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Brainiac Five posted:Well, their intentions of restoring French control of Algeria and Morocco aren't to their credit, and the biggest motivation was simple military expediency. Not that this makes Operation Torch morally abhorrent. To be fair Operation Torch was necessary to ensure control of the Med Sea and such since the rest of the Axis powers had some sort of military investment in Africa I think at the time. Restoring colonial possessions is bad, but the core intention of restoring the status quo in this scenario is better than say Soviet intention for the land it occupied.
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Apr 5, 2016 18:08
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Famethrowa posted:The ussr was arguably as colonial as the United States :shh: Lmao. Even restricting ourselves to the Cold War, that's pretty misleading.
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Apr 5, 2016 18:09
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Brainiac Five posted:Lmao. Even restricting ourselves to the Cold War, that's pretty misleading. Soviet satellite states, puppet governments, Prague Spring, Afghanistan... Not colonial to you?
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Apr 5, 2016 18:16
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You need a blue water navy to be a colonial power, the USSR just gained allies and such due to the political pressure of the cold war. I think its fair to say it gained most of its Asian allies by being the alternative to China's aggressive stance towards its neighbors.
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Apr 5, 2016 18:19
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Gaj posted:You need a blue water navy to be a colonial power, the USSR just gained allies and such due to the political pressure of the cold war. I think its fair to say it gained most of its Asian allies by being the alternative to China's aggressive stance towards its neighbors. That's... not true in the slightest. And that's even ignoring the fact that the Soviets had a blue-water navy.
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Apr 5, 2016 18:21
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Gaj posted:You need a blue water navy to be a colonial power, the USSR just gained allies and such due to the political pressure of the cold war. I think its fair to say it gained most of its Asian allies by being the alternative to China's aggressive stance towards its neighbors. It's Asian allies were equals and counterparts, sure. It's Warsaw Pact allies were for the most part firmly under their thumb. Also, their navy wasn't quite as strong as the US, but it was certainly blue water.
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Apr 5, 2016 18:21
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Gaj posted:You need a blue water navy to be a colonial power, the USSR just gained allies and such due to the political pressure of the cold war. I think its fair to say it gained most of its Asian allies by being the alternative to China's aggressive stance towards its neighbors. Man, nobody tell the Northern, Pacific, Baltic, or Black Seas Fleets. They'll be all kinds of bummed to learn they never existed.
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Apr 5, 2016 18:23
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I mean I knew The Hunt for Red October was a work of fiction, but I had no idea Clancy went that far! 
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Apr 5, 2016 18:27
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Gaj posted:Also cant we just as easily say that the American-Allied actions against Vichy France are tempered by their post war actions and intentions? Yeah the Brits bombed the French fleet, and they then restored the French state as an independent sovereign nation. The argument that "no government=no country" is so childishly laughable Eddie Izzard made fun of it Well, that's basically "the ends justify the means", except dressed up in fancy wording, pretending that an objective moral judgement of international political maneuvering over the course of an entire decade is possible, and taking laughably naive views of both means and ends. The Allies acted in total self-interest without any regard for the rights of neutral nations, even going to far as to purposely launch aggressive attacks or acts of war against them solely for the convenience of the Allied cause, and that should be criticized - just as similar Soviet behavior, both as part of the Allies and on its own, should similarly be criticized. The Soviet actions were overall worse than the general Allied actions, I think, but neither one should be whitewashed.
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Apr 5, 2016 18:43
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Main Paineframe posted:Well, that's basically "the ends justify the means", except dressed up in fancy wording, pretending that an objective moral judgement of international political maneuvering over the course of an entire decade is possible, and taking laughably naive views of both means and ends. The Allies acted in total self-interest without any regard for the rights of neutral nations, even going to far as to purposely launch aggressive attacks or acts of war against them solely for the convenience of the Allied cause, and that should be criticized - just as similar Soviet behavior, both as part of the Allies and on its own, should similarly be criticized. The Soviet actions were overall worse than the general Allied actions, I think, but neither one should be whitewashed. Actually the murder of millions during Stalin's regime is a fun logic puzzle to try and rationalize. 
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Apr 5, 2016 18:50
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I think it should be plainly obvious, that while the Soviet Navy has blue-water capable ships, that does not mean they had anywhere near the global projection capabilities of any other colonial navy. Im not even mentioning the Warsaw pact as a colonial construction, because that should be plainly obvious that is it unless you cant colonize places without governments. Vietnam didnt turn to the USSR because of gunboat diplomacy, but due to fears of Chinese aggression (political pressure). I would admit that there is a pretty blurry line between colonial possession and a constructed buffer state.
