Jumpin’ Jimmy Paine, He’s a Gas, Gas, Gas
May 1st, 2008
(Note: This is a guest editorial by longtime Try-Works commenter, Law Professor.)
No matter how often he announces that Dr. Ward Churchill has become “irrelevant,” Pirate Ballerina’s Jim Paine simply can’t stop talking about the man (so, too, PB’s dwindling number of readers, but that’s another story).
Whatever the reason for Mr. Paine’s obsession—anal compulsion? a sexual fixation of some sort?—we should perhaps all be grateful for it, given the richly comical results it often generates.
Take, for example, Mr. Paine’s “analysis” today of an article by Churchill published in Social Text. Therein, Mr. Paine informs us, among other interesting things, that “Senator [Joseph] McCarthy compiled no blacklists.”
This, of course, is an assertion roughly on par with the Right’s current pretense that UC Berkeley Con Law Professor John Yoo’s grotesque distortions of the U.S. Constitution in the “torture memos” he wrote for the Bush regime has “nothing to do with his scholarly integrity.”
Or claiming that Hitler had nothing to do with the Holocaust simply because he never personally ordered it in writing.
In fairness, it may be conceded that likening Mr. Paine to a Holocaust denier is a sense unwarranted, at least in this instance. Far more likely, he simply—and all too typically—had no idea what he was talking about.
By his own admission, Mr. Paine has been prone to confusing the Senator McCarthy whose activities he purports to explain to us—JOE, a right-wing Wisconsin Republican who died in 1957—with Minnesota Senator EUGENE McCarthy, a Democrat and “leftist” antiwar candidate for President in 1968.
Some “expert,” this Jim Paine, similar in quality to those on Fox News who confused the “Mr. Douglas” debated by Abraham Lincoln—a white senator named Stephen—with the black abolitionist leader, FREDERICK Douglas, this week.
So much for the lofty “standards” of the Right.
Anyone wanting to assess McCarthy’s actual involvement in blacklisting might find it useful to begin with the chapter titled “The Academic Blacklist in Operation” in Ellen Schrecker’s fine study, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford University Press, 1986) pp. 265-82.
There are several more good references, for those wishing to delve deeper still. Just let me know. (Sorry, Mr. Paine, but you and yours will actually have to acquire—and read—the books. Mere googling will not suffice.)
May 1st, 2008 at 7:16 am
I remember Fred actually making that argument vis-a-vis Hitler, of a sort. His line was that a genocide is only a genocide if there’s a signed order to commit genocide coming from the top. The last time we heard from him around here was when I pointed out that by his reasoning the European Holocaust wasn’t a genocide.
A little soft on their history, these folks.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:05 am
To say the least, Ben, and on anything resembling logical consistency as well. As in, even a signed order means what it says it says, only when it’s convenient to their argument. Witness their collective refusal to admit that the order signed by Sec. of War Cass to withhold smallpox vaccine from the Mandans, Arikaras, and Hidatsas doesn’t actually mean that vaccine was deliberately withheld.
Anyhow, props to the Law Prof for thoroughly exposing Paine’s latest round for sanctimonious horsecrap for being exactly what it is.
May 1st, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Inside scoop: Paine and Martin have been hosting a David Irving reading circle for the past umpteen months now. Irving, it seems, is their ideal of a “real historian.” So much so that they’ve built shrines to the guy in their homes, featuring color glossy photos of the guy dressed up in a funny little “early Hitler” suit (leiderhosen, knee socks, brown shirt, and Sam Brown belt).
Word is that Paine’s planning to republish all of Irving’s now out-of-print books, claiming that Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust, and that the Allies murdered upwards of 125,000 Germans during the 1945 Dresden fire bombing.
For his part, Martin’s been secretly raising funds with which to send cookies to Irving, who’s doing time in Austria for defaming the victims of the Nazi genocide (mainly by parsing the record to the point of denying that it occurred; sound a tad familiar, PB readers?).
