Re: [Marxism] Socialist Scholars Conference: Observations

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> There's one other thing I meant to point out. I am in fact tremendously 
> respectful of left scholars. When I read a Michael Perelman, a James 
> Blaut, a Jack Weatherford or a Robert G. Williams (brilliant studies of 
> the role of coffee and cattle production in Central America politics and 
> revolution), I want to tip my hat to them.

Speaking of Jack Weatherford, here's something from the latest Harper's.

NEW BOOKS
By John Leonard

We will get to new biographies of Kingman Brewster and Eugene McCarthy in a 
minute, but not before spending some quality time with another illustrious 
leader of young men. In GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD 
(Crown, $25), anthropologist Jack Weatherford seeks to rescue the Mongol 
warlord from Western stereotypes of barbarism and bloodthirstiness. In what 
way were his behaviors more atrocious than those of Alexander, Charlemagne, 
or Napoleon? After uniting the untidy tribes of the steppes early in the 
thirteenth century, abolishing aristocratic privilege, creating a 
meritocracy that rewarded loyalty and achievement, and establishing 
"history's largest free-trade zone," didn't he invent China and Russia as 
we know them? Didn't he cancel taxes for doctors and teachers, ordain a 
postal system and a universal alphabet, outlaw torture and legislate 
religious freedom, even if Genghis himself could imagine no other god but 
the big blue sky above him?

Chaucer admired him, Voltaire didn't, and Europe still has nightmares about 
his Danube pit stop. But what Europe remembers in traumatic folklore as 
slaughter, rapine, and millions of refugees, Weatherford?a revisionist, a 
contrarian, a defense attorney, and a closet nomad?sees as cultural 
exchange. So what if the Mongols wrote calendars instead of novels, built 
bridges instead efforts, and could neither cast metal nor bake bread? They 
also gave us firearms, printing, the compass, and the abacus, besides 
teaching the West to wear pants.

Much of what Weatherford tells us of the early days has been pieced 
together only in the last two decades, from documents written in an 
exasperating cipher and known as The Secret History of the Mongols. Even 
translated from Chinese  characters representing thirteenth-century 
Mongolian sounds, the Secret History apparently depends on geographical 
keys that couldn't be interpreted so long as the Soviet Union controlled 
the homeland. Weather-ford, who thought he was researching a book on the 
Silk Route, was lucky enough to end up, in 1998, with a team of scholars on 
the banks of the Onon River. Using the Secret History as both a map and a 
kind of shamanistic box kite, they found the hillock where the infant 
Temujin had been bom to an outcast family in 1162. They then followed the 
little boy into shame, abduction, slavery, and murder, after which he 
became big enough to create a nation and lead its armies from the Onon to 
the Indus to the Volga.

It's hard to think of anyone else who rose from such inauspicious 
beginnings to something so awesome, except maybe Jesus. We watch Genghis's 
Golden Horde on the march, an army organized in the tens of thousands. 
Because all of them, including officers, are illiterate, orders move by 
word of mouth, composed in rhyme for easy memorizing and set to a fixed 
melody known to every warrior ? "like learning a new verse to a song that 
he already knew." Weatherford loves such local color. On these steppes, 
looking up at wolves and hawks, the anthropologist sees himself as Sitting 
Bull or Crazy Horse, as a bedouin or Cain. Like the late Bruce Chatwin in 
Africa, he has been persuaded that Paradise was never a garden but, 
instead, a waste of white thorns.



Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org 


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