Introduction

In what is hopefully the last post for quite awhile on the alleged contactee status of Swiss farmer Billy Meier and his “Authorized American Media Representative” Michael Horn, I would like to discuss two very old (3+ years) interviews that Horn gave on the podcast, The Paracast. Specifically, I would like to address the second interview where Horn is presented with a specific analysis of a specific photograph that was shown beyond a reasonable doubt by one of the foremost experts in Photoshop to have been faked … and then Horn’s apparent refusal to actually answer the claims raised.

What Does it Mean to Falsify Something?

In science, there is pretty much no case where you can “prove” something. Just like the American legal system, someone is never “proven innocent,” nor are they “proven guilty.” They are either shown to be “not guilty” (very different from “innocent”) or that there is “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that someone is guilty.

We operate much the same way in scientific circles. Even the two pillars of modern physics – Relativity and Quantum Mechanics – which I note are “theories,” have never been proven to be 100% true. They simply can’t be – science doesn’t operate that way. True, there are literally thousands of independent experiments that have tested these theories and shown them – so far, beyond a reasonable doubt – to precisely predict the results of the experiments to within measurement uncertainties and errors.

However, all it takes is ONE experiment, one piece of indisputable, independently reproducible evidence or an experiment or observation that is irreconcilable with any established theory, and the theory goes out the window. In historic hindsight, it’s really as simple as that, though of course during the process of the revolution it is a little messier.

Why do I bring this up? Well, it’s very relevant to the interviews that I’m going to address.

Paracast Interviews

Yet again, Conspiracy Skeptic Karl Mamer clued me into some older interviews that were done with Michael Horn and put out on June 27, 2006, and July 11, 2006. I think during that time I was on a 25-hr/day schedule to photograph the moon every night for two lunar months … but I digress.

Anyway, in the first interview, Horn was pretty much given free reign, much like in the Coast to Coast AM interviews I’ve heard. It was really the latter that this post will focus on. First off, The Paracast has two hosts – Gene Steinberg who is an award-winning journalist, and David Biedny (pronounced “Bee-ed-nee”) who is one of the world’s foremost experts in the Adobe program “Photoshop” and works at Industrial Light and Magic. His credits include working on the effects of Hudson Hawk, Terminator 2, Star Trek VI, The Rocketeer, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, and Hook (I wonder if he’s the one who digitally removed all of Robin Williams’ chest hair in that movie). The reason why I bring up Beidny’s credentials in what may seem like an obvious argument from authority (though it’s not and I’ll address that below) is that the second interview was almost all Biedny going head-to-head with Horn with the intent of his analysis of a single photograph that Horn claimed was genuine.

Burden of Proof versus Refutation

First, if you end up listening to The Paracast as a result of this blog post please note that it DOES have commercials annoyingly throughout it. Be fore-warned.

Moving on, if we ignore the front matter and the posturing, the real meat at the beginning of the interview as about falsification. The two hosts put forth the idea that if any single piece of Meier’s evidence that Horn was putting forth as genuine was proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be faked (false/hoaxed/lied/etc.), then that should – and would in their eyes – call the entire thing into question. Following the logic of science that I laid out at the beginning of the post, that makes perfect sense to me.

However, without actually acknowledging that, Horn countered that if he could show that a bunch of it was true, then it should be accepted as true. The hosts, and I sitting in my little office, laughed at that.

Why? one may ask. After all, isn’t that only fair – wouldn’t it be a double-standard to think otherwise? The answer: No.

Think of it like this: In my apartment, I could use a mixture of some various chemicals to come up with something that looks like chocolate. I may have actually done this. I could then present it to people as, “This is genuine chocolate. Here, have a taste! It’s chocolate and you’ll be able to tell!” Those people – I may present it to hundreds – may agree with me that it’s real chocolate. I could then call on them as witnesses that it’s real chocolate. However, I may then give it to someone who is able to analyze it in a different way, or may be more sensitive to the actual taste of chocolate or the chemicals I’ve used, and that person could then demonstrate that, beyond a reasonable doubt, what I gave them as “genuine chocolate” was fake.

I could say, “But all these other experts said it was real!” That wouldn’t matter. I had fooled them. All it takes is one, irrefutable piece of evidence that I had hoaxed my chocolate that would then call everything else I had tried to pass off as chocolate into question. Even if some of it actually had been real.

So, that is why I can fairly easily say to Meier, or a creationist, or an astrologer, or anyone else, really, that once I’ve conclusively demonstrated that any one of the claims you’ve put forward as genuine is demonstrably false, then that should call into question everything else you’ve done. Just look at the South Korean scientist who was found out to have faked some of his stem cell research.

[As a side-note, to anyone reading this who has had any chocolate that I've made, I would never actually try to pass of fake stuff as real, and I'm up-front when I do use white chocolate which isn't really chocolate.]

Getting Into It, But Not Really, or “How Could a Simple One-Armed Farmer …”

With this in mind, Biedny did an in-depth analysis of one of the photographs that Horn had been putting forward as genuine. On the episode, Biedny pointed to several artifacts in the photograph that clearly demonstrated compositing different images and models to create the single finished product. Getting into the details is not the purpose of this post – go listen to the episode if you’re interested.