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Apr 5, 2016 18:55
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Brainiac Five posted:Lmao. Even restricting ourselves to the Cold War, that's pretty misleading. Well, Russia kept chunks of various places after WW2 and has expanded its borders forcefully through both annexation and Russian administered puppet states a few times in the last 2 decades. Largest country on the planet just cannot seem to stop growing.
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Apr 5, 2016 19:09
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Gaj posted:You need a blue water navy to be a colonial power, the USSR just gained allies and such due to the political pressure of the cold war. I think its fair to say it gained most of its Asian allies by being the alternative to China's aggressive stance towards its neighbors. No, you need a blue water navy to run an overseas colonial empire. It's quite possible to direct colonialism and imperialism at one's neighbors on the same continent, although it's historically been more difficult in Europe due to the close proximity of rival empires.
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Apr 5, 2016 19:21
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Didn't the USSR deliberately Russianize some of its constituent "republics"? The Baltic states, for instance? Does that not constitute colonialism?
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Apr 5, 2016 19:23
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Gaj posted:You need a blue water navy to be a colonial power, What? No.
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Apr 5, 2016 20:15
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Russia (and the Soviet Union, which was a de facto Russian Empire) is a land-based civilization whose expansion is necessarily overland. The Anglo-American and French Empires have been sea-based. The blue-navy requirement is either disingenuous or ignorantly Western-centric in its outlook. Aleksandr Dugin does good analysis of Russian geopolitics along these lines.
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Apr 5, 2016 21:35
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Famethrowa posted:Soviet satellite states, puppet governments, Prague Spring, Afghanistan... Responding to the Afghanistan government's request for military assistance is not "colonialism".
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Apr 5, 2016 21:41
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HorseLord posted:Responding to the Afghanistan government's request for military assistance is not "colonialism". 
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Apr 5, 2016 21:47
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HorseLord posted:Responding to the Afghanistan government's request for military assistance is not "colonialism". That's the coup puppet government they basically created right?
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Apr 5, 2016 21:54
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I have met Furr several times, and am also on a few listservs with him. I think I can contribute a few contextualizing tidbits that may help the conversation (if this can even be called a conversation at this point). His character is beside the point, but I will say that he's a likable and earnest guy. First, as has been pointed out, he is trained as a literary medievalist. This is usually evoked to discredit him: to say that he has no right to speak on matters of history and historiography. Even today, though, the scholarship on Medieval literature is profoundly caught up in the problems of historiography -- how the hell anyone today can know with any certainty what was happening in 12th century Flanders, or whatever. The historical character of medievalist scholarship was even deeper when Furr was a graduate student, before "theory" became a thing. My point isn't that Furr thus qualifies as a 'trained historian,' but that the leap from Medievalism to straight-up history writing isn't as far as some suggest. This has not been a major point of contention in this thread, but it has come up. For what it's worth, I've never heard Furr say anything about medieval literature with the exception of one Chaucer excerpt in an email. Second is the nature of Furr's project as he has described it to me -- to me personally and to groups of people I was in, at conferences -- on more than one occasion: his argument is not that Stalin did nothing wrong, or that no mistakes were made in the USSR under Stalin.His argument is that the state of historical discourse on communist nations is such that we cannot really say anything about that history with any certainty: that standards of evidence are noticeably lower than for other subjects, and sometimes evidence is lacking altogether. Furr is (obviously) a committed communist, and the relevance of Soviet history for him is that current Marxist movements can learn something from that history, which means knowing as reliably as possible what was successful and what was a failure. The moral evaluation of historical figures is pointless, and even worse is the desire to vindicate or condemn certain figures, for whatever reason. I am in no position to evaluate this argument, but it is also the case that this thread (which seems to have people capable of doing so) has not evaluated the argument on its own terms, usually overconstruing his position in bad faith as "Stalin did nothing wrong" (he did, admittedly, in that famous youtube, say he has seen no evidence of "crimes" committed by Stalin, but a. I have never heard or read him say that anywhere else, and b. I am not sure what is meant by "crimes" that would have relevance for the way in which Stalin is usually condemned, or, in other words, why exactly this is construed in terms of legality and illegality -- I say that very earnestly, and if anyone can expand on this for me I'd be happy to read it). Swampman and others have tried to steer the argument back toward historiographical bias in the last few pages without much success. I would add, though, that if this bias needs to be explained causally (rather than described), we don't really need recourse to a cabalistic CIA conspiracy that grants the government the near-omnipotence