Re: Is Bob Only Exaggerating?

smaceach@polar.bowdoin.edu (frank@clark.net)
Sun, 26 Jan 1997 12:42:01 -0500

On Mon, 20 Jan 1997 smaceach@polar.bowdoin.edu wrote:

> <frank@clark.net> wrote:
> >
> > I'd like to know of a case of someone getting tenure, within the last
> > decade, who has openly held these positions. And I'd like even more to
> > know of a case where someone openly claiming that whites are innately more
> > intelligent than blacks getting tenure.
>
> Take a look at the people who get Pioneer Fund money, and their grad
> students. Numbers of them are tenured, although I'm not sure about the
> last decade -- why then, especially? But look at Philipe Rushton, at
> University of Western Ontario, for example -- fulfills your criteria
> and, when his beliefs became controversial, the educational establishment
> held its collective nose and defended his right to tenure. And he still
> has it. Does trash anthropology, but he's still tenured.

It is the last decade I really do want to find out about. The voices of
the educational establishment in Rushton's support were not very loud. Did
Steven Jay Gould sign anything on Rushton's behalf? By why just hold your
collective nose. Why not show *positive* evidence FOR racial equality.
These nose holder believe in it. Where's their evidence.

> > Less exaggeratedly: There were other mass killings than those of the
> > Nazis, such as those undertaken when Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were
> > in power. But liberal opinion regards Hitler as far worse because of his
> > racial ideas. Is this the case?
>
> _Far_ worse...? You could, I suppose, examine genocide along the axes
> of numbers of dead, rationale and techniques. Under those criteria,
> Hitler probably leads the pack of monsters for the 20th century at
> least, likely neck-and-neck with Stalin and Mao. Monsters are monsters.
> OTOH, I actually don't see the latter being defended with the passion
> with which revisionists defend Hitler. Have you seen anyone within the
> last few years seriously deny that Stalin's purges happened?

I wrote to some Holocaust Revisionists about this, and they did turn up a
small group of Gulag Deniers or at least claimants that the atrocities are
"greatly exaggerated." I can't locate the reference and am a little
ashamed that I never got around to writing them to hear their arugments. I
would have been instructive. If anyone remembers their address, please
post it.

Actually, there may be more Gulag Deniers than Holocaust Deniers, for all
I know, but the dominant soft-liberal ideology that pervades the media is
not very concerned with the misdeeds of those to the "left" of them. But
when someone denies or belittles the misdeeds of those on the "right,"
they get very concerned and at first try to black out the denials. They by
and large still are successful, as there is no *book* I can buy that
answers the Holocaust Revisionists point-by-point, though I can buy books
refuting Velikovsy and the Creationists.

Besides, World War II is still alive. It is "the" war for most Americans,
like the Civil War used to be for most Southerners (and still is for some
of the very old oldsters). It is for me (a fifth-generation Kansas), but
because it marked the real beginning of both concentration of power at the
national level and into the executive branch at that level.

I wrote a piece, "Why Governments Will Devolve," at the start of last year
and might as well repost it, for the benefit (such that it might be) for
those who didn't see it.

Frank