05-20-2018, 11:30 AM
Two controversial historians:
Bernard Lewis, FBA (31 May 1916 – 19 May 2018) was a British American historian specializing in oriental studies.[1] He was also known as a public intellectual and political commentator. Lewis was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Lewis' expertise was in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West. He was also noted in academic circles for his works on the history of the Ottoman Empire.[2]
Lewis served as a soldier in the British Army in the Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Corps during the Second World War before being seconded to the Foreign Office. After the war, he returned to the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and was appointed to the new chair in Near and Middle Eastern History.
In 2007 and 1999, respectively, Lewis was called "the West's leading interpreter of the Middle East"[3] and "the most influential postwar historian of Islam and the Middle East."[2] His advice was frequently sought by neoconservative policymakers, including the Bush administration.[4] Lewis, therefore, is generally regarded as the dean of Middle East scholars.[5] However, his support of the Iraq War and neoconservative ideals have since come under scrutiny.[6][7][8][9][10][11]
Lewis was also notable for his public debates with Edward Said, who accused Lewis and other orientalists of misrepresenting Islam and serving the purposes of imperialist domination,[12] to which Lewis responded by defending Orientalism as a facet of humanism and accusing Said of politicizing the subject.[2][13] Lewis argued that the deaths of the Armenian Genocide resulted from a struggle between two nationalistic movements[14] and that there is no proof of intent by the Ottoman government to exterminate the Armenian nation.[15] These views prompted a number of scholars to accuse Lewis of genocide denial and resulted in a successful civil lawsuit against him in a French court.[16]
More at Wikipedia
Richard Edgar Pipes (Polish: Ryszard Pipes; July 11, 1923 – May 17, 2018) was a Polish American academic who specialized in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union, who espoused a strong anti-communist point of view throughout his career. In 1976 he headed Team B, a team of analysts organized by the Central Intelligence Agency who analyzed the strategic capacities and goals of the Soviet military and political leadership. Pipes was the father of American historian and expert on American foreign policy and the Middle East, Daniel Pipes.
Pipes wrote many books on Russian history, including Russia under the Old Regime (1974), The Russian Revolution (1990), and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1994), and was a frequent interviewee in the press on the matters of Soviet history and foreign affairs. His writings also appear in Commentary, The New York Times, and The Times Literary Supplement. At Harvard, he taught large courses on Imperial Russia as well as the Russian Revolution and guided over 80 graduate students to their PhDs.
Pipes is known for arguing that the origins of the Soviet Union can be traced to the separate path taken by 15th-century Muscovy, in a Russian version of the Sonderweg thesis. In Pipes' opinion, Muscovy differed from every State in Europe in that it had no concept of private property, and that everything was regarded as the property of the Grand Duke/Tsar. In Pipes' view, this separate path undertaken by Russia (possibly under Mongol influence) ensured that Russia would be an autocratic state with values fundamentally dissimilar from those of Western civilization. Pipes argued that this "patrimonialism" of Imperial Russia started to break down when Russian leaders attempted to modernize in the 19th century, without seeking to change the basic "patrimonial" structure of Russian society. In Pipes's opinion, this separate course undertaken by Russia over the centuries made Russia uniquely open to revolution in 1917. Pipes strongly criticized the values of the radical intelligentsia of late Imperial Russia for what he sees as their fanaticism and inability to accept reality. The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn denounced Pipes' work as "the Polish version of Russian history". Pipes, in turn, accused Solzhenitsyn of being an anti-Semitic Russian ultra-nationalist, who sought to blame the ills of Communism on the Jews rather than to admit to the Russian roots of the Soviet Union. Writing of Solzhenitsyn's novel, August 1914 in the New York Times on November 13, 1985, Pipes commented: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Dostoevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews".[19] Pipes explained Solzhenitsyn's view of Soviet communism: "[Solzhenitsyn] said it was because Marxism was a Western idea imported into Russia. Whereas my argument is that it has deep roots in Russian history."[20]
Pipes stressed that the Soviet Union was an expansionist, totalitarian state bent on world conquest. He is also notable for the thesis that, contrary to many traditional histories of the USSR at the time, the October Revolution was, rather than a popular general uprising, a coup foisted upon the majority of the Russian population by a tiny segment of the population driven by a select group of intellectuals who subsequently established a one-party dictatorship which was intolerant and repressive from the start, rather than having deviated from an initially benign course. In Pipes's view, the Revolution was a total disaster, as it allowed a small section of the fanatical intelligentsia to carry out policies that were completely unrealistic.[citation needed]