necessary to intentionally shape academic discourse for political reasons, even if it's clear and indisputable that the impulse to do so was there. I don't think it's all that farfetched to say that anti-communism was not only a function of capitalist state apparatuses, but also took hold of the citizens of those states such that they "did the right thing" all of their own. But even that is beside the point, because, again, the argument is only that this bias exists in academia, over and above how it came to be. My only wish would be for this thread to take this argument in good faith, because I can only think about it anecdotally at best. In short: the argument is about the writing of history, and not the actual historical events themselves, and this thread is wayyyy caught up in the latter. Lastly, I would say that academic Marxists (this is the circle I'm in) tend to keep Furr's scholarship at arm's length. As a person he is well-loved and a welcome presence at conferences, and generally folks take his line on the relevance of Soviet history for contemporary communists. But, for any number of reasons, "the anti-Stalin paradigm" (Furr's phrase) has not really entered circulation, even among the radical left in academia (lol at the idea of such people). The most tangible effect of Furr's discourse in this circle is more sustained attention to "anti-communism," which absorbs the historiographical point without wading too deep into the Stalin question.
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Apr 5, 2016 22:08
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TFNC posted:But even that is beside the point, because, again, the argument is only that this bias exists in academia, over and above how it came to be. My only wish would be for this thread to take this argument in good faith, because I can only think about it anecdotally at best. In short: the argument is about the writing of history, and not the actual historical events themselves, and this thread is wayyyy caught up in the latter. quote:Grover Furr has been described by historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr as a revisionist author[6] who, according to Cathy Young, was "on a career-long quest to exonerate Stalin".[7] Furr believes that the Katyn massacre was not committed by the NKVD,[8] despite Russia officially admitting as of 2010, that the killings were carried out by the Soviet Union.[9] Furr has also received some negative attention from a number of American conservative media outlets. David Horowitz listed him as one of the "101 most dangerous academics in America", and criticizes him for believing that "it was morally wrong for the United States to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union", denying the Katyn massacre, Stalin's antisemitism, and on a number of other historical issues.[10] Furr was also criticized by websites like FrontPage Magazine[11] and The Daily Caller[12] for a response he gave to a question on Stalin during a university debate: quote:I am in no position to evaluate this argument, but it is also the case that this thread (which seems to have people capable of doing so) has not evaluated the argument on its own terms, usually overconstruing his position in bad faith as "Stalin did nothing wrong" (he did, admittedly, in that famous youtube, say he has seen no evidence of "crimes" committed by Stalin, but a. I have never heard or read him say that anywhere else, and b. I am not sure what is meant by "crimes" that would have relevance for the way in which Stalin is usually condemned, or, in other words, why exactly this is construed in terms of legality and illegality -- I say that very earnestly, and if anyone can expand on this for me I'd be happy to read it). Swampman and others have tried to steer the argument back toward historiographical bias in the last few pages without much success. I would add, though, that if this bias needs to be explained causally (rather than described), we don't really need recourse to a cabalistic CIA conspiracy that grants the government the near-omnipotence necessary to intentionally shape academic discourse for political reasons, even if it's clear and indisputable that the impulse to do so was there. I don't think it's all that farfetched to say that anti-communism was not only a function of capitalist state apparatuses, but also took hold of the citizens of those states such that they "did the right thing" all of their own. Yeah, you may enjoy his company and his lectures, but he's saying the exact opposite of what you are claiming.
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Apr 5, 2016 22:16
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didn't he rob a bank
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Apr 5, 2016 22:18
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Famethrowa posted:Soviet satellite states, puppet governments, Prague Spring, Afghanistan... Imperialism isn't colonialism, so no, those aren't colonial in any meaningful sense. There were colonial actions performed by the USSR, but almost all of them were internal. Warbadger posted:Well, Russia kept chunks of various places after WW2 and has expanded its borders forcefully through both annexation and Russian administered puppet states a few times in the last 2 decades. And yet, the areas annexed from Poland were added to the Ukrainian SSR, not to the Russian SSR. The only area added to the Russian SSR directly was the region around Konigsberg/Kaliningrad. Also, if we're going to insist that the Russian Federation is the USSR, we should probably say that the US is ruled by the house of Hanover to this day, too. Brainiac Five fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Apr 5, 2016 |
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Apr 5, 2016 22:32
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CommieGIR posted:Yeah, you may enjoy his company and his lectures, but he's saying the exact opposite of what you are claiming. I very explicitly mentioned the bolded section of your post, and also very explicitly said that his character was beside the point. You responded by posting what Wikipedia said a bunch of people said Furr said, followed by a claim that he made once, in a Q&A session, and which, again, I am very aware of and referred to in my post.
