Re: [Marxism] Ward Churchill Redux

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

First, in case someone is wondering about my personal circumstances, the
doctors will see me on  Monday. 

As I mentioned to a comrade who wrote me off-list: 

"I'm not being seen until Monday, and although I had originally gotten the
impression from my doctor that they'd grab me immediately, do a biopsy,
diagnose it, and zap me with radiation or cut it out the same day, I see not
this was a sort of hysterical over-reactive interpretation on my part, you
know, 'Holy shit -- I probably have cancer? Get it out of there RIGHT NOW!'"

Sol you will have to suffer one more weekend of "my act".

Speaking of which, Ian writes: "Richard Evans's In Defence of History is
very good on this subject. A moderate left Social Democrat rather than a
Marxist, he is nonetheless acutely aware of many issues that equally concern
us. He founds his argument on the basis that without a notion of scholarly
objectivity, there is no truly rational way of making an utterly convincing
case against Holocaust deniers. And I do believe his own work in
discrediting David Irving on scholarly grounds (showing it to be a tissue of
fabrications, lies, distortions of sources, etc.) constitutes the most
powerful critique there is."

"Scholarly objectivity" is extremely suspect. 

"Scholarly objectivity" is what allows someone to write about "Holocaust
denial" without in the same breath mentioning what has happened to the
indigenous peoples of the Americas, and above all in the United States, and
the portrayal of the fate of indigenous peoples in educational, popular and
scholarly works produced by the US and its people (which are really all
social products even if individually "authored.")

The academic writer in the United States that is worth praising for
confronting Holocaust denialism would be the one who doesn't concentrate on
a David Irving but rather on just about every last high school US history
book ever written, and I daresay most of the college ones, too, not to
mention tens of thousands of fiction and nonfiction books, millions of
articles and warehouses full of Hollywood movies and TV shows.

There is, of course, a political-ideological content to all these works. And
it is to create a series of legitimizing myths for the United States of
America, and justify the genocide against native peoples (in case anyone
asks).

There is also a politico-ideological content to most writings, etc., about
"The Holocaust" (capital T and capital H) in U.S. society. That content is
most often, in fact, overwhelmingly, legitimization of and support to the
colonial-settler Zionist entity occupying Palestine and committing genocide
against the Palestinian people. 

For the bourgeois-Zionist ideologists, "holocaust denialism" is not just
denying that Jews were massively and systematically murdered by the German
variety of white European imperialism, (while the OTHER imperialist powers,
who were ENTIRELY aware of what was going on, basically twiddled their
thumbs). It ALSO includes challenging that this is a unique and transcendent
event with which no other may be compared, and which give "the Jewish
people" (although in reality the Zionist movement and its maximum political
expression, the state of Israel is meant) the right to "reclaim" into an
EXCLUSIVELY Jewish state lands where most of the population had abandoned
Judaism for Islam and in some cases Christianity long ago.

Thus, opposition to the dispossession of the Semitic Palestinian people by a
settler regime dominated by what presents to the Palestinians as the latest
white European colonizers becomes "anti Semitic." And the dispossession and
extermination of countless native peoples in the Americas and especially in
what is now the United States becomes a non-event, disappears from history.
Thus you will find in a newspaper like the NY Times many MORE articles
relating to "The Holocaust" (capital T capital H) than to the genocide
against Indian peoples. 

Is that because the holocaust of the Jews is more relevant than that of the
indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere? The New York Times, its
offices and printing presses and web servers, the homes of its staff, the
homes, schools, workplaces and houses of worship of its readers and
advertisers, are all on land obtained through the genocidal European settler
dispossession of indigenous peoples. The truth of the claim that what
happened in parts of Europe for 3, or 5, or a dozen years starting more than
seven decades ago is more relevant to the NY Times's audience than the
processes through which today's "United States" was created as a distinct
socio-economic formation and eventually a state that developed into the
world's pre-eminent imperialist power over 500 years is hardly self-evident.


It is, in fact, not an "objective" statement but a highly political and
ideological one, AS IS ALSO the one I have counterposed to it. 

That is because ALL accounts of what has happened, either in the
journalistic craft or by a historian, involve implicitly a host of judgments
about what is important, what is relevant, what is significant. 

Refuting David Irving, for example, is presented as being of great
importance. But why are HIS the historical lies that should receive a high
priority in being refuted? Aren't there many more historical lies that need
to be deal with as a higher priority, beginning with, to cite just one
example, the lie that the United States invaded Cuba in 1898 to help free it
from the Spanish, or, to cite another, that the United States has blockaded
Cuba for almost half a century to help the Cuban people. 

What is considered "objective" depends ENTIRELY on what side you are one.
And when one finds that there seems to be an almost complete consensus in
society about something like "objective journalism," what that shows is NOT
that there is such a thing, but that in the given society there is a very
cohered ruling class consensus that has been successfully imposed as
hegemonic in that society as a whole.

Joaquin


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