Fred Bauder wrote:
I think we are getting down to the issue here. Academic politics are definitely involved. I find the book, In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, hardcover, ISBN 1893554724 to be useful in sorting these matters out. This book, of course, supports the traditionalist point of view as opposed to the revisionist school.
Not all of us are on a campus, and from that outside perspective the terms traditionalist and revisionist seem terribly jargonistic. Mao considered Khrushchev to be a revisionist. Enver Hoxha considered them all to be revisionists, but that didn't help the Albanian people very much. Today's revisionists may be considered to be incorrigible traditionalists by the next generation. Those of us outside the academic loop, both left and right, tend to take independent positions without regard to the internecine squabbling of the academics.
From: Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com The unfortunate aspect for us poor Wikipedians is that it can be very hard to know what to make of the dueling experts. Is Conquest more or less authoritative than 172?
Exactly. What are the criteria for objectivity in history? We know that we can't rely on experts alone. What is generally fed to the public is strongly propagandistic. At the same time the public can be blissfully unaware of the difference between primary and secondary sources.
Our one big advantage that we have is that we don't need to worry about being fired, or having our research budgets cut.
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