Alan responded to my long post about this topic as follows: > You know, just because you were gullible and believed the North Korean > propaganda you were fed by your tour guides there does not necessarily mean > that you are completely unable to distinguish between propaganda and fact in > all cases.
> Perhaps I was making this assumption too arbitrarily and judging your > assertions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict too hastily on this basis. Sorry, Alan, but that is not good enough. Go back and re-read the exchange about North Korea. I did not say anything on the list about my trip. I said I would be glad to discuss it off-list with anyone who is interested, but that unfortunately I was constrained by an agreement not to discuss the trip in a public forum by the British tour company that runs the tours (a constraint that was lifted in a subsequent e-mail from our British tour guide, for unexplained reasons). What I did do is basically what I did in this exchange, namely, I cited scholarship, in that case about the Korean War. And not just scholarship, but the best scholarship, a recent (2004) article by Bruce Cumings that ran in Le Monde Diplomatique, which relied almost entirely on internal US government documents to describe the consequences of the US air campaign against North Korean forces during that war. You gagged on the article, called it propaganda, and so on. So that raises the question: Who exactly is it that has been brainwashed, Alan? Bruce Cumings, who has devoted several decades of his life to the study of this war, and writes big thick books on it based primarily on recently declassified US documents, and is widely considered the world's foremost authority on it and North Korea? Me, who studied under Cumings, and has read a big stack of books about North Korea, including Cumings' work? Or you, who apparently settled for the condensed version provided by "Reader's Digest", and gets a bad case of the hives when anything that does not fit the comforting contours of US propaganda and hysterical media reports about that country is cited, and responds not by reading and potentially learning something new (re-read the exchange; you did not even bother to read Cumings' article before laughing it off), but by clinging to the unlettered, unexamined version of events, and then accusing me of being brainwashed for having the temerity to cite a serious scholarly article. BTW, you do not necessarily have to agree with what Cumings says about the Korean War. In fact, there was a fair amount of work done in the 1990s critical of Cumings' two books on the origins of the Korean conflict, the former based in part on newly available Soviet archives. And in the last decade or so, as more has been learned from Chinese and Soviet sources, a fuller picture that is broadly consonant with Cumings' arguments has emerged. As these remarks indicate, scholarship about such things is an ongoing enterprise. Even the views of experts may differ, often sharply. But there is a big difference between an educated view, and a view based on knee-jerk, unexamined assumptions handed down for the last 58 years. You also do not necessarily have to "like North Korea" or "take the Palestinians' side" (whatever that means) as a result of doing some serious reading about these countries and issues. This seems to be a constant source of misunderstanding on your part, Alan, namely the inability to distinguish between legitimate scholarly inquiry aimed at deeper understanding, and "adopting the enemy's position". It really does not speak well of your knowledge of scholarly objectivity that you continue to persist in this. The fact that I cited an article describing some of the horrors inflicted on North Korea by the US AIr Force does not mean that I excuse the NK government for its failures or admire its political system. But such an article and other scholarly work like it are instructive in understanding why the North Korean system functions the way it does, and why there is such paranoia and so little trust in its relations with the outside world, and the US in particular. And Alan further wrote: > I think I should in fact look more carefully into the facts around the start > of the Palestinian refugee situation. I would not want to have believed > Israeli propaganda myself if that is what it turns out to be. If this means that you intend to actually read something serious about the issue before opining about it, then I guess we can call that progress. I will just say again that my point is not that you have to agree with the New Historians (who do not even agree with one another), or Norman Finkelstein, who has been critical of them from a position more sympathetic to the Palestinians, or Efraim Karsh, who has written a fairly harsh (I would say intemperate and poorly researched and reasoned) polemic against them from a more orthodox Zionist position. The point is rather that there are better and worse arguments to make for or against something, and in this case you chose a risibly bad argument, one that was discredited long ago and is frankly embarrassing for Israel at this point (like Golda Meir's claim that there is no such thing as the Palestinian people, or Joan Peters' claim that Palestine was completely depopulated until Jewish settlers in the late 19th century attracted Arab la borers when the former made the desert bloom, and so on). It does not speak well of your general knowledge of the subject that you would parrot this stale line, and the overweening manner in which you presented it (re-read your gallumphing post) speaks even more poorly of you personally. OK, enough, time to get the snow shovel and sled ready. John Marchioro --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Persons posting messages to not_honyaku assume all responsibility for their messages. The list owner does not review messages, and accepts no responsibility for the content of messages posted. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