In what was meant to be an "off-the-record" interview, Pipes told Reuters in March 1981 that "Soviet leaders would have to choose between peacefully changing their Communist system in the direction followed by the West or going to war. There is no other alternative and it could go either way – Détente is dead." Pipes also stated in the interview that Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher of West Germany was susceptible to pressure from the Soviets. It was learned independently that Pipes was the official who spoke to Reuters. This potentially jeopardized Pipes's job. The White House and the "incensed" State Department issued statements repudiating Pipes's statements.[21]
In 1992, Pipes served as an expert witness in the Constitutional Court of Russia's trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[22]
The writings of Richard Pipes have provoked criticism in the scholarly community, for example in The Russian Review.[23][24][25][26][27][28]
Criticism of Pipes's interpretation of the events of 1917 has come mostly from "revisionist" Soviet historians, who under the influence of the French Annales school, have tended since the 1970s to center their interpretation of the Russian Revolution on social movements from below in preference to parties and their leaders and interpreted political movements as responding to pressures from below rather than directing them.[29] Among members of this school, Lynne Viola and Sheila Fitzpatrick claim that Pipes focused too narrowly on intellectuals as causal agents. Peter Kenez (a one-time PhD student of Pipes') argued that Pipes approached Soviet History as a prosecutor, intent solely on proving the criminal intent of the "defendant", to the exclusion of anything else.[30] Pipes' critics argued that his historical writings perpetuated the Soviet Union as "evil empire" narrative in an attempt "to put the clock back a few decades to the times when Cold War demonology was the norm".[31][32]
Other critics have written that Pipes wrote at length about what Pipes described as Lenin's "unspoken" assumptions and conclusions, while neglecting what Lenin actually said.[33] Alexander Rabinowitch writes that whenever a document can serve Pipes' long-standing crusade to demonize Lenin, Pipes commented on it at length; if the document allows Lenin to be seen in a less negative light, Pipes passed over it without comment.[26]
Pipes, in his turn – following the demise of the USSR – charged the revisionists with skewing their research, by means of statistics, to support their preconceived ideological interpretation of events, which made the results of their research "as unreadable as they were irrelevant for the understanding of the subject"[34] to provide intellectual cover for Soviet terror and acting as simpletons and/or Communist dupes.[35] He also stated that their attempt at "history from below" only obfuscated the fact that "Soviet citizens were the helpless victims of a totalitarian regime driven primarily by a lust for power".[36]
Again, more at Wikipedia
Bernard Lewis, FBA (31 May 1916 – 19 May 2018) was a British American historian specializing in oriental studies.[1] He was also known as a public intellectual and political commentator. Lewis was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Lewis' expertise was in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West. He was also noted in academic circles for his works on the history of the Ottoman Empire.[2]
Lewis served as a soldier in the British Army in the Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Corps during the Second World War before being seconded to the Foreign Office. After the war, he returned to the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and was appointed to the new chair in Near and Middle Eastern History.
In 2007 and 1999, respectively, Lewis was called "the West's leading interpreter of the Middle East"[3] and "the most influential postwar historian of Islam and the Middle East."[2] His advice was frequently sought by neoconservative policymakers, including the Bush administration.[4] Lewis, therefore, is generally regarded as the dean of Middle East scholars.[5] However, his support of the Iraq War and neoconservative ideals have since come under scrutiny.[6][7][8][9][10][11]
Lewis was also notable for his public debates with Edward Said, who accused Lewis and other orientalists of misrepresenting Islam and serving the purposes of imperialist domination,[12] to which Lewis responded by defending Orientalism as a facet of humanism and accusing Said of politicizing the subject.[2][13] Lewis argued that the deaths of the Armenian Genocide resulted from a struggle between two nationalistic movements[14] and that there is no proof of intent by the Ottoman government to exterminate the Armenian nation.[15] These views prompted a number of scholars to accuse Lewis of genocide denial and resulted in a successful civil lawsuit against him in a French court.[16]
More at Wikipedia
Richard Edgar Pipes (Polish: Ryszard Pipes; July 11, 1923 – May 17, 2018) was a Polish American academic who specialized in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union, who espoused a strong anti-communist point of view throughout his career. In 1976 he headed Team B, a team of analysts organized by the Central Intelligence Agency who analyzed the strategic capacities and goals of the Soviet military and political leadership. Pipes was the father of American historian and expert on American foreign policy and the Middle East, Daniel Pipes.
Pipes wrote many books on Russian history, including Russia under the Old Regime (1974), The Russian Revolution (1990), and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1994), and was a frequent interviewee in the press on the matters of Soviet history and foreign affairs. His writings also appear in Commentary, The New York Times, and The Times Literary Supplement. At Harvard, he taught large courses on Imperial Russia as well as the Russian Revolution and guided over 80 graduate students to their PhDs.
