only facts, no interpretations

[Doug Millison]

It's hard to know what Mackin's beef with DeLong or Evans might be, 
or how DeLong's review might be out of place here, given mention 
earlier today of another review of the same book, plus DeLong's 
treatment of yet another book, by A.J.P. Taylor, that has figured 
prominently in the discussion in this forum. It's DeLong who brings 
Taylor into his discussion of Evans' book on the Holocaust denier, 
Irving, after all. DeLong seems to have his doubts about quite a few 
historians besides Irving, Taylor, and the others he mentions in his 
review:

DeLong:
"So it seems to me that ultimately Evans's attempt to draw a bright line
between Irving and the historians fails. When Watt worries that the forces
unleashed by the Irving trial will impinge on the reputation of historians
like Gibbon and Taylor who "allowed their political agenda... to influence
their professional practice," and who used the available primary evidence
selectively and tendentiously, he is right: it will. Misquotation and
mistranslation are greater sins against Clio than merely averting one's eyes
from pieces of evidence, or telling history to make a particular point
rather rather than as it really happened. But they are not the only sins."

It might be interesting to compare that with the view of history and 
historians that develops in Pynchon's writings, where folklore and 
propganda and other distortions would appear to be among the many 
links in the chain back to understanding what comes before us.

That can't happen when some folks claim an ultimate truth that 
revalues all other propositions:

"Edward Gibbon set out to write the story of the decline and fall of the
Roman Empire with two purposes: to tell a good story, and to provide a
lesson for the future of the danger of barbarism and religious fanaticism.
Donald Cameron Watt refers to Gibbon's "caricature of early Christianity" as
history not as it really happened but instead molded by Gibbon's
own--Enlightenment, tolerant--political agenda. It is not clear to me that
Gibbon's picture of early Christian bishops and theologians is a caricature.
The council of Nicaea seems to caricature itself quite well, for there the
bishops and theologians proclaimed that anyone having trouble understanding
the phrase "eternally begotten" could mean was condemned to hell. Such
behavior seems profoundly... un-Christian. Gibbon focuses on 
theologians who played intellectual dominance games and on
bishops who played power games rather than on saints or believers seeking to
live holy and just lives. But there were such theologians and bishops (just
as there were saints and believers)."


-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>