on the joys of being a left historian in the age of neo-liberal reproduction

Following a recent post about Mike Davis, Whitebait came across this really interesting article by Paul Brennan in the OC Weekly on various flimsy attacks on his this historian's work. In the past Whitebait was aware of a concerted campaign launched in the wake of Davis' publication of Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster:

Bradley Westwater, who set up a website devoted to exposing Davis’ "errors" (many of which turned out not to be errors at all)... [T]he biggest error on the site was the claim that Bradley Westwater existed: "Westwater," it turned out, was a pseudonym for Ross Ernest Shockley, a Malibu realtor. One of the chapters in Ecology of Fear, it should be noted, is titled "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn."

This time it is a Guardian writer who is getting upset about what he perceives to be Davis' besmirching of Winston Churchill's name in Dead Cities. As Brennan begins:

Until recently, the sperm of UC Irvine professors was not among the many subjects covered in the pages of The Guardian, one of England’s leading daily newspapers. But there it was in John Sutherland’s Sept. 30 column: "Tell Me Lies About Iraq: Politicians, generals and authors are all fighting the fiercest battle of all—to make us believe their side of the story."

Despite the column’s title, no politician’s statements are scrutinized. No general is mentioned. And the examination of authors is limited to one: UC Irvine history professor Mike Davis.

Sutherland accuses Davis of aligning himself with the forces of darkness by using his new book, Dead Cities: And Other Tales, to poison the public debate in the U.K. over a "preemptive" war against Iraq. "The Iraqi lie factories are in full production," Sutherland writes. "Davis has his product out early."

This is strange because Dead Cities isn’t about Iraq. But then Sutherland isn’t actually attacking Davis for anything he has written about Iraq. Instead, he’s infuriated by something Dead Cities reveals in passing about the late, great Winston Churchill in a chapter on the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Sutherland is so upset he uses 14 of the column’s 15 paragraphs to attack Davis as a scholar and a person, in a way that is remarkable for its sneering disregard for the truth and for its incompetence.

Davis says Dead Cities is a study of "‘the radical contingency of cities,’ as well as the Urban West." One of the book’s "dead cities" is the German Village, whose remains still stand at the Dugway Proving Ground. The U.S. Army Air Corps constructed the German Village during World War II to determine the best way to bomb Germany. "Best" in this context means "most destructive," and "Germany" means "German civilians."

And this is where Churchill enters the story.

Read on here.

      

Comments

[Brady Westwater]

The article stating I was a Malibu real estate broker using the name of Ross Ernest Shockley was just one of the many lies told about me since no one could prove a single thing I said about Mike Davis was not true.

I had taken the name of Brady Westwater when I was in my teens as my pen name, but by the time I left UCLA in the 1970 - it was the only name I ever used, even among my own family, and it was the only name I ever used in Malibu. And besides real estate (which I was essentially retired from when I wrote the article, I might add) I was also involved in many arts organizations, wrote for film and TV and also wrote extensively on the history of Los Angeles and urban planning issues

The Orange County paper, I might add, had to retract that false statement when confronted with the truth, though they tried to falsely claim that one one my hundreds of charges of lying by Mike Davis was untrue.

Now if you would be interested in finding out the truth, I would be glad to supply you
any documentation you would like proving every statement I ever made about Mike Davis was correct. But I find that very few people are really interested in the truth.

[whitebait]

Thanks for the response Brady.