Rather, Horn’s reaction is what I wanted to address. As has been the case in the comments section of my own blog, Horn has refused to directly address the refutations I gave of the alleged prognostication of asteroid Apophis. The first post on the subject contains the bulk of Horn’s comments which simply dodge the issue and point to other alleged predictions. The second post on the subject contained a detailed look at the timeline of the alleged prediction where I looked through all of the available documented evidence to show that Meier did not predict Apophis. For me, that was the equivalent of what Biedny did with the one photograph – I went into detail on one prediction. The third post was more of a superficial discussion of it, discussing my discussion of the blog discussion during my discussion with Karl Mamer. Lots of discussing.

But none addressing the point — I directly challenged Horn on at least 4 occasions on my blog – both in posts and on the comments – to come up with a refute to my break-down of the timeline of the alleged prediction of Apophis. He has not done so.

Neither did he with any of the points that Biedny raised for the faked photograph. Rather, very conspicuously – and discussed during a recap during the last ~8 minutes of the latter Paracast episode – Horn dodged the points that Biedny raised. He had two main things he kept going back to. First was the various other experts that he claims have looked at the photograph and said it’s genuine. However, I refer you to my discussion of chocolate that I had a few paragraphs ago – it does not matter how many experts I have convinced that what I’m putting forward is real, it just takes one to shoot something down. The second thing he kept coming back to was, “Yes, but how could a simple one-armed farmer …” (the quote may have been “simple one-armed Swiss farmer” a few times, I don’t actually remember). I liked the host’s response to that after the upteenth time that Horn raised it (following is paraphrased even though it’s in quotes): “We’re not saying that he did. He could have had help. All we’re saying is that there is undeniable evidence that this photograph has been faked, we don’t care how he may have done it.”

Final Thoughts

That was really the extent of the discourse. Not once did Horn directly address Biedny’s demonstrable claims of pointing out flaws in the photo that show it to have been forged. Horn simply dodged the subject. Occasionally, Horn would ask, “But look at this [other] photograph.” Biedny’s response – in my mind – was quite proper, and it was effectively, “Why should I? I’ve neither the time nor inclination. I’ve shown one that you put forward as genuine has been faked beyond a reasonable doubt, calling into question all the rest of the claims.”

Similarly on my blog, Horn has refused to directly address the evidence I presented in terms of the Apophis timeline, and rather he has pointed to other alleged predictions and claims and lines of evidence that, at the moment, I have zero inclination nor time to pursue. But, I don’t think I need to. I have demonstrably shown with the available evidence that the claim that Meier predicted Apophis is false. I think that calls into question all the rest of his claims, and I don’t think I need to go into them, especially when others already have.

This is really a continuation of the conversation I had with the person (and people) from “How do Mormons reconcile the contradictions in their religion?“

As we went on from the opening question (and answers) I discussed in my last entry, the main questioner questioned whether Mormonism could be falsifiable under these criteria. He raised the dearth of evidence of Book of Mormon locations, and I pointed out that absence of evidence doesn’t mean evidence of absence (although, absence of evidence doesn’t alone give compelling reason to believe.) He eventually said:

I guess this is how I would look at it:

If Mormonism is true, you would expect evidence of this civilization
If Mormonism is false, you would expect no evidence of this civilization.

Strictly speaking you can only ever prove Mormonism true by that criteria since if you haven’t found the evidence it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist… but if you’re going to be intellectually honest, you have to say that the world we’re living in doesn’t look like the one the book of mormon describes

He actually said something later that related to the point that I thought was interesting too…

Which, while I realize I’m preaching to the atheistic/agnostic choir here, ultimately means that you could justify absolutely anything with that line of reasoning. Which means that Mormonism is consistent with all possible evidence. Which means that it ultimately predicts and explains nothing about reality.

I guess I haven’t thought a lot about that last part. But I did try to address his first message by saying:

Let me put your scenario to a different test.

“If black swans truly exist, you would expect evidence of these swans.
If black swans truly did not exist, you would expect no evidence of these swans.”

Indeed, we did not see evidence of these swans for a looooong time. But did that conclusively show that black swans do not exist? Well, when Europeans discovered Australia, I bet THEY were really surprised to find those black swans after all! Book of Mormon cities should be larger and more noticeable than our black swans, and we suppose that we know *where* to look…but we could be way off.

You say that “if you’re going to be intellectually honest, you have to say that the world we’re living in doesn’t look like the one the book of mormon describes.” But you play with fire. I’ll tell you something:

GLENN BECK IS MAKING A KILLING PRECISELY BY ARGUING THAT THE WORLD WE’RE LIVING IN LOOKS LIKE THE ONE THE BOOK OF MORMON DESCRIBES. When he invokes images of the constitution “hanging by a thread” because of America’s unrighteous pride, he’s pulling deep into Mormon lore and the Book of Mormon pride cycle. And apparently, as much as you or I want to believe he’s just a nutjob that NO ONE LISTENS TO, plenty of people (many non-mormons too…these people would probably flip if they realized Beck was one of the Mormons!) do listen to Glenn Beck (even if he’s still a nutjob).

Apparently, what the world looks like — and how it relates to any piece of literature — is in the eye of the beholder.

In hindsight, that’s one scary answer.

(Nederlandse versie hier)

Have you ever heard of Newton’s theory of gravity? Well, it’s all made-up nonsense. You’ve been fooled.

The reasoning goes as follows:

1. According to the theory of gravity, objects should fall to the Earth’ surface.
2. That bird in the sky remains there, without falling.
3. Theory of gravity is wrong.

This reasoning bears a lot of resemblance to the following, equally strong reasoning that falsifies the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW):

1. According to AGW, CO2 controls the climate.
2. For the past 10 years, global temperature remained more or less steady whereas