Grover Furr is at it again. Responding in the comments section to the Chronicle for Higher Education’s blog entry on this week’s release of FIRE’s annual speech codes report, Spotlight on Speech Codes 2007: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses, Furr calls the report a “fraud,” claiming that we seek only to advance a political agenda and that our analysis of speech codes is incorrect.
The thing is, we’ve answered Furr before - in 2005, when he was making nearly identical claims. Since he didn’t get the message then – and we suspect a finely-honed proclivity to ignore viewpoints differing from his own – we’re forced to respond again...
The exasperation the good folks at FIRE were obviously experiencing because of the painfully simple-minded "ideas" of Furr struck a chord with me. In fact, the practiced blinkered pig ignorance displayed by Furr coupled with his near total disregard for the basic tenets of intellectual honesty seemed familiar somehow.
"Grover Furr....where have I heard that name before?"
Well, I did a quick search and discovered I had had a run in with Furr eleven years ago back when I was in grad school at The Catholic University of America and Furr was wasting the time of serious academics on a Medieval Philosophy mailing list.
The following was written by me on March 23, 1996. In it I quote from Furr his response to another writers assertion that Stalin may not have been the nicest fellow in the world and the gulag was a bad thing:
On Sat, 23 Mar 1996, Grover Furr wrote:This is just cold-war rubbish!
You might, with more accuracy, say that "the Americans perfected the slave state," keeping in mind (a) the fascist Jim Crow system; (b) peonage and virtual slavery, to say nothing of mass murder, in Central America, directly under American control; (c) support of fascists in South Africa, South Korea, Vietnam; (d) American corporations profiting from virtual slavery TODAY in Indonesia, Thailand, and South-East Asia generally: unions outlawed, and starvation wages and 14-hour days being the norm.
Look. Fascism is a specific thing and it is NOT profitably defined as "everything I happen not to like." Of course this might have to force us all to learn more terms (the HORROR) to accurately describe a given situation, but I think we can all think of this as a professional hazard. Likewise history deserves to be looked at more closely. Not every civil war is the Spanish Civil War. Thus not every civil war is
Communists v. Fascists.
RE: Fascism. Sabine, in the standard history of political thought states that the form fascism took was largely defined by its great enemy, communism. Marxists were materialists, therefore fascism defined themselves as idealists; Marxists saw class warfare as permanent, therefore fascists saw the organic totality of the state etc.
Of course fascism and communism seemed to be in lock-step as regards the totalitarian state.
Sabine [says]:Both are dictatorships; both have condemned liberalism and parliamentarism in unmeasured terms; both tolerate but a single political party, which is in substance hardly distinguishable from the government of the state. In both the party is the self-proclaimed elite, the "best" brains and hearts, entrusted with the mission of giving ordinary men what is good for them and making them want it. The power of the factions in control of the party has had to be perpetuated in both systems by bloody "purges" which at the best are hardly more than judicial murder and at the worst are murder pure and simple.
And before someone claims this is "cold war" rhetoric it must be pointed out that this was published in 1937, well before the worst of the atrocities of either fascist Germany or soviet Russia were known.
"Jim Crow" laws are a uniquely American injustice. And it has nothing to do with fascism, unless someone wants to claim that only fascists have ever been racists.
Off the soapbox.
It is nice to know that old Grover isn't allowing the dearth of facts supporting his idiotic positions to slow him down.
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