Doug Henwood wrote:
> As a matter of fact, he did just that. Maybe you
> should read some
> Finkelstein before passing judgment on him.
No, he does *not* "do just that."
I have read the Finkelstein essay from "A Nation on Trial".
Goldhagen correctly describes Finkelstein's "refutation":
"He finds an instance where a scholar disagrees with my interpretation about some point. He then asserts, as if it is uncontested fact, that such a disagreement shows that I have falsified two things. The first is my conclusions. It is an assumption of his entire piece that whenever a disagreement over interpretation exists between any scholar and me 1) that the other scholar is automatically correct, 2) that I know it, and 3) that I have willfully hidden it. He typically presents other scholars’ interpretations of data as facts, which makes it seem as if my putting forward a different position is to deny uncontested facts.
My second alleged falsification is of the work of others. He writes as if any time one uses a single fact that is contained in another book, it creates an obligation to accept its author’s interpretation of that fact and on seemingly all other matters as well. No scholar does this.(14) (My book is not a historiography of the scholarship on the Holocaust but a study of the Holocaust itself which already has 125 pages of endnotes without the additional endless historiographical discussions that the man who cannot read most of the sources demands.) That my interpretations and conclusions, on small and large points, often differ from those of other scholars is extremely well known -- after all my book is based on new evidence and new interpretations, and I say at the beginning that it revises central notions about the Holocaust."
http://web.archive.org/web/20040604233545/www.goldhagen.com/nda0.html
One can accept or reject Goldhagen's central thesis as one wishes. Finkelstein's hyper-polemical tone and bad faith suggest that for him, it is not about the scientific examination of an opposing argument.
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