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In an article for The Jewish Advocate (24-30 June), Shira Shoenboerg says that Alan Dershowitz of Harvard's law faculty and Richard Landes of Boston University's history department have joined those who accuse Columbia University's Rashid Khalidi of plagiarism. See also, Solomonia, where History News Network is identified as the"Leftists New Network." The comments there and at Front Page Rag continue to offend me because of the refusal to distinguish partisan politics from the struggle for academic integrity.
Roger Sandall,"What Native Peoples Deserve," Commentary, n.d., is a deeply disturbing essay about the status of native Americans in Brazil.
Tim Burke has returned from travels on the west coast and he's brought goodies for us, both at Cliopatria and Easily Distracted, as well as dose of reality about Zimbabwe.
I believe that the dissent written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in Kelo v. City of New London, No. 04-108 was absolutely correct and that the majority decision by Justices Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy and Souter deeply violates something quite elemental to the American dream. As Justice O'Connor said, the majority decision can only benefit those who are already wealthy at the expense of those who are not. Private property is the last bastion of liberty and the justices on the Court's left sacrificed the interests of ordinary people to magnify the authority of the state and further fill the pockets of the already wealthy. Shame on them.
At coffee grounds, Evan Roberts takes note of the death of Susan Porter Benson of the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He never had a chance to meet her, says Evan, but her book, Counter Cultures, brought him to the place where he is now. There's not much higher tribute than that.
Finally, special thanks to two of my colleagues for their extraordinary work: First, to Sharon Howard, without whom the History Carnival would not have become the smashing success that it is. Beyond that, she and Julie Hofmann are turning Carnivalesque into a monthly production, alternating ancient and medieval history one month with early modern history the next. Second, many thanks to Jon Dresner, who has engineered the expansion of Cliopatria's palace. Well down our right hand column, you'll see a link to Cliopatria's Symposia. Links to our first symposium, on Barry Gewen's"Forget the Founding Fathers," New York Times, 5 June 2005, including Gewen's response, are found there. We will do occasional symposia in the future. Be on the lookout for a likely subject piece. Whenever we hold a symposium, it will be posted on our mainpage and archived at Cliopatria's Symposia. Jon's larger effort has been devoted to Cliopatria's History Blogroll. If you've not been over there lately, go have a look at it. I count more than 165 history blogs over there, in addition to the 20 or so in the blogroll on our mainpage. It really is quite extraordinary to see the history blogosphere expanding so rapidly and we've Jon to thank for helping us keep track of it.
You are right; there is considerable potential for corruption in the eminent domain power. There always has been. This is particularly true when governments and corporations woprk together.
However I did not say that the government was good or right in this case; I said that what it did was constitutional. The power of the government to do good with eminent domain is closely associated with the power to do evil, and it is difficult to curtail its doing the latter without also curtailing significantly its power to do good.
Both dissents, particularly O'Connor's, worked hard to suggest that this case was clearly and uniquely different than past cases before the Court and that, therefore, holding for the homeowners would not set new limitations on emient domain.
I was not convinced that they were successful it this. Hence, my stand. I thought their logics allowed the possibility of a wider rollback of the power and that, though good would be done in this case, harm would be done in the long run.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/25/2005
If I may say so, Oscar, that is said by someone who truly believes that government is the citizen's best friend. The enlarged possibilities for corruption in Kelo are, alone, reason to believe that this is a terrible decision.
Oscar Chamberlain -
6/25/2005
People are rightly uncomfortable with eminent domain as a power of government. It is one of the most intrusive powers, and compensation is all too often insufficient for the damage done to a person's life.
However, it is an essential power of government, and for the court to have placed a vague limit on the government's right to do this would have had its own problems. Primarily, it would have opened up a new avenue of challenges against any action of eminent domain, whether for private gain, environmental gain, or any other gain. This would have made the Supereme Court a regulator of eminent domain in which it would decide, case-by-case, what is too far. The majority avoided that, and wisely I think.
The use of eminent domain in this case was arguably wrong, but that, in itself, does not mean the power should be limited.
