Gene Coyle wrote: >The Wall Street Journal frequently denounces "junk science." By that they >seem to meen expert testimony that supports seeking damages from some >business. What I've discovered that a lot of this preoccupation with "junk science" has to do with American Indian concerns. Recent articles about alleged cannibalism among Pueblo Indians, the "Kennewick Man" and the Rigobertu Menchu controversy have convinced me that the ruling class (sorry for the Marxist jargon) feels that the achilles heel of their indigenous opponents and their supporters is on the matter of who is more "scientific" or "objective". Salon Magazine has jumped into the fray by a favorable review of a Sokalesque attack on "relativist" historiography: <startquote> [The author being reviewed] Windschuttle notes that behind these new histories lurks a revisionist impulse that prevents historians from taking the facts at face value. In many of these theories, the native cultures invariably end up being valorized over the bad imperialist white men. One of the reasons historians don't criticize these new trends is that they're afraid of being painted as reactionary colonialists. But Windschuttle shows just how superficial such sympathies for oppressed peoples are. He points out that despite these historians' sympathy for the imperial culture of Tenochtitlan, they have done little to resurrect the views of their conquered neighbors. The interest of cultural studies theorists in the conquest of the Americas, Windschuttle argues, "derives only in small part from any real sympathy they might have for the natives and far more from their fervor to adopt a politically correct stance against their own society." <endquote> The main target of Winschuttle's wrath are historians who deploy structuralist and poststructuralist paradigms, but in reality the goal is not "relativism" but social justice. I wrote the reviewer, a wet-behind-the-ears Berkeley history major, a mild remonstrance that pointed out that Arthur Schlesinger, who has argued similarly, managed to write an entire book about the Andrew Jackson presidency without mentioning the expulsion of the Cherokees from the south in the infamous "trail of tears". He wrote me back a letter in all upper-case accusing Schlesinger of being some kind of commie because he thought that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
