Fw: [lbo-talk] Paranoid Styles, Soviet and American (was Hamas "a project of Shin Bet")

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sat Oct 21 16:02:17 PDT 2006


On 10/21/06, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> Jesse Lemisch wrote:
> > When will Yoshie read the book, and determine that Bettina was three --
> > three years old -- when Herbert began playing "choo-choo with her? Of
> > course it would be paranoia to talk about power differences betwen an adult
> > male and a three year old female child. Right?
>
> The point of the research that Yoshie cited doesn't seem to be getting
> through. You simply accept that "Herbert began playing choo-choo" with
> her at age 3 because she had a vivid memory of that as an adult. What
> we know is that she has a vivid memory account; we can't say with any
> certainty what Herbert did or didn't do to her solely on the basis of
> this memory account. Your faith in the accuracy of human memory is
> unwarranted. --And I should stress that this is a claim based on a
> veritable mountain of research on memory. It is not, as you falsely
> suggest, a brazen ideological ploy to subjugate women.

Besides, in what way would it help women to insist that an accusation without evidence suffice to establish guilt? Women can very well be the accused, and men, accusers. The accused in pre-modern witch hunts included both men and women, and so have the accused based on "recovered memory" since 1980.

More generally, there can be no liberty under the principle of accusation equals guilt -- a dangerous principle that the US government today is doing all it can to have us all accept. Such a principle gets widely accepted when most of the public are unable to imagine themselves in the position of the accused, thinking that it will never be applied to them. Those who are tempted to believe an accusation without evidence ought to ask themselves if they will accept the principle of accusation equals guilt even if they become the accused themselves.

On 10/21/06, joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> There is also a mountain of data about sexual abuse in families. No one
> is saying that she has proved her case; we are objecting to her
> allegations being dismissed out of hand.

If there is corroborating evidence that Herbert Aptheker raped his daughter, as Bettina Aptheker says he raped her from age 3 to age 13, I will believe her account. Otherwise, I can be at most agnostic, and odds are strongly against her account being true, given that it is based on "recovered memory."

Is there any condition under which you and Jesse change your mind? What can make you dismiss the accusation? If nothing can, then, what you two assert is merely faith. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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