I, personally, was delighted and amazed by Zizek's article, rather to my own
astonishment, as I have never been able to read anything else he had written.
You wouldn't knbwo it from Lou's comment, but the article is a review essay
of J. Arch Getty's The Road to Terror, which I have not read yet, but which
promises to be the standard work on the Stalin Terror of the '30s for the
next 20 years. I read Getty's other work on the Terror, and he is excellent,
a reallys olid historian. He's probably the first person to being real
historical methodology to the study of the Terror, certainly the only one in
English, including (as far as I know) translations.
Lou may be shocked to hear that during the Stalin Terror, people really did
confess to crimes they did not commit, and some of them did it, albeit under
impossible duress, with the belief that it aws for the good of the Party.
Bukharin was an exceptionally complicated case, since it seems very likely
from his stubborn and intransigent refusal to say just anything Vyshinsky
(the lead prosecutor at the purge trials) and his torturers put in his mouth,
but only the things that he had in mind to confess to, that he was trying to
subvert the message of the trials and leave a word to posterity through his
ltortured (literally and figuratively) testimony.
Zizket's main focus, however, and more importantly Getty's, is not on the
psychodynamics of false confession but on the system of the Terror. Neither
of them are recycling God That Failed anticommunism.
I have always used "tendentiously" to mean "speciously" myself--and
"speciously" used to mean "plausibly"--Hume so uses it.
In a message dated 00-01-30 19:22:12 EST, you write:
<< >The last place I expected to read such nonsense was in the pages of the
New
>>Left Review. In the latest issue #238, an article by Slavoj Zizek titled
>>"Suicide of the Party," recycles this cold war mythology but under a heavy
>>coating of postmodernist babble. Sort of like seeing Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
>>with a nose-ring.
>
>I urge people to read the article for themselves rather than relying
>on this tendentious account of it.
>
>For what it's worth, Zizek told me he considered the point of view he
>wrote it from to be "Leninist." Evidently one person's Leninism isn't
>always compatible with another's.
>
>Doug
The Oxford English Dictionary says that the word "tendentious" means
"having a purposed tendency; composed or written with such a tendency or
aim." Given this meaning, why should the word "tendentious" be used as if
it meant something (vaguely) bad?
>>
