Saturday, August 28, 2004

I had never heard of Rousas J. Rushdoony

Is this article representative of his thinking?

An exerpt:
CM: Why do you think so little is said of the ethnic purging of the Armenians under the Turks? We hear so much of genocide in the 20th century but very rarely is the case of the Armenians mentioned. Is there a reason for that?

Rushdoony: Yes. The figures are constantly revised downward, from two million to a million to a few thousand. There is a reason for that. A great deal of history is being rewritten. It is my belief that a man teaching in a smaller school is more likely to be a good historian and a superior historian than a man teaching in a major university. Increasingly the chairs of history in major universities are endowed by various foreign governments. This is to control history-writing in a particular area. One of the most bitter controversies in southern California in recent years was when certain Arab states were going to create a Middle Eastern Studies Center - at the University of Southern California, I think it was. Immediately there was a massive Jewish protest. The whole project was cancelled. This doesn't mean that Arabs aren't funding things - just as Jews are funding things. The Turks are funding a great deal, on the condition that certain subjects are avoided or are twisted as they are dealt with. Recently, one scholar found in the National Archives material that showed how extensive the Armenian massacres were in one out-of-the-way province where it was not normally believed that much had taken place. Her book, published under the title Slaughterhouse Province, was quite revelatory and a surprise to many reviewers. The interesting thing she reported was that even while she was working on this project she found that the Turks were allowed access to the National Archives and were destroying material derogatory to them regarding the massacres. This is the pattern. One major scholar who was an authority on Medieval Armenian architecture was forbidden to give a lecture in which he was going to discuss the architecture and the destruction of some of the great monuments by the Turks. So, the censorship is extreme, the destruction of original source documents is extreme. That is why some of the most stimulating work of late in general history have come out of schools that many people have never heard of. It is because independent scholarship can function in the smaller colleges in a way it can not in the major universities.

I ask because this is a pretty "softball" interview with a lot of accusations about matters I've never considered.

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