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Entry: The Kirk Wars Continue Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_kirk_wars_continue#2424 Post contents: The fact that this article has attracted the above series of extraordinarily intelligent comments is evidence of the author's rare talent. And Professor Gottfried wrote, about Wolfe: "As a successful American intellectual it would not be in his interest to present a fairer assessment of his subject." Yep! Once again to quote John Lukacs (as I often do, perhaps to excess, but maybe that's just evidence of the paucity of deservingly quotable historians in our time), in paraphrase, "wealth and power are no longer achieved through accumulation of capital, but through the accumulation of opinions and publicity." Publicity. Some of you know that I've spent the past five years in China. (I moved to Australia two weeks ago.) And China has a government department called - well the closest translation in English is - "The Propaganda Department." Their role is to guide and to monitor all of China's media, the print media and broadcast media and the internet too. But just a few years ago, they finally realised that the English word "propaganda" has a negative connotation in Western nations, so they changed the official English translation of their department's name to: "The Department of Publicity", to make it more palatable to Westerners whenever they (the Propaganda Department's officers) exchange business cards with Westerners. And China's "Publicity Department" guides and monitors all academic discourse among China's intellectuals, both within and without the academies, and any Chinese scholar or writer who runs afoul of the MOSTLY UNWRITTEN rules of China's Publicity Department, will be ruined professionally and financially and personally. With all due respect to the otherwise honourable Mr Wolfe (or is it "Doctor" Wolfe? Sorry, but as idiots like Condoleeza Rice have PhDs, I no longer take the title of "Dr" seriously) - all I will say is that for the past five years in Communist China, most - with some exceptions - most of the Chinese scholars I have met have been moral cowards who are not even self-censors, because they could not have risen so high in Chinese academia unless they had internalised the expectations of the Communist Party and convinced themselves that they actually believed in all of the dead, stale, Communist Party bullshit - and I think they are a mirror into which Wolfe (and many other American academics like him) ought to take a long, searching glance. And ya know how virtually every Chinese "scholar" opens every argument? They usually start by saying, "As we all know", or "as is well known." Just like the incontrovertible superordinating claims of "multiculturalism" above the claims of civilisation, are "well known" in American academies today... Sent at: 2008 07 24