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Apr 5, 2016 22:33
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TFNC posted:Second is the nature of Furr's project as he has described it to me -- to me personally and to groups of people I was in, at conferences -- on more than one occasion: his argument is not that Stalin did nothing wrong, or that no mistakes were made in the USSR under Stalin.His argument is that the state of historical discourse on communist nations is such that we cannot really say anything about that history with any certainty: that standards of evidence are noticeably lower than for other subjects, and sometimes evidence is lacking altogether. His argument, as you present it, is wrong. We do know what happened in the Soviet Union seventy years ago, and we can say that certain things happened with a fair amount of certainty. Not absolute certainty, no, but no aspect of history is ever absolutely certain - it's an inherent limitation of historical study, which is necessarily limited to only the information that can be gleaned or inferred from surviving sources. I agree that a bias definitely exists in the popular discourse, and that the standards for evidence for claims within that discourse are low and heavily politicized, and I have no doubt that some specific individual historians have bias problems as well, but claiming that such bias extends to academic history as a whole is a serious, major claim that needs serious, major evidence. Fifty years ago when people could literally be denounced to the US government as communists and blacklisted from work, and Soviet papers were still largely classified? Sure, a skew undoubtedly existed back then - although it was impossible to prove because the sources telling the Soviet side of the story often simply weren't accessible to Western historians and were therefore impossible to take into account. But the Cold War has been over for more than a quarter of a century, and many Soviet archives and sources that were previously inaccessible to Western historians have been opened up for quite a while now. However, that's not the claim that he, you, and others are making. You're insinuating the presence of an intentional bias across all of academia, and that's definitely an accusation that should be regarded as extraordinary. I'm not taking the favorite defense of conspiracy theorists, crackpots, and crazies in "good faith".
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Apr 5, 2016 22:49
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whatever you might think about stalin (and i read this entire thread so my anti-communist bingo card is totally covered) his actions created piles upon piles of dead nazis which should put a smile on everyone's faceMain Paineframe posted:His argument, as you present it, is wrong. We do know what happened in the Soviet Union seventy years ago, and we can say that certain things happened with a fair amount of certainty. Not absolute certainty, no, but no aspect of history is ever absolutely certain - it's an inherent limitation of historical study, which is necessarily limited to only the information that can be gleaned or inferred from surviving sources. I agree that a bias definitely exists in the popular discourse, and that the standards for evidence for claims within that discourse are low and heavily politicized, and I have no doubt that some specific individual historians have bias problems as well, but claiming that such bias extends to academic history as a whole is a serious, major claim that needs serious, major evidence. Fifty years ago when people could literally be denounced to the US government as communists and blacklisted from work, and Soviet papers were still largely classified? Sure, a skew undoubtedly existed back then - although it was impossible to prove because the sources telling the Soviet side of the story often simply weren't accessible to Western historians and were therefore impossible to take into account. But the Cold War has been over for more than a quarter of a century, and many Soviet archives and sources that were previously inaccessible to Western historians have been opened up for quite a while now. it's interesting you mention the opening of the soviet archives since that very thing forced the most strident anti-communist historians to revise their Death Numbers and re-contextualize most of what was written beforehand. of course the propaganda victory in the west had already been achieved from decades of cold war historiography, and that's the narrative which has entered popular consciousness, as evidenced by many, many posts in the thread
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Apr 5, 2016 22:49
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TFNC posted:I very explicitly mentioned the bolded section of your post, and also very explicitly said that his character was beside the point. You responded by posting what Wikipedia said a bunch of people said Furr said, followed by a claim that he made once, in a Q&A session, and which, again, I am very aware of and referred to in my post. quote:Furr gave an interview on the subject in which he alleged that a right-wing conspiracy against Stalin, organized by Nikolai Yezhov, the leader of the Soviet Union’s secret police, led to the mass genocide that was carried out during Stalin’s regime as a means to remove him from his position. He also says that many Soviets have a favorable view of Stalin. Keep trying.