Louis N Proyect -
6/24/2005
Of course I have criticisms. Here are just a few:
1. The miners were encroaching on an Indian reserve. When they approached the heavily armed miners, a fight broke out and there were casualties on both sides. Sandall makes it sound like murder when it really had more in common with the sort of thing that occurred all throughout the 19th century in the USA. As far as Indians oppressing whites in the Amazon rainforest, it is only a rag like Commentary magazine that can try to turn the victim into the criminal. Entirely missing from Sandall's article is any discussion of the long record of miner assaults on Indians, like this:
The New York Times
August 23, 1993, Monday, Late Edition - Final
Brazil's Outrage Intensifies As Toll in Massacre Hits 73
By JAMES BROOKE, Special to The New York Times
DATELINE: RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug. 22
As outrage mounted over the massacre of 73 Indians by gold miners, President Itamar Franco today called a meeting of the National Defense Council for Monday to enlist the help of the military in hunting down the killers. The council, made up of civilian and military officials, advises the President on national security.
The military has been hostile to Indian rights, but public calls for justice have been growing since Saturday, when the death toll in an attack on Yanomami Indians on Aug. 15 roughly doubled, to 73, making it the largest massacre of Indians in Brazil in this century.
2. As far as quoting Margaret Mead's rants are concerned, there is not much point to responding to them. I am surprised that Sandall thought they had merit, when they come across as a mixture of Archie Bunker and Rudyard Kipling. Mead said, "All primitive peoples lead miserable, unhappy, cruel lives, most of which are spent trying to kill each other." I love that business about being "unhappy". So *scientific*. Somebody engaged with the anthropological literature might have made the effort to at least counter the views of a Marshall Sahlins, for example.
3. Sandall refers to Portuguese settlers in the 16th century who were appalled by the man-eating proclivities of the Tupinamba Indians. I deal with this nonsense in a piece I wrote on "The Tempest":
While giving credit to Montaigne as Europe's first multiculturalist, we must at the same time recognize that he was also guilty of a terrible slander against the Indian, committed mainly out of ignorance. Montaigne assumed that the Tupinamba Indians of Brazil were cannibals, when there really is no evidence to support this. A sailor named Hans Standen spent 12 months on the South American coast and wrote a travel book filled with lurid tales about Tupinamba cannibalism that Montaigne accepted at face value.
Standen account is so filled with inconsistencies, that they alone serve to debunk the notion of cannibalism in Brazil. By his own admission, he only spent 12 months in Tupinamba territory but apparently learned their language well enough in this time to record their accounts. I personally have been studying Spanish on and off for 35 years and still don't have it nailed down.
And what accounts they are! He says that when the tribe captures a man from another tribe, their own women force themselves sexually on him. If the woman becomes pregnant, the child is raised as a Tupinamba, but during adulthood "when the mood seizes them, they kill and eat it." That is what we would call a major mood disorder. Standen also said that the Indians could not count past five, which in his mind was sufficient proof of a savagery consistent with cannibalism. (For a full and highly informative discussion of how Europeans got the idea from Standen and other fabulists that cannibalism existed in the New World, I recommend W. Arens' "The Man-Eating Myth Myth: Anthropology and Anthropagy, New York, 1979.)
To conclude, Sandall is a complete idiot. I find it depressing that a serious scholar could read his nonsense and take it at face value.
Derek Charles Catsam -
6/24/2005
The great thing about HNN is that radical leftists think it is appallingly conservative and radical rightists think it is sickeningly leftist. They both are wrong.
dc
Martin Solomon -
6/24/2005
Understood.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/24/2005
Mr. Proyect, Apart from your love of dominating conversations on someone else's nickel, do you have internal criticism of the article in question? That would be appropriate.
Louis N Proyect -
6/24/2005
Go ahead and lecture all you want. When a boss lectures me, I have to take it all in without saying a word. That is because the boss has the power over my wallet. You, on the other hand, are utterly impotent, except the power to ban me because you don't like my politics. (For all of your free speech sanctimony, I have not met many people on the Internet with censorious instincts as palpable as your own.)
Here, by the way, are some of Sandall's scholarly credentials taken from his own website. You really know how to pick 'em.
