
>
>
>
>
>
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