pynchon-l-digest V2 #1840

[Doug Millison]

No, Mackin, you're still mixed up about who said what. I quoted DeLong's
review of Evans book, in which DeLong relates the historical approach of
Taylor, Gibbon, and other historians to the methods used by Holocaust denier
Irving. If you don't like DeLong's comparison of Taylor to Irving, take it
up with the good professor -- his email address is delong at econ.berkeley.edu,
and you can read his review online at
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/evans.html; likewise,
if "jbor" doesn't like DeLong's appraisal of Taylor's work, take it up with
DeLong.

Here's how DeLong compares Taylor to Holocaust denier Irving:

DeLong:
"So I believe that Richard Evans and the other witnesses called by the
attorneys for Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin proved their case: the assertions
about Irving made in Denying the Holocaust were substantially true. Her book
would not be suppressed in Britain. According to Evans's
categorization--with its stress on being a truthful voice of the documents
and other primary evidence--Irving was not a historian at all, or not a very
good historian. (Of course, it is hard to see how A.J.P. Taylor can maintain
his reputation in Evans's eyes, given the passages on the Hossbach
memorandum in Origins of the Second World War.)  ... 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."


Here's DeLong 's judgements of Taylor's history:
"Now Taylor's history is not history as it really happened. All you have to
do is glance an inch beyond the frame of Taylor's picture--at Nazi domestic
policy and the Night of Broken Glass, or at Hitler's conduct of World War
II--and you find events grossly and totally inconsistent with Taylor's
portrait of an opportunist looking for diplomatic victories on the cheap.
Taylor's Hitler would never have widened the war by attacking the Soviet
Union and declaring war on the United States, or weakened his own military
resources by exterminating six million Jews, four million Russian prisoners
of war, and millions of others rather than putting them to work in the
factories making tanks and ammunition. Nevertheless, you can learn a lot
from Origins.....A.J.P. Taylor's Origins of World War II is
ultimately a failure because its psychological picture of Hitler's
motivations and aims is inconsistent with what else we know about Hitler
from primary sources outside the book. "

Taylor has his defenders -- Mackin and "jbor" among them, obviously. I
wouldn't read Taylor for an objective portrayal of Germany's entry into WWII
or Hitler's ideology, however, as it sounds as if Taylor's selective gaze
fails in at least those two areas.

FYI, the first entry for A.J.P. Taylor that comes up in a search through
www.google.com is at what appears to be a neo-Nazi organization (check the
swastika in the home page at
http://www.redrival.com/heretical/British/index.html#uk_directory), which
quotes Taylor above this piece of propaganda: "Three disastrous policies
which have been implemented this century by the British "democratic"
Government without any democratic mandate whatever: 
Giving women the vote; 
Going to war against our closest genetic cousins, the Germans; 
Allowing invasion by the Third World." (at
http://www.redrival.com/heretical/British/mhistory.html).

Here's another observation (from the web site of the Department of History
at the University of San Diego) re Taylor that notes how his work has been
used by Holocaust revisionists:
"Taylor has been used by the Holocaust revisionists, such as IHR but he was
never this kind of revisionist, and never denied the reality of the
Holocaust. He at one time praised the scholarship of the notorious David
Irving, but he never endorsed the bogus Hitler Diaries or Irving's
anti-holocaust arguments. Taylor practiced a legitimate revisionism that is
found in every field of history. Similar revisionists included Daniel J.
Goldhagen who has argued that a deep-rooted antisemitism in Germany caused
the Holocaust, not just Hitler and the Nazi party. Herbert Bix has
challenged the traditional interpretation of Hirohito as a passive, remote
figure-head, and has instead argued that the emperor was an active supporter
of war policies."
http://history.acusd.edu/gen/WW2Timeline/Taylorthesis.html