Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997 13:03:19 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Not committed to Goldhagen?


On Mon, 15 Sep 1997, Andrew Wayne Austin wrote:

> As for the rest of your argument, I am very busy and I am weary of all
> this dumping on me. Because, and I think anybody with a clear head (i.e.,
> doesn't have this idiotic agenda that blinds them to reason) can see this,
> that is what this whole stupid discussion has turned into. 
> 
> I regret that you, Louis Proyect, have seen fit to join the irrational
> camp. You have. Good luck.
> 

Maybe you should go away for a couple of months until you learn a little
modesty and respect for the opinion of others. I don't blame you for being
weary of all the dumping. I would also feel this way if I made support for
Goldhagen's research a litmus test for serious Marxist thought and put up
with people's outrage.

Goldhagen is a joke. Your embrace of him is a scandal. You have continued
to ignore my substantive criticisms of his work. I have read only five
pages of his book and that is *all I need* to form an opinion. Anybody who
wrote what he wrote about Germany in the 20s is not a historian, he is a
lying propagandaist whose cause you have embraced. 

You remain silent about his lies. This will not do on a rigorous and
scholarly list. Do you agree with his falsification of German history in
the 1920s? When you read the section on Weimar Germany, didn't a little
alarm go off in your swollen head about the tendentiousness of the
argument? I have hammered away at this point, but you still don't seem to
get it.

What is your problem with history? I know that you are trying to carve out
a career as an academic political scientist and you concentrate on this
rather specialised world, but how do you manage to mess up royally on such
questions as the sequence of historical events in the Spanish Civil War,
or whether somebody is telling lies about the Weimar Republic?  

What you need to do is rest those arrogant typing fingers of yours and
bone up on history a little bit before shooting off your ignorant mouth
about what happened under fascist rule.

One of your problems is that like many aspiring academics, you are awash
in abstractions. You write about genocide in the abstract, fascism in the
abstract and racism in the abstract. This is not the way Marxists should
approach politics. If you study Marx and Engel's writings from the 1850s
and 1860s, you will discover article after article that is immersed in
historical detail. What much of your writing represents is overinflated
prose around other people's research. Furthermore, your writing smacks of
a dissertation. Some people have asked me in private whether you are
recycling term papers here. I replied that, like most pedants, you are
incapable of expressing yourself in any other fashion.

In the past several weeks, you have alienated just about everybody. This
consists of a wide variety of political opinions. In your latest
screed, you adopted a cheapened and profane tone. This is usually the mark
of somebody who is in over his head, like Malecki 100 percent of the time.
Pretty soon, you will be viewed as another Malecki and the target for
people's Eudora filters. This would be a shame, because you are much
better than that.

(For information about how to filter out Malecki, please contact me
privately for technical advice.)

Louis Proyect




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