Genocide and intentionality
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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
full: 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 make sense of: "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
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