[Marxism] Genocide and intentionality

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Apparently there's a professor named Ralph Luker who is kind of upset 
because I have not given the proper respect to Henry Farrell and Timothy 
Burke at the Crooked Timber and Cliopatria blogs. These are group blogs run 
by left-leaning academics, with at least one non-academic on Crooked Timber.

Luker himself is the author of "The Social Gospel in Black and White: 
American Racial Reform, 1885-1912," which is ranked #694,883 at amazon.com. 
I am not sure whether he reaches a bigger audience through book sales or 
though visits to the Cliopatria blog, but we are not talking public 
intellectual in the Edmund Wilson or Manning Marable sense.

In any case, I wasn't aware that Luker was aware of my existence until I 
noticed a bunch of referrals to my blog from the Cliopatria website. 
Usually the referrals are from Ken McLeod or Lenin's Tomb, so I was curious 
to see why people would be going to Unrepentant Marxist via Cliopatria. 
It's not as disconcerting as the referrals I get from www.navy.mil, etc., 
but I had to wonder what was up.

After strolling over to Cliopatria, I discovered that Luker was raking me 
over the coals, which I really don't mind. I rake people like him over the 
coals nearly every day, but at least I have the common courtesy to cc them 
when I do.

Luker wrote this:

>>But there are Lefty trolls, too, of course. David Salmanson and I ran 
into one ? Louis Proyect ? at Crooked Timber the other day. Proyect is an 
obscure former Troskyite, a computer technician at Columbia University, and 
the manager of a Marxist listserv. When Henry Farrell criticized Tim 
Burke's critique of Ward Churchill's work and cited Burke's response to 
that criticism and Thomas Brown's essay criticizing Churchill's claims 
about the Mandan Indians and the smallpox epidemic of 1837, Proyect 
trolled. Farrell and Burke were "mediocrities" and Farrell a "useful idiot."<<

full: <http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html>http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html

Luker feels that he and his co-thinkers are vindicated because I became 
persuaded that Ward Churchill had failed to back up his charge that 
smallpox blankets were used as biological weapons against the Mandan Indian 
in 1837. He is not happy, however, that I was far more disturbed by a kind 
of holocaust denial that is implicit in Thomas Brown's attack rather than 
Churchill's faulty scholarship.

He writes:

>>What interests me about the way Churchill, Malkin, and some of 
Churchill's apologists use history is that if you can find a precedent for 
an action in the past (Malkin's Japanese internment; Churchill on Lord 
Amherst's use of smallpox) it becomes, on the one hand, a convenient excuse 
for similar action in the present; or, on the other hand, justification for 
blatant distortion of history because we know that there was holocaust 
intent anyway. Proyect makes his support of Churchill's holocaust argument 
quite explicit here. If you doubt it, you are a "holocaust denier" and, 
yet, Proyect is finally persuaded that, in this case, the evidence denies 
it. Think about it. If past precedent justifies present action or blatant 
distortion of the historical record, we can repeat the 19th and 20th 
century's horrors; and we have, indeed, bought the post-modern notion that 
all the world's merely a text, to be construed as we will.<<

Trying to decipher such clumsy prose is a daunting task.

To start with, the opening sentence is typical overloaded academic prose 
that one scratches one's head to decipher: "What interests me about the way 
Churchill, Malkin, and some of Churchill's apologists use history is that 
if you can find a precedent for an action in the past (Malkin's Japanese 
internment; Churchill on Lord Amherst's use of smallpox) it becomes, on the 
one hand, a convenient excuse for similar action in the present; or, on the 
other hand, justification for blatant distortion of history because we know 
that there was holocaust intent anyway."

Whenever you see a 74 word sentence that tries to make a number of 
divergent points, you can only conclude that the author is struggling to 
make a point but lacks the command of the English language to accomplish. 
Or, you can also conclude that the author's ideas are just half-baked. 
Finally, it may be the case that the author wants to conceal his true 
meaning. Luker seems guilty on all counts, but I would not recommend a jail 
sentence. I am really quite liberal on the topic of free speech.

For Luker, the criterion of intent is critical to people like Ward 
Churchill and me. But I specifically said that I come at the question 
differently from both Brown and Churchill, who both believe that 
intentionality is key. For me, it is not so important. As a Marxist, the 
question of what is in the mind of a particular colonist is not so 
important. I am far more interested in the *objective*, *structural* effect 
of certain virulent strains of colonialism than I am in what is in the mind 
of the colonizer.

For example, Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennet's "Thy Will Be Done: the 
Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of 
Oil" makes clear that the genocidal attack on indigenous peoples who stood 
in the way of oil exploitation was based at least partially on liberal 
ideology. The Standard Oil family was liberal, but they made common cause 
with Wycliff missionaries. In other words, you had the same lethal 
combination of the dollar and the bible that was visited on people like the 
Mandan.

Now it doesn't really matter what was in the mind of Rockefeller or the 
Wycliff missionaries. When you systematically destroy the means of 
reproduction of an entire people in the pursuit of profit, it is no excuse 
that you meant them no harm. Capitalism's course among hunting and 
gathering peoples has been genocidal worldwide. In distinction to primitive 
accumulation among more advanced peoples (speaking strictly in terms of the 
means of production) like the Chinese or the Indians, the effect on the 
North American Indian, the South Pacific islanders, the native Australian, 
etc. has been genocidal. Among anthropologists on the left like the late 
Stanley Diamond, this is not controversial.

Among people who appear to have a commitment to denying that there was a 
genocide against American Indians, it is controversial. To repeat myself, I 
feel that 90 percent of the hatred directed toward Churchill is a function 
of this rather than a failure to adequately document events that took place 
in the Dakotas 168 years ago.


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org 


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