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Apr 5, 2016 22:50
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Wasn't one of Stalin's big thing to censor and revise the past by claiming past evidence was wrong and to get angry when people didn't go along with the new narrative 
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Apr 5, 2016 23:16
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Homework Explainer posted:whatever you might think about stalin (and i read this entire thread so my anti-communist bingo card is totally covered) his actions created piles upon piles of dead nazis which should put a smile on everyone's face His actions also created piles upon piles of dead socialists, should we be smiling about that?
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Apr 5, 2016 23:55
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TFNC posted:... Thank you for the very informative post! Do you happen to know if there has been any official acknowledgment of Furr by Dr. Snyder or indeed any notable anti-communist "historian"? I freely admit to running too wild with some of Furr's points and otherwise diving in to the poo poo-scarfing contest against the unhinged anticommunist losers, at many points in the thread... one of the main things that interests me is how the undeniable proof that Snyder is a liar is handled. It makes sense Furr would bring in such an emphatic concept as the "anti-Stalin paradigm" to explain the baffling lack of consequence for Snyder.
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Apr 6, 2016 00:20
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TFNC posted:Second is the nature of Furr's project as he has described it to me -- to me personally and to groups of people I was in, at conferences -- on more than one occasion: his argument is not that Stalin did nothing wrong, or that no mistakes were made in the USSR under Stalin.His argument is that the state of historical discourse on communist nations is such that we cannot really say anything about that history with any certainty: that standards of evidence are noticeably lower than for other subjects, and sometimes evidence is lacking altogether. Are you aware that he literally argues that Stalin committed no crimes?
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Apr 6, 2016 00:25
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Jack of Hearts posted:Are you aware that he literally argues that Stalin committed no crimes? Maybe I should give him a closer look. It makes sense that the dictator of a militarized superpower during a world war would only do good things.
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Apr 6, 2016 01:43
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asdf32 posted:Maybe I should give him a closer look. It makes sense that the dictator of a militarized superpower during a world war would only do good things. I wasn't aware WW2 started in the early 1930s 
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Apr 6, 2016 01:45
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-Troika- posted:I wasn't aware WW2 started in the early 1930s I'm enjoying this prospective love feast between dumb and dumber, but asdf32 is not supporting Stalin with that post.
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Apr 6, 2016 02:01
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Threads like this one are fascinating, but usually generate more heat than light, for good reasons. We are talking about the two superpowers that defined the last century, whose actions and mistakes affected huge numbers of people in ways good and horrible, and each of them churned out more total media demonizing the other than had likely had been produced by all of mankind in the 5 centuries preceding it. We can only hold so much information, and not all of it can ever be accurate, so in the end we pick and choose, not always honestly. We are not impartial. At best, we can be -fair-, and open about our biases. But we do have intimate inner commitments to ideals: to our personal advancement and to ideas that we feel can help us get there; to equality of all and for all; to individualism; to freedom of expression; to private property being the cornerstone of all morality and ethics; to a higher power and its dogma; it's a looong list, and we all check more than one box. So we do hold on to dubious information, and are compelled to dismiss other arguments as silly, naked conspiracy theories. At the same time, conspiracies and misinformation informing big-time real world actions do exist, so we can't always chalk everything unusual as fiction. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Bay of Pigs, the deafening silence surrounding the culling of East Timor, even the babies torn out of incubators and tossed onto hospital floors to die by Saddam's bloodthirsty red-eyed hordes were real underhanded events that had real impact, and I'm likely leaving lots of stuff out. Some are minor accents to the real events; others are entire fake narratives. We are hypocrites, on all sides. We may not openly defend the dirty tricks and inconsistencies 'our' side (not that the leaders of each action really give two shits about us, but we are along for the ride), be it coddling feudal jerks like the Saudis, propping up dysfunctional police states like north Korea, etc, but we surely do forget them fast, and shrug them off when they are brought up. We are too busy trying to survive to seriously agitate for something that distant and outside our sphere, even if it ostensibly violates our ideals. Finally, it doesn't help that history is also a crooked, crazy thing. Who'd imagine that colonial nightmare lich-overlord England, who made nations run red with the blood of uppity wogdom for centuries, would be Europe's Democracy Bastion for ww2, and callous racist overseer Winston Churchill a poster boy for human rights. (personal disclosure: I'm a chomskyite socialist to the core. Tax me at freaking sixty percent, I don't give a poo poo; if I have a moderately comfortable living, can work with something that doesn't ruin my soul and leaves me some time of my own, and education and health are offered to all, I'll happily pass on any dreams of owning a beach house and rubbing elbows with the Hiltons at the Cote d'Azur) I read Snyder's Bloodlands back in 2014. It was a weird book, way too naked in trying to turn Nazi Germany and the USSR into a big murderous buddy cop movie, and doesn't skimp on adding emotional overtones to the quoted research (at the same time, should we even be completely clinical when dealing with stuff this tragic?). I can see why he was feted by several NATO hawks and think tanks. If that was his intention from the get-go or a happy coincidence, who can tell. They won't always have Anne Applebaum as a poster child! All of that said, this weird Stalin Revisionism is just loving weird. It goes against decades of testimony, population data, overt policies and world events, all based on starting from smaller data that goes "see, maybe the USSR was not quite the Mordor we commonly thought. turns out they did not feed 70 million of their citizens to hellhounds every other sunday!" and extrapolating that to "No real crimes happened here, and if they did, it was someone else's fault." Call it the Bart Simpson Axiom of Culpability: I didn't do it. You didn't see me do it. You can't prove anything.
