{"id":263,"date":"2006-02-23T02:33:20","date_gmt":"2006-02-23T07:33:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=263"},"modified":"2006-02-23T02:33:20","modified_gmt":"2006-02-23T07:33:20","slug":"against-suicidalism-from-down-under","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=263","title":{"rendered":"Against Suicidalism from Down Under"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Keith Windschuttle gets it.  In <a href='http:\/\/www.sydneyline.com\/Adversary%20Culture.htm'>The Adversary<br \/>\nCulture<\/a> he identifies the same suicidalist pathology that<br \/>\nMark Brittingham and Jeff Goldstein and I have been writing about<br \/>\nrecently.<\/p>\n<p>Windschuttle, an Australian historian, identifies historians and<br \/>\ncultural-studies types on the academic left as vectors of the<br \/>\ndisease. I wonder if he&#8217;s read Koch on Willi Munzenberg or Haynes<br \/>\n&amp; Klehr&#8217;s <cite>Denial<\/cite> and gets how thoroughly these<br \/>\npeople were piping to a tune that Stalin&#8217;s espionage apparat wrote?<\/p>\n<p>For anyone still tempted to believe blaming the Soviets for the<br \/>\nflakiness of academia is just conspiratorial raving, get a load of <a href='http:\/\/www.frontpagemag.com\/Articles\/ReadArticle.asp?ID=3214'>this<\/a><br \/>\nand <a href='http:\/\/usinfo.state.gov\/media\/Archive\/2005\/Nov\/09-262154.html'>this<\/a>:<br \/>\nit seems that during the Korean War the Soviets and North Koreans<br \/>\nthought anti-U.S. dezinformatsiya so important that they gassed their<br \/>\nown people in order to fabricate evidence for a legend that<br \/>\nU.S. troops had used chemical weapons in Korea.  They did this with<br \/>\nthe clear intention of damaging U.S. prestige, of breaking our will to<br \/>\noppose Soviet expansionism by making us doubt and loathe ourselves.<br \/>\nWe have statements from the people who planned and executed the<br \/>\noperation.<\/p>\n<p>They got the result they were after.  Left-wing historians like<br \/>\nGabriel Kolko dutifully repeated legends of U.S. chemical warfare,<br \/>\nterrorism and atrocities in Korea for forty years afterwards. In fact,<br \/>\nKolko continued to repeat the chemical-warfare legend even after the<br \/>\nSoviets themselves repudiated it in a published 1953 letter to Mao<br \/>\nTse-Tung!<\/p>\n<p>Whether Kolko himself (or any other individual leftie) was taking<br \/>\norders from Moscow or was an &#8216;honest&#8217; dupe fed the legend by Soviet<br \/>\npropaganda organs is not really very significant.  What matters is<br \/>\nthat Kolko, and all the the rest of the Marxist intelligentsia who<br \/>\nbecame cogs in Stalin&#8217;s memetic war machine, willingly did their part<br \/>\nto injure &#8216;the main enemy&#8217;.  They retailed the lies of a tyrant who<br \/>\nmurdered more people than Hitler, and they have not yet been called to<br \/>\naccount for it.<\/p>\n<p>Say what you will about conservative historians and conservatives<br \/>\nin general (I can find plenty of nasty things to say of them, and<br \/>\nfrequently have); at least they never sunk quite so low as to repeat<br \/>\ntotalitarian propaganda after the totalitarians themselves had<br \/>\ndisowned it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Keith Windschuttle gets it. In The Adversary Culture he identifies the same suicidalist pathology that Mark Brittingham and Jeff Goldstein and I have been writing about recently. Windschuttle, an Australian historian, identifies historians and cultural-studies types on the academic left as vectors of the disease. I wonder if he&#8217;s read Koch on Willi Munzenberg or&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=263\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Against Suicidalism from Down Under<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}