A brief thread on Gilley et al. The one thing to keep in mind is that at the most basic level they have no qualifications or expertise in the fields to which they claim to be contributing. This is not about freedom of speech, it’s about basic academic standards. 1/
Gilley is a political scientist whose actual research focuses on modern China - which begs the question why @RLPGBooks thought he was the right person to edit a series on 'Anti-Colonialism'...2/
Jeff Fynn-Paul is an economic historian of medieval and early modern Spain who has now reinvented himself as a 'centrist' apologist for settler-expansion and a genocide-denier in The Spectator - which perhaps explains some of his more bizarre takes. 3/
Likewise Nigel Biggar, who is Prof of Moral and Pastoral Theology, but who passes as an expert on colonialism - despite the fact that his defence of Cecil Rhodes was made off the back of a couple of popular biographies and his was denied funding by Oxford Uni for his project. 4/
This is not about academic gate-keeping, because it is not actually an academic debate. Even I am not so arrogant as to think I'm suddenly qualified to make revisionist claims about modern China, the Iberian Peninsula in the middle ages, or indeed theology. 5/
Gilley, Fynn-Paul, Biggar etc. want to be taken seriously on the back of their academic credentials, yet at the same time they do not even have the conviction of their own beliefs to do the required research, let alone engage with the relevant literature. 6/
You will note that they never actually engage with the substance of the criticism levelled against them and their arguments and instead build their entire grift on attacking a variety of lazy strawmen. They are charlatans, not intellectuals. 7/
This is what the identity-politics of the right looks like - its about feelings rather than facts. And that is why we should not debate them. 8/
PS: These people - and the newspapers and publishers who provide them with a platform - are obviously entitled to their views. But they're not entitled to being taken seriously. You don't talk fashion with the naked emperor.
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William Calley just passed away - yet more than half a century after the My Lai Massacre Americans still struggle to come to terms with this atrocity. In this (long) thread - about American amnesia and historiographical containment - I explain why: 1/
In December 1969, the journalist Jonathan Schell, who covered the war in Vietnam, wrote an impassioned reflection on the significance of the My Lai photos, which had then only just been published: 2/
The unspoken understanding is that the “we” that Schell addressed was an overwhelmingly white American public for whom the very idea that “our boys” might do horrible things was largely inconceivable. 3/
I am writing a book about a single photograph taken during the worst massacre in U.S. history - one that few people have ever heard of. In March 1906, American forces killed more than 1000 local Muslims, including women and children, at Bud Dajo in the southern Philippines.
I have blurred the image here, but it is a restored version of an original print I discovered in a U.S. archive. There was in fact no less than three photographers present at Bud Dajo, though this is the most iconic image - taken with an old-fashioned 4x5 glass plate camera.
You can find the image in different versions all over the internet, but the story behind it remains obscure. I've spent several years tracking down the different copies, including commercial postcards, and I was finally able to identify the photographer earlier this year.
The definition of Orientalism captured in a single tweet...
'If you want to read a book on Britain today by someone who truly knows every tube station in London and has interviewed many Beefeaters, I highly recommend...'
So this seems to have taken off. If you're curious about how Orientalism has historically been weaponized, long before the 'War on Terror', I am currently writing a book about the killing of more than 1000 Muslim men, women and children by U.S. forces at Bud Dajo in 1906.
Dear Britain: If you want to understand why Cecil Rhodes has become so central to the identity politics and current culture-war of the right - to the point that the BBC is openly whitewashing his legacy (in the name of 'balance') - here is a thread: 1/ bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan…
2/ I wrote this as a review of @PriyaSatia's book, 'Time's Monster', which does a great job of explaining how history and notions of 'balance' has always been part of the imperial project.
If anyone is interested in trying to understand the politics behind the current celebration of the British Empire, I wrote a review of @PriyaSatia's book, which explains why this is not simply 'nostalgia' but rather a continuation of an imperialist worldview 1/
I commend Nigel Biggar for finally coming out and being open and honest about his defense and celebration of white supremacist and arch-imperialist, Cecil Rhodes. The fact that this is based on a blatantly disingenuous misreading of the historical facts is another matter...
It's not as if the truth about Cecil Rhodes or the violence of the founding of Rhodesia is unknown and that Biggar is simply unawares of the actual facts...