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Apr 6, 2016 02:22
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swampman posted:Thank you for the very informative post! It's handled in much the same way as truthers' "undeniable proof" and climate change deniers' "undeniable proof": it's just a pile of misinterpretations, imaginary connections, self-delusions, and conspiracy theories not even worth a real takedown.
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Apr 6, 2016 02:27
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Main Paineframe posted:His argument, as you present it, is wrong. We do know what happened in the Soviet Union seventy years ago, and we can say that certain things happened with a fair amount of certainty. Not absolute certainty, no, but no aspect of history is ever absolutely certain - it's an inherent limitation of historical study, which is necessarily limited to only the information that can be gleaned or inferred from surviving sources. I agree that a bias definitely exists in the popular discourse, and that the standards for evidence for claims within that discourse are low and heavily politicized, and I have no doubt that some specific individual historians have bias problems as well, but claiming that such bias extends to academic history as a whole is a serious, major claim that needs serious, major evidence. Fifty years ago when people could literally be denounced to the US government as communists and blacklisted from work, and Soviet papers were still largely classified? Sure, a skew undoubtedly existed back then - although it was impossible to prove because the sources telling the Soviet side of the story often simply weren't accessible to Western historians and were therefore impossible to take into account. But the Cold War has been over for more than a quarter of a century, and many Soviet archives and sources that were previously inaccessible to Western historians have been opened up for quite a while now. Thanks for an earnest reply. Your second point first: I certainly did not mean to insinuate an intentional and organized bias across all of academia. I don't think that the world works like that, and I don't really think Furr does, either (but maybe I am too generous). You would probably be right to believe that such a claim is below your good faith, and that's fine. But you grant me that there is, or has been, a certain bias, and if nothing else I think that it's worth interrogating (though I think you're right to imply that I ought to've made a more rigorous distinction between academic and popular discourse). And, more importantly, you're also quite right that, thanks to its scope, "it is a serious, major claim that needs serious, major evidence." I am in no position to offer any evidence at all for that claim, but it's not as though Furr simply makes the assertion and runs off: a book like Blood Lies at least wants to provide that evidence, and the interrogation of that evidence and its adequacy seems to be what Swampman wanted in this thread. Which brings me to your first point: I don't doubt at all that we can know certain things with reliability about the USSR, and I did not mean to imply that Furr takes such a radically skeptical position. My only point was to bring up the "inherent limitation" of historical study that you mention. And as far as I can tell, this is the paradigm in which Furr operates in Blood Lies: he takes every claim made in Bloodlands and examines its evidential basis. I don't believe there is anything wrong with approaching a scholarly historical text in this way, so if there is something wrong with Furr's book it would either be in his criteria for what counts as acceptable evidence, and his standards of reasoning that allow and disallow certain inferences from evidence. The thread, at least in the beginning, was meant to put Furr's reasoning under pressure to see if it holds up, and if it fails, where and in what way. This mostly took the form of posters saying "Furr denies X narrative, which I definitely know happened, so he is wrong." Swampman's refrain, which many have found annoying, has been to ask what primary sources support that narrative that (presumably) Furr did not know about, or ignores, or whatever. This is a difficult thing to do on a forum, where all we can do is post links at each other and name some books that certainly no one will read, but at the very least I understand why the question is being posed! My only point in intervening here is to bring the discussion to this question -- what do we know, how do we know it, what does it mean -- which I think is the point of the thread and of Furr's work. And if that question is below consideration in good faith, I would also like to know why. CommieGIR posted:Keep trying. That article is almost entirely about the same youtube video that I have already acknowledged, and acknowledged I acknowledged. I read the interview with RevLeft that it links to, and I don't think it's pedantic or weasely if I point out that Furr (as in the youtube rant) does not say that no crimes were committed, but that there is no evidence of crimes, and that claims to the