pynchon-l-digest V2 #1840

[Paul Mackin]

This subject is depressing and I promise I won't pursue it further than this
post. I don't really have anything more to say even now.

Why won't Doug answer my simple question? Did he or didn't he imply Taylor
is a Holocaust Denier in the quotation I supplied? If not, he should tell us
what he did actually mean to say.

The statement in question is: "In his review of the Evans book, DeLong
discusses another history (A.J.P.
Taylor's)  that has been mentioned several times in this forum to support
the notion that Germany didn't start WWII -- DeLong shows how this sort of
argumentation relates to the historial approach of Holocaust deniers."

Admittedly there is some wiggle room in the loose phraseology but Doug needs
to do the wiggling because the statement can easily suggest the meaning I
feared it to have..

Oh rats. I'll go the extra mile and help Doug out. He didn't ACTUALLY mean
Taylor is a Holocaust Denier. He meant only that Irving was one and
(following DeLong) this kind of untruthfulness is related to what other
historians do when they do not tell the whole truth and nothing but the
truth. Of course the other "lying" historians are not necessarily lying with
regard to the actuality of the Holocaust.

We may well ask why if this fairly innocuous observation (DeLong doesn't
think it completely innocuous of course) is all Doug meant why didn't he
make his words more straightforward. I suppose, like the rest of us, he
doesn't like to sound innocuous.

            P.




To: "Doug Millison" <millison at online-journalist.com>; <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2001 6:36 PM
Subject: Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1840



----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Millison" <DMillison at ftmg.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2001 7:09 PM
Subject: RE: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1840


> 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
>