"A part-time BA in anthropology took him to Columbia University in 1956, but the prospect of a PhD in this alarming subject made him drop out, find work as a guide at the American Museum of Natural History, and learn what he could about making documentary films."
Ralph E. Luker -
6/24/2005
Of course, you are correct that you were not the person who said that. It simply amused me that it was said at your site. I'm so used to Mr. Proyect berating us for being insufficiently Leftist that I wanted to make another opinion available to him. I do, however, think that it is very important to detach any criticism of Khaladi's responsibility for plagiarism from any political motivation for making that criticism. If he is a plagiarist, it isn't because he is a supporter of Palestinian rights.
Martin Solomon -
6/24/2005
That was a joke, Mr. Luker. You seem to have taken some offence for which I apologize. The point is I'm not familiar enough with this place to have an opinion about your bent one way or the other, and didn't refer to your site in the manner you implied.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/24/2005
I believe that my proprietorship claims on this site are a little stronger than your claims and that you need to hear whatever lecture I choose to give you.
Louis N Proyect -
6/24/2005
Even if you were not making a threat, I don't need to hear lectures from you about whether I am doing my job or not. Where do you get the nerve to bring up that topic? It smacks of the snooping that I read about in the trade press all the time about how employees are using the Internet inappropriately. It is also totally arrogant since it assumes that I don't have the right to post to this blog during working hours while professors do. Do I need your permission to speak to my wife on the telephone? In any case, I can certainly understand why you would want to shift the attention away from that disgusting article. It is singularly unscholarly.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/24/2005
I may be despicable, but I made no threat -- veiled or otherwise. I'm just suggesting that you ought to check in with your conscience occasionally.
Louis N Proyect -
6/24/2005
Dr. Luker, I wrote a political criticism of an item dealing with indigenous peoples. You wrote a personal attack that contains a veiled threat about whether I am doing my job. For somebody in a position of responsibility on this forum, this is despicable.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/24/2005
Does Columbia University actually pay you to do source tracking at obscure blogs and adjudicating cases of political righteousness? Do you spend any time doing the work of computer services at the University?
Ralph E. Luker -
6/24/2005
Mr. Solomon, I appreciate your having the free speech right to call History News Network "Leftist News Network" if you should decide to do that, but if you do please carry on your debate -- not with me, but -- with Peter Clarke, Louis Proyect and others who will laugh in your face.
Louis N Proyect -
6/24/2005
I agree. This is a disturbing article. Almost as disturbing as the item on HNN a while back that denied that North American Indians were victims of genocide. I imagine that Dr. Luker stumbled across Sandall's piece on aldaily.com. It was placed there for obvious reasons. Denis Dutton is a fellow-traveler of Spiked-Online, a bizarre libertarian cult in Great Britain headed by a sociologist named Frank Furedi that emerged out of Living Marxism magazine. LM was infamous for its attacks on environmentalism, indigenous rights, health and safety standards, etc.--all in the name of a kind of crude Marxist productivism. In recent years, they have dropped the Marxist pretense and function like Reason Magazine or any of the think-tanks funded by the now defunct (thankfully) Olin Foundation, etc. It is to the eternal discredit of Chronicle of Higher Education that they decided to pay some huge amount of money for Dutton's website. It is a dank and ugly place.
Martin Solomon -
6/24/2005
Sorry, "New*s* Network."
Martin Solomon -
6/24/2005
To clarify, the author of the Solomonia Blog (that would be me) did not identify HNN as the "Leftists New Network," a commenter did. I reserve my right to do so in the future, of course, I just happened not to have done so this time. I currently have no opinion on that one way or the other. I realize you did not specifically say that I did, but I wanted to be clear on it.
Louis N Proyect -
6/24/2005
This is what they call chutzpah.
Jonathan Dresner -
6/24/2005
...in addition to my other duties (mostly what I do is keep track of Ralph's finds and initiatives, frankly: I can't take credit for more than a very small fraction of the new blog listings we've produced, though I will take the blame for the classification system, if necessary), I'll be hosting the next Carnivalesque -- Early Modern -- here on July 5th.
Nominations of material produced since early May -- your own, or work you've noted, or blogs you think I should look at -- to dresner[at]hawaii[dot]edu, please!