contrary therefore lack evidence (this also addresses Jack of Hearts' post). Maybe there is evidence, I don't know! I'm not a(n) historian! This is, again, why Swampman and others have been asking for primary evidence for the claims that Furr is denying. Just for clarity, though, what is it that you think I'm "trying" to do that this Daily Caller article undermines? Swampman posted:Thank you for the very informative post! Thanks for putting in the work on this thread -- I appreciate your efforts. I'm not aware of any statement by Snyder or others about Furr's criticism -- Furr really does publish at the fringe of academia, so it would be easy enough for them to dismiss him with even less thought than most of the posters in this thread. The next time I see him I'll be sure to ask, though.
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Apr 6, 2016 02:55
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Ladies and gentlemen (who am I kidding, it's SA)-- Gentlegoons, I present to you a play in one act titled "Not one crime!" by Sir Grover Furr. Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRPTZF5zSLQ I am going to print out every page of this thread. And I am going to roll it up. And smoke it.
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Apr 6, 2016 02:56
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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"Stalin did nothing wrong" Sorry dude. He should've stuck to medieval literature.
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Apr 6, 2016 03:08
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TFNC posted:Thanks for an earnest reply. Your second point first: I certainly did not mean to insinuate an intentional and organized bias across all of academia. I don't think that the world works like that, and I don't really think Furr does, either (but maybe I am too generous). You would probably be right to believe that such a claim is below your good faith, and that's fine. But you grant me that there is, or has been, a certain bias, and if nothing else I think that it's worth interrogating (though I think you're right to imply that I ought to've made a more rigorous distinction between academic and popular discourse). And, more importantly, you're also quite right that, thanks to its scope, "it is a serious, major claim that needs serious, major evidence." I am in no position to offer any evidence at all for that claim, but it's not as though Furr simply makes the assertion and runs off: a book like Blood Lies at least wants to provide that evidence, and the interrogation of that evidence and its adequacy seems to be what Swampman wanted in this thread. The bias is inherent to the fact that, until the 90s, we only really had the historical sources from one side of the story. The problem with Furr is that, as far as I can tell based on what's been posted in this thread so far, his arguments are not based on new evidence, or even on new interpretations brought about by new evidence that are used to show old evidence in a different light. He's just plain misinterpreting old evidence because he doesn't have the domain knowledge necessary to set it in the proper context. For example, his assertion that the Katyn massacre was actually a German crime based on what he claims to be flaws in the official German report on it from way back in the early 40s. As I pointed out a page or two ago (and was totally ignored) both of the things he points to in the section Swampman quoted are things that sound like evidence to a layman unfamiliar with the incidents but don't actually prove his point at all, as any actual expert in the subject matter would know. In fact, his reasoning was basically conspiracy logic, right up there with birthers scrutinizing Obama's birth certificate and pointing to random marks as "evidence" that it's all an elaborate fake. That is why, even though the documents and photographs he pointed to have been public knowledge since before he was even born, historians never managed to draw the same conclusion from them that he did - because they don't support that conclusion at all, he just thinks so because he doesn't know any better. He's not the first person to think "what if the Katyn massacre was actually committed by the Germans", since that was the Soviets' official line up until the early 90s, but historians have agreed for a very long time that the evidence does not support that claim, so he needs to bring something new to the table if he wants to drag that one back from the grave. If Furr had brought up some newly discovered evidence, it might be worth taking a look at, but he's basically picking over the same evidence historians have known about for decades and coming to a wildly different conclusion through mostly conspiratorial logic. That's why he's ignored - not because of supposed bias in the academic community, but because his work is crap. He fools some people because he posts sources, but his interpretations of those sources and the conclusions he draws from them often have major flaws. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 03:25
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