Pipes is known for arguing that the origins of the Soviet Union can be traced to the separate path taken by 15th-century Muscovy, in a Russian version of the Sonderweg thesis. In Pipes' opinion, Muscovy differed from every State in Europe in that it had no concept of private property, and that everything was regarded as the property of the Grand Duke/Tsar. In Pipes' view, this separate path undertaken by Russia (possibly under Mongol influence) ensured that Russia would be an autocratic state with values fundamentally dissimilar from those of Western civilization. Pipes argued that this "patrimonialism" of Imperial Russia started to break down when Russian leaders attempted to modernize in the 19th century, without seeking to change the basic "patrimonial" structure of Russian society. In Pipes's opinion, this separate course undertaken by Russia over the centuries made Russia uniquely open to revolution in 1917. Pipes strongly criticized the values of the radical intelligentsia of late Imperial Russia for what he sees as their fanaticism and inability to accept reality. The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn denounced Pipes' work as "the Polish version of Russian history". Pipes, in turn, accused Solzhenitsyn of being an anti-Semitic Russian ultra-nationalist, who sought to blame the ills of Communism on the Jews rather than to admit to the Russian roots of the Soviet Union. Writing of Solzhenitsyn's novel, August 1914 in the New York Times on November 13, 1985, Pipes commented: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Dostoevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews".[19] Pipes explained Solzhenitsyn's view of Soviet communism: "[Solzhenitsyn] said it was because Marxism was a Western idea imported into Russia. Whereas my argument is that it has deep roots in Russian history."[20]
Pipes stressed that the Soviet Union was an expansionist, totalitarian state bent on world conquest. He is also notable for the thesis that, contrary to many traditional histories of the USSR at the time, the October Revolution was, rather than a popular general uprising, a coup foisted upon the majority of the Russian population by a tiny segment of the population driven by a select group of intellectuals who subsequently established a one-party dictatorship which was intolerant and repressive from the start, rather than having deviated from an initially benign course. In Pipes's view, the Revolution was a total disaster, as it allowed a small section of the fanatical intelligentsia to carry out policies that were completely unrealistic.[citation needed]
In what was meant to be an "off-the-record" interview, Pipes told Reuters in March 1981 that "Soviet leaders would have to choose between peacefully changing their Communist system in the direction followed by the West or going to war. There is no other alternative and it could go either way – Détente is dead." Pipes also stated in the interview that Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher of West Germany was susceptible to pressure from the Soviets. It was learned independently that Pipes was the official who spoke to Reuters. This potentially jeopardized Pipes's job. The White House and the "incensed" State Department issued statements repudiating Pipes's statements.[21]
In 1992, Pipes served as an expert witness in the Constitutional Court of Russia's trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[22]
The writings of Richard Pipes have provoked criticism in the scholarly community, for example in The Russian Review.[23][24][25][26][27][28]
Criticism of Pipes's interpretation of the events of 1917 has come mostly from "revisionist" Soviet historians, who under the influence of the French Annales school, have tended since the 1970s to center their interpretation of the Russian Revolution on social movements from below in preference to parties and their leaders and interpreted political movements as responding to pressures from below rather than directing them.[29] Among members of this school, Lynne Viola and Sheila Fitzpatrick claim that Pipes focused too narrowly on intellectuals as causal agents. Peter Kenez (a one-time PhD student of Pipes') argued that Pipes approached Soviet History as a prosecutor, intent solely on proving the criminal intent of the "defendant", to the exclusion of anything else.[30] Pipes' critics argued that his historical writings perpetuated the Soviet Union as "evil empire" narrative in an attempt "to put the clock back a few decades to the times when Cold War demonology was the norm".[31][32]
Other critics have written that Pipes wrote at length about what Pipes described as Lenin's "unspoken" assumptions and conclusions, while neglecting what Lenin actually said.[33] Alexander Rabinowitch writes that whenever a document can serve Pipes' long-standing crusade to demonize Lenin, Pipes commented on it at length; if the document allows Lenin to be seen in a less negative light, Pipes passed over it without comment.[26]
Pipes, in his turn – following the demise of the USSR – charged the revisionists with skewing their research, by means of statistics, to support their preconceived ideological interpretation of events, which made the results of their research "as unreadable as they were irrelevant for the understanding of the subject"[34] to provide intellectual cover for Soviet terror and acting as simpletons and/or Communist dupes.[35] He also stated that their attempt at "history from below" only obfuscated the fact that "Soviet citizens were the helpless victims of a totalitarian regime driven primarily by a lust for power".[36]
Again, more at Wikipedia
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.