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:18 am
I pointed this out a long time ago during a discussion of lies the ballerinas tell, but it’s worth saying again. I think Paine might very well know the difference between the two McCarthies. His readership (or what’s left of it), on the otherhand, probably does not. Part of their game is spouting complete fabrications as allegations and counter-examples simply because they know that their audience won’t know the difference. It’s similar to the SCRM’s claim that their work wan’t scholarship once STAF filed the counter-complaint. It’s like when Bush and his cronies allow critics to call them stupid when they lie, because it distracts from the systematic purpose behind the lies they tell. How is one to combat this tactic?
One of the hurdles that any academic social movement faces is the desire to remain attatched to academic standards in making its arguments and disseminating information. It’s kind of like trying to follow the Geneva convention when fighting a radical, murderous military force that officially rejects it (you know who I mean).
One way to compensate is illustrated by Rama’s approach. You just embrace hyperbole and invention as thoroughly as the ballerinas and other neocons in an attempt to level the playing field. The problem with this, as illustrated by Rama, is that anyone who actually adheres to a set of standards for what they say will inevitably wind up using hyperbole and invention in a humorous way. The problem is that many folks just can’t spew complete bullshit with a straight face.
I think some specific discussion on what to do about this problem would really benefit social movement tactics. How is a social movement to effectively counter this neocon tactic? One way is to use any chance to interject into neocon forums (whatever form of media they take) with complete garbage, garbage so incoherent and petty that it lowers the level of the forum enough to alienate as much of the previous readership as possible. Anybody out there have other productive approaches?
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:30 am
It just occured to me that a ballerina embrace of the tactic I outlined might explain the existence of Snapple. At least it might explain his repetitive psychotic rambling on tryworks till Ben wisely banned him, I’m not sure anything can adequately explain the existence of Snapple altogether.
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Good god, Tyndale, what the fuck is an “academic social movement”? Aside from an extraordinarily pretentious oxymoron, I mean.
Here’s my prescription for curing what ails you:
1) Declare a personal moratorium on using the word “problem”—it appears in 3 sentences, back to back, in your 1:18 am post—for at least 6 weeks.
2) During the same period, read nothing but material by/about Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Abbie Hoffman, and Hunter Thompson.
3) Watch “The Yes Men” DVD at least once a day.
4) Write little notes to yourself every day analysing the degree of communicative effectiveness attained by the folks just mentioned—as compared to yourself—and why that might be.
At the end of the six weeks, give yourself a little test. See if you’ve figured out why the ability to “spew complete bullshit with a straight face,” is an important skill to have available for tactical application. If so, you’ll be ready to be taken seriously (by others, not just yourself).
If not, start over.
If, on the other mind, you’ve gotten a handle on the “why,” you’ll be ready to start working on the “how” part.
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Settle down, Rama.
Tyndale, what’s your issue here? Are you saying that Rama’s approach—which it seems to me you either misunderstand to a considerable extent or have decided to grossly misrepresent—is unacceptable for some reason, and should therefore not be employed?
If so, why? Give your reasons clearly, and do avoid bullshit like comparing Rama’s stuff to Snapple’s and the ballerina garbage unless you really mean it. (If you do, there’s not much to discuss, because, to put it politely, the comparison is so bogus that anybody making it in a serious fashion must be absolutely full of shit.)
You might also want to avoid basing your position on what you think “a lot of folks can’t do.” I mean, so what? A lot of folks can’t do a lot of things—or think they can’t—or pretend they can’t. Does that mean that such things shouldn’t be done by those who CAN do them?
Let me put it another way: If you actually believe that “tactics” should be restricted to consisting only of those things that “everybody” can do, you’re beat before you start, so why bother?
Something else to ponder: Your comment is posted on a string attending a piece by Law Professor, whose approach is radically different from Rama’s (and much more academic, I might add). Yet you completely ignore LP’s approach—and LP him/herself, for that matter— opting instead to simply attack Rama’s way of going at things.
