Terence claims that the figures in the annual UN Development Report for deaths of children under five are nonsense. I’d like to see him prove his claim.He also hasn’t understood my reference to a historical cut-off date for truth. Rgellately seems to think that books printed in e.g. the 1960s are too old to rely on, if they contradict his own convictions. That’s why I asked for a cut-off date.
Gellately has now moved on, so I won’t continue flogging him. But if you read our exchanges you will see that his replies to questions are simply insults. For example, see replies 80-82.
A few comments on Richard Pipes are in order for the sake of historical accuracy and his links to US and Israeli crimes in the Middle East (I am an atheist Jew and anti-Zionist). Rgellately was horrified when I called Pipes a propagandist. “Your defamation of Richard Pipes is also inexcusable. He does not need me to defend him, but suffice it to say that as the emeritus professor of Russian history at Harvard, with a half-dozen classics to his name, I think it is fair to say that he has forgotten more about Russian history than most people will ever learn.”
A scoundrel like Pipes can’t be defamed. Among other things, he was head of he infamous “Team B” assembled by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush Sr. in 1974, when Gerald Ford was US president. Rumsfeld and Bush believed that CIA intelligence reports on the USSR were unreliable and underestimated the “Soviet threat”. Team B’s task was to generate alternative, more accurate reports. The team was selected by apprentice criminal Richard Perle and included at least one other other apprentice criminal, i.e. Paul Wolfowitz.
In 1974 Richard Pipes’ Team B obediently submitted a report which stated that the CIA was unaware of a new and secret Soviet WMD - nuclear submarines that were undetectable and could penetrate US coastal waters, where they could launch missiles with nuclear warheads that would annihilate the US.
The only problem was that the Pipes team’s entire report was a pure fabrication. As such it was a prototype of the lies which the Bush Jr. administration used to justify the attack on Iraq, which Pipes considers to be correct. This makes him an accessory to war crimes. Although – or perhaps because – the report was a lie, Pipes was appointed to the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, where he presumably endorsed the criminal attack on Grenada.
Like the other neo-cons, Pipes has always been a fervent supporter of Zionism, which also makes him an accessory to war crimes.
Pipes’ scholarly productions include a history of the Russian revolution that is a travesty. See e.g. Peter Kenez, The Prosecution of Soviet History: A Critique of Richard Pipes’ The Russian Revolution, The Russian Review, 50 (1991). Pipes does not discuss the secret US financing of Cossack terror, for which see America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism, David Foglesong, University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Pipes also wrote Property and Freedom, an ahistorical quasi-metaphysical work in which he claims that there is an “inseparable connection” between private property and freedom. He does not explain how this connection is reflected in e.g. the slave-trading operations of the US and UK bourgeoisie and the cotton and sugar-cane plantations they owned in the US and the Caribbean.
For a typical evening of rubbish by Richard Pipes, visit
http://www.fee.org/publications/notes/notes/property.asp, where he reaches new depths as he states that Plato was “the first communist in intellectual history”.