Groundbreaking books about the history of communism, such as Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago or Viktor Suvorov’s Ice-Breaker, are never written by "professional" historians. Indeed, historians typically meet those books with remarkable hostility.
Yet, non-academic history books certainly have their advantages. For one thing, they are readable. More often than not, they are better researched too. Above all, they are intellectually honest, free from the unspoken taboos of the academic world and from allegiances to theories and to colleagues that tie the hands of many an academic.
Where a professional historian pursues an academic career, the amateur seeks after the truth. Ignorant of taboos, the amateur can follow the trail of evidence to wherever it leads and discovers things which, according to the academic conventional wisdom, are best left untouched and unsaid......To Read More.....
My Take - I have read her book and didn't find the contents out of context with other books I've read on the subject. Of course, someone like me, who is a history buff, can't compete with people who do historical research for a living, so I have been happy to see those who aren't part of the academic coven coming forward and defending her work. Articles which haven’t appeared on Horowitz’s FrontPage.com., at least that I’m aware of.
As for Radosh - he
has said things in the past that have always brought into question his
integrity, and his credentials as a conservative and an historian, at least in
my mind. I found his review arrogant, and corresponding comments downright
nasty. It wasn't classy in my view, and it turned out to be inaccurate - and since he made claims about things in her book that weren’t there, I have to conclude his review was also fraudulent.
I have posted articles by Radosh in the
past. I will no longer do so, even when I
think he’s accurate, because in my opinion he’s intellectually dishonest,
therefore, just as in a court trial when a witnesses’ testimony has been found
false - all of his work must be called into question.
As for Horowitz,
his integrity must also be called into question. These former old lefties still think FDR was
a great man. They acknowledge he was
wrong on a lot of stuff, but in their minds he’s still a great man. If they accept West’s evidence, which hasn’t
been called into question, they must be willing to accept the idea that FDR was
a traitor. That is a paradigm they will
not accept - and no evidence - no matter how compelling will change that. So the only conclusion for them is to destroy
anyone who presents that evidence.
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