Then, having ignored the alternative posed by LP, you ask for somebody alternatives. Uuuuh… If I were him or her, I’d be feeling pretty thoroughly dissed by that performance. Wouldn’t you?
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:27 pm
postmodernism would probably be an academic social movement. It’s definitely not a populist or working class social movement. Structuralists also.
May 3rd, 2008 at 10:04 am
Oh my god, Sybil, do you think s/he REALLY meant “postmodernism”? Or “postcolonialism”? Maybe even “posteverything”?
You may well be right about this, in which case the situation is far worse than I’d imagined. Had I even considered such a bizarre possibility, I’d responded a bit differently. Like suggesting that s/he have a look at Terry Eagleton’s fine little book, “The Illusions of Postmodernism,” as well as Stuart Hall’s and Anne McClintock’s devastating essay-length critiques of “postcolonality,” for example.
Or, I might have been really cruel and demanded that s/he spend his or her next several months reading Spivak and Homi Bhabha—a veritable intellectual death sentence—before presuming to take up anyone else’s time dicussing the “alternatives” posed by the “posts.”
More likely, however, I’d have simply followed Churchill in recommending that anyone afflicted with such preoccupations cut right to the chase by adopting a dietary regime consisting of Post Toasties and then get on with things more constructively undertaken.
Oh yeah, BTW: That would be POSTstructuralism, m’dear. Structuralism itself has been around since the 19th century. And it’s an analytical method, not a social movement. Just so you know (and maybe Tyndale, as well).
May 3rd, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Interesting that you should mention Homi Bhabha, Rama. As I recall, he’s the guy who once argued that ANY sort of concrete action is, by definition, “counterrevolutionary.” The only sphere of genuinely revolutionary activity, according to him, is therefore to read lots and lots of books, and then write books “transcending” what you’ve read.
Wow! Now THERE’S a plan…
We can all spend our time endlessly debating all-important questions like whether Frantz Fanon was a sexist, or maybe whether there aren’t hidden teleogies lurking in the subtexts of Third World texts.
Excuse me while I vomit.
Assuming that Sybil’s correct about such “postmodernism” meeting the definition of what Tyndale calls an “academic social movement,” it’s no wonder s/he’s casting about for “alternatives.”
May 3rd, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Sorry Rama, I think you misunderstood. I wasn’t trying to attack what you’re doing, and I didn’t mean for that to come off as an insult of any kind, I was just trying to start some discussion. I don’t need your lessons in communication, and I don’t understand your incredibly overreactive tone. Just chill out.
Oh, and an academic social movement is one that begins in or addresses academia, like the site we’re commenting on right now. And I’m not a goddamn post-anythingist. Jerk.
May 3rd, 2008 at 4:13 pm
And a few other things, since you’ve managed to piss me off with your patronizing tone. It’s not post-structuralism, it’s deconstruction. See Derrida. Also, under many interpretations, Lenny Bruce winds up as too much of a pussy for my taste. “Don’t throw rocks at policemen” my ass. And props to Rose for calling you out on your Homi. He just might be the biggest pussy ever to be associated with the left.
Oh, and many thanks to Billy for responding in a helpful, productive way.
May 3rd, 2008 at 5:15 pm
oh yes, I just said that because it was the first thing that came to mind when you asked what an academic social movement is. Judith Butler is a good example. I knew someone who spent a lot of time with Dialectic of Enlightenment so I got a copy, but didn’t read it, and never had much opportunity to read in that area. I’m thinking of looking up some good titles to help psychologically adjust to working at Restoration hardware in Santa Barbara. My own simplified definition of postmodernism vs. modernism is that modernism is about optimism in the future and technology, while postmodernism is about how things are all trippy and don’t make sense. Everyone keeps referring to the Sokal book, but that was almost snotty. There are much better critiques of postmodernists, and it’s more like specific writers rather than the whole field should be dealt with. Is it possible for someone who writes clearly and w/o big words to get the same ideas across, or is it like a type of poetry that has to be difficult to read. French people are good at philosphy because they teach it as much as history in high school.
As you said, another major area of academic social movements would be activism related to universities, or mostly made up of academics (for instance, the first opponents to biofuels for being inefficient seemed to be a group in California)
BTW, how many died in Dresden - 200,000?
May 3rd, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Tyndale:
Note that it was Sybil who introduced the “post” business, when she, like me, was trying to decipher what on earth you meant by “academic social movement.” Also note that I qualified all references to you in that connection, e.g., “Assuming Sybil’s correct…”
As to whether your initial posting might be reasonably construed as an attack on my “approach,” please observe that Billy—to whom you extend props for his “constructive response” (an assessment with which I agree, BTW)—plainly read it the same way (before you complain about “tone,” check your own).
This suggests rather strongly that, assuming you actually didn’t intend an attack, and irrespective of your own impression of your communicative skills, they could use a little work (as in, maybe you WOULD benefit from a few “lessons” on that score, o humble one).
A good place to start might be with actually knowing what you’re talking about before making correcting others. Statements like, “It’s not post-structuralism, it’s deconstruction. See Derrida,” ain’t exactly helpful, since deconstruction is one thing, post-structuralism another.
For clarification, see, e.g., Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young, eds., POST-STRUCTURALISM AND THE QUESTION OF HISTORY (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Now, since you introduced the question of reading comprehension by way of claiming that I “misunderstood” your original comment, try rereading mine and Rosie’s. Far from “calling me out” on Bhabha, she was both agreeing with and amplifying my point (which means, since you agree with her, you’ve also agreed with me).
Finally, very few social movements I know of have lacked what might be described—if you stretch the definition a bit—an academic dimension. Some have had formal outright academic components (albeit, they’ve usually employed the word “intellectual” rather than “academic”). But I think you’ll agree that this hardly makes them “academic social movements.” (There are, of course, exceptions, like the so-called Modern School Movement, but they’re very few).
I think I’m beginning to see—and maybe even agree with—what you were trying to get at, but your formulation was awkward (to say the least). So, too, your probably unintended suggestion that a blog, or some aggregation of blogs, might somehow in themselves constitute a social movement (academic or otherwise).
May 3rd, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Rama is correct, Tyndale. I was reinforcing the point he’d already made about Bhabha. And the point was identical to your own—albeit, if you keep using the term “pussy” to make it, I may just offer you an opportunity to wear your ass as a hat, tuff guy—which means that you’re in perfect agreement with him, like it or not.
He’s also correct in observing that deconstruction and post-structuralism are not the same thing. I can give you a few more reference in that regard, if you’re either doubtful or interested.
Those matters settled, how about we all stand down on this exchange?
May 3rd, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Well, here we go again. That last comment was MINE, not Rama’s. This “template glitch,” whatever it is, is getting to be a real pain in the ass, Ben. Is there any way of fixing it?
May 4th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I’ve not posted for a while, mainly because I’ve not felt that I’ve had much to contribute beyondwhat was already being said about the topics under discussion. Not so, the current Tyndale/Rama/Rose exchange.
First off, let me observe that Rama is again correct, Tyndale, in that deconstruction and poststructuralism are indeed different things. They are, however, neither seperate nor even separable, as Rama seems to suggest. Rather, deconstruction might be viewed as a subpart of poststructuctural, or, better yet, as a transitional link between structuralism and poststructuralism.
Either way, your assertion that “it’s not post-structuralism, it’s deconstruction,” is erroneous, it that remains true whether or not one follows your recommendation to “see Derrida.”
Third, there are—at least in my opinion—much better basic references on the matter than that suggested by Rama, although “Post-Structuralism and the Question of History” is a good and useful collection in its own right.
Personally, I suspect you’d benefit rather more, in terms of sorting out the terms/concepts involved, from Mark Poster’s “The Mode of Information: Post-Structuralism and Social Contexts” (Polity Press, 1990) and/or Madan Sarup’s “An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism (University of Georgia Press, 1993).
Most likely, you’d also find Alan Finlayson’s and Jeremy Valentin’s “Politics and Post-Structuralism” (Edinburgh University Press, 2002) useful, although, like Rama’s suggestion, it assumes readers are already thoroughly familiar with the core theories deployed and should be approached only after absorbing Poster and/or Sarup.
I hope you find this helpful (I’m addressing not just Tyndale, but all three of you.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:35 am
“BTW, how many died in Dresden - 200,000?”
Sorry, Sybil, I got so caught up in all that other business that I forgot to respond to query. “Most historians today estimate [the death toll] at somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000,” according to Paul Addison (see his and Jeremy Crang’s coedited book, “Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945,” p. 210).
May 6th, 2008 at 11:39 am
huh. I’ve never really researched it. In the NYTimes review this week of Kurt Vonnegut’s pre-creative period account of surviving that, Roy Blount Jr. quotes 200,000. But that can include all wounded. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Blount-t.html?scp=1&sq=vonnegut&st=cse
My mom’s house actually was firebombed in Giessen, but that was a situation where they had air raid sirens first. The cities are really dense because in the monarchy times, people were moved into walled areas to protect against rival armies.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
I’m a little uncomfortable with that one, Rama.
Without for a moment defending David Irving’s adventures in Holocaust denial, I’m not sure his earlier work, especially on Dresden, should be viewed in the same light.
While it’s now widely claimed that Irving invariably parroted Nazi propaganda—and, in his later work, he often did—it should be noted that although the Nazis claimed that 300,000 Germans were killed by the Allied firebombing, Irving’s own estimate was 135,000 (comparable to the number of Japanese killed by the firebombing of Tokyo ordered by Curtis LeMay a few months latter).
Curt Vonnegut’s posthumously-published estimate of 250,000 killed by the Dresden bombing was obviously far closer to the Nazi tally than was Irving’s, and it should be borne in mind that Vonnegut, at the time a German POW, was not only on the scene but forced by the SS to help collect the bodies.
Vonnegut’s eyewitness impressions concerning the magnitude of the carnage in Dresden cannot be accepted at face value, of course, but it seems rather unlikely—at least to me—that such a close, astute, and ANTInazi an observer as he might have been off by a factor of 1000 percent (as orthodoxy would now have it).
The denial of uncomfortable/inconvenient historical realities is hardly a phenomenon confined to neonazis like Irving, Rama. Witness Turkey’s official position regarding the Armenian genocide, Israel’s regarding the Nazi genocide of the Gypsies, and that of both the U.S. and Canada regarding the genocide of Native Americans.
If we’re learned anything at all from the Ward Churchill case, it is that any time the scholarly status quo goes out of it’s way to discredit conclusions at odds with orthodoxy as being “unscholarly”—which is the worst that’s been said of Irving’s work on Dresden—we should be alert to the probability that it is the accusers rather than the accused who are guility of scholarly fraud (or prostitution).
In sum, it seems important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Despite the sordidness of Irving’s other sins, his estimate that 135,000 human beings, most of them civilians, were deliberately incinerated by the Allies at Dresden seems likely to be much closer to the truth than the counterclaim that the number was only 20,000.
May 6th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
It would be hard to know how many due to direct observation once you reached 1000 because people can’t count that high, and you’d have to know the population of the town, and the number of survivors. Also, how many likely were able to have left the city earlier. But I’d assume that Vonnegut was writing from a commonly understood figure from the time.
A likely more underestimated source of mortality was starvation and disease afterwards - it’s just like with Iraq right now where we’re barely cognizent of the millions of refugees limping along in Syria and so forth. For that matter, what are the americans going to look like a year from now if people are already pawning their antiques for a couple gallons of gas right now. I guess there will be a lot of metal theft emerging: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jmVfjiFvKMMmnD72pAgqzkLBW4CwD90BPO681
May 6th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Okay, I’m confused. What did you just say, Sybil? That you think 200,000 is a reasonable estimate of the number killed? Or 25-40,000? That Vonnegut’s estimate of 250,000 seems too high? That Irving’s 135,000 might be too low?
And if, as you assume, Vonnegut’s estimate was not based on his own observations, but rather upon “a commonly understood figure from the time,” from whence did that figure come? To the best of my knowlege, the only such figure would have come from the Nazi propaganda ministry. So, are you saying that, until his dying day, Kurt Vonnegut was busily spreading Nazi propaganda?
Next question: Where on earth did you get the idea that “people can’t count that high”? I know of nobody who, upon viewing the battlefied at Gettysburg the morning after the fighting ended, came away believing there might only be a couple-thousand corpses lying there.
Were the estimates committed to their letters, diaries, and journals immediately after witnessing the scene precise? No. But some were fairly close. And they they were all, I think without exception, a helluva lot nearer the mark than plus or minus 1000 percent.
You have to bear in mind that the SS as recovering bodies from the rubble, transporting them to central collection points, and then burying or, more usually, burning them en masse, that Vonnegut was one of those forced to do the labor, day after day, and that he saw not one but several of the collection sites.
I’ll grant that, unless you had considerable experience with that sort of thing—as some of the SS men undoubtedly did—it would be easy enough to conclude that there were 20,000 corpses in a vast pile containing “only” 10-15,000. The mind does indeed tend to inflate such horror, which is why I suggested that his estimate was probably far too high.
That said, to hold that Vonnegut consistently mistook piles of fewer than 1,000 corpses for mounds containing 10 or 20 times that number, simply beggars credulity. The fact is that he may well have seen, first-hand, very nearly as many corpses as the “responsible” historicians cited by Rama would have us believe comprised the entire number of people killed by the Dresden firebombing.
The rest of your observations would be right on point, if estimates of the toll ultimately taken by the firebombing, both directly and indirectly, over the long term, were at issue. But they’re not. The question is how many people were killed, directly and immediately, during the bombing itself.
May 6th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Oh - I don’t have a motivation to tend to believe it is higher or lower than a certain level. I just read your statement, then noticed the NYTimes article later. (In the first part, it is difficult to tell what Blount is trying to say about his son). Dresden is supposed to have been the largest attack in the war.
I think people would need training in counting mortalities or crowds, and even then, how would you know without an omniscient knowledge of a true count while learning. For instance, in the California huge antiwar marches of 2003, it took four hours for these massive crowds to get down 6 lane Market Street in San Francisco. The organizers estimated 100-200,000 people at some of the largest, but then the police would give out an official estimate of 30,000. This was dubious because people working downtown don’t make such a sidewalk jam leaving their offices at 5pm, and the people going through the ticket turnstiles and bag inspection at the baseball park don’t require four hours. So what was the method of the police? The newspaper will also give inflated counts of 100,000 people going to a food festival over the weekend. Now nobody goes to these marches, yet on the radio some guy was saying today ‘we’re not going to stop this war until we get people in the streets demanding it’.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2003/03/01/15789931.php
One problem can be the taking of a position that seems to match that of nazis, for different reasons. It is a right wing position to emphasize german suffering. Another example, which I could find some documentation of if I spent a minute, is the strategy of neo-nazis to drop the antiforeigner focus of the early 90s, and to now pick up the cause of the palestinians. There are photos at rallies of nazis carrying palestinian flags, and leftists carrying israeli flags. It puts you in a quandary if you want to pick the side for a different reason.
So… lots of working class germans really did end up suffering for their dictator. There were something like 5% people imprisoned for political reasons. I wonder what it would be here… perhaps the 4% who voted for Nader. http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2008-February/0214-eg.html
May 6th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
ope, here’s a matching song that the self-hating german antifascists do, which was originally an english song about bombing Dresden. it’s sort of like, what the hell. the u.s. residents certainly haven’t processed our participation in Vietnam that way… probably aren’t aware of half the stuff in Churchill’s chicken book. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sav8xG2JY_k
May 7th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
This is getting really tedious, folks. But, the Sceptic’s argument unnerved me a bit, so decided to look a little further. One thing I came up with is the following assessment of Frederick Taylor’s 2004 book, “Dresden: Tuseday 13 February 1945,” which is generally considered to be the definitive synthesis of what “reputable” historians “now believe” on the matter (e.g., the 25-40,000 body count).
“For English-speaking readers whose consciences had been weighed down for decades with guilt over Dresden, [Taylor’s] analysis offered some relief. In removing…distortions, he presented a more even-handed account in which the people of Desden could no longer be seen as innocent, or the city as a target of no military value. Though he stopped short of justifying the attack on Dresden, he left the issue in the balance and commentators interpreted the book as in large measure a vindication of the bombing.”
Wow. That’s almost identical to the argument Ward Churchill made with regard to 9/11: that, according to the standards established by the Allies in World War II, and applied to Others ever since, the people in the WTC could not be considered innocent, the WTC itself could not be seen as a target of no military value, and that the attacks were therefore vindicated under U.S. rules.
Actually, Churchill was a lot more restrained than Taylor, since Churchill argued only that a certain segment of the people in the WTC had to be considered something other than innocent (”little Eichmanns”), while Taylor holds that the entire population of Dresden should be considered fair game.
Churchill, moreover, advanced his argument as a means of REJECTING such rules of engagement, while Taylor’s is designed both to affirm their legitimacy and to alleviate whatever sense of guilt might be suffered by anyone—on “our” side—who a applies or endorses them.
For this, Churchill gets hammered, not only by the right but by the Todd Gitlin/Marc Cooper “responsible left,” while Taylor takes his place in the ranks of “highly respected historian.”
Okay, Sceptic, I get it. I’m prepared to dismiss the low estimates of Dresden fatalities I cited, as part of a systematic process of denial and self-exoneration. Which means that I guess I’m prepared—gag!—to reconsider my position regarding David Irving’s estimate of 135,000 dead.
They may well have used Irving’s involvement in Holocaust denial as a cover behind which to discredit his earlier—and incoveniently accurate—work as being equally “unscholarly.”
That’s pretty much the same approach taken against Churchill, the difference being—and it’s huge—that Irving was in fact guilty of myriad falsehoods and fabrications in his later work, the appearance that Churchill was similarly guilty has itself be constructed of falsehoods and fabrications.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
I’m not sure what “NYTimes article” you’re referring to, Sybil.
Vonnegut’s estimate that the Dresden firebombing “killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours” will be found on page 11 of his recently released “Armageddon in Retrospect.” It appears in a letter dated May 29, 1945.
That’s what I was working from.
May 8th, 2008 at 2:54 am
Sorry Rama. I got pissed at your tone, as I mentioned. I understand how what I said might have come off as an attack on you, but know that it wasn’t meant to be. I read the comment where you came down on me so hard while innebriated and up late (when else is there really time for blogging?) and wrote back accordingly. I didn’t even read the comments everyone left completely or carefully. You’re all correct, thanks for the tips on further reading, I will certainly pursue them.
To restate my original question clearly– how should those working against reactionaries counter the truth manufacturing tactic? Is the only answer to respond in kind?
May 8th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Nope. One alternative is to actually try to get things right (see, e.g., my response to Sceptic’s criticism, above).
In that vein, it’s worth pointing out that maybe s/he should’ve kept reading the Vonnegut book (a copy of which I laid hands on last night), at least to the extent that doing so would’ve addressed the question s/he posed about whether the man might be viewed as having continued to repeat Nazi propaganda until the end of his life.
In a piece titled “Wailing Shall Be in All the Streets”—two chapters further in than the May 29, 1945 letter Sceptic quotes, and presumably written much later—Vonnegut cuts his initial estimate of 250,000 dead substantially, placing the toll taken by the Dresden firebombing at “over one hundred thousand human beings” (p. 34).
Later in the same essay, he refers to “over one hundred thousand non-combatants” (p. 43), having already observed that this totaled “more people than died in the whole London blitz,” all of them”exterminated in one bloody night” (p. 37).
So, it appears that Sybil was on to something when she suggested that he was probably influenced not only by his personal observations as one forced to help collect the dead in the immediate aftermath, but by whatever overall estimates were available at the time.
In other words, his original figure of 250,000 does in fact appear to have been derived from the estimates put forth by the Goebbles ministry, while his later, much reduced estimate was most likely gleaned from David Irving’s 1963 study, “The Destruction of Dresden.”
It’s worth noting, I think, Vonnegut appears to have read most everything published about the Dresden firebombing over the years (which is perfectly undestandable, given his direct experience of it). He was thus almost certainly aware of the much lower—and officially endorsed—estimates of fatalities coming from Allied sources, beginning with a tally of 35,000 in early 1946.
That he simply ignored them is significant, implying as it does that he viewed the Allied low-counts to be just as self-serving as the Nazis’ inflated figures. And here, I will continue to argue, his personal observations of the sheer scale of the carnage DID play a decisive role.
This is as close as I can come to synthesizing the three lines of argument and evidence involved in this exchange, and I doubt that either of the other participants will be able to do better.
So where does this leave us? 1) The Nazis’ 250-300,000 estimate was absurdly high, 2) the 25-40,000 estimate now enshrined by apologists for the Allies is absurdly low, and 3) David Irving’s estimate of 135,000 is probably the most reasonable. From that, we can adduce 4) Irving’s early work on Dresden should not be conflated with his subsequent—and utterly inexcusable—activities as a Holocaust denier.
That said, I agree that this has become far too tedious, and join in the recommendation that we move on.
May 8th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Fine by me. Sybil?
May 8th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
yeah - it’s interesting that 100,000 were just killed in Burma. It’s a top story but still matched with election news.
If we look at reception of comparative slaughters, it’s interesting that despite the anti-communist drive in the U.S., there is slightly more emphasis on some right-wing mass mortalities such as the civil war, WWI, and WWII at the top of course. If we correctly define genocide as the attempted destruction of an ethnic group (rather than as a generic mass killing, as many understand the term), most westerners do rank the WWII genocides above the soldier mortalities and starvation/disease dead of the Russians and frech of the same period. David Horowitz always makes this big deal of showing that even more people died under Mao and the Ukrainian agricultural chaos, and it’s true that americans don’t shed as many tears despite having an incentive to do so - but Horowitz repeatedly goes on this trip of equating communists with Bill Clinton’s rough ideological position, so it’s hard to work with that.
What the people writing and making movies about the death toll of fascism vs. communism consistently forget is the tremendous death toll in the colonial countries. What was Burma a colony of? Maybe it’s because it’s more difficult to pin blame, than in the story that the good german working class enabled Hitler, or the academic marxists enable the communist vanguard. In colonies, it was always divide and conquer. A few thousand upper-class capitalists in France, England etc sent some managers to Asia and Africa, who there recruit an upper class to do their bidding. Cooperation of the army then let the whole country get taken over. Yet, as each of these countries like Algeria, Angola, India, Indonesia attempted to free themselves, or still are attempting to do so, 100,000s or millions have died. Add to that the millions of poverty deaths, and it easily tops the toll from communism.
But it’s so much harder to put together a coherent presentation of whose fault it is, for instance Rios Montt in Guatemala (whose daughter is married to an american congressman). It wasn’t ‘the English’, or the americans or whatever who got to vote on the colony, but the working class does share some sort of blame, even if they were never taught enough to find the country on a map. Because the local soldiers do most of the repression, it is easy for the G8 countries to blame the local governments - and that is enhanced when we always switch official support at the end of a tyranny in the Philippines, Indonesia etc. So in Burma… it’s easy to say that it was just a sad case of bad government and the locals need to learn to value democracy or better civil engineering and birth control.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Kind of like Katrina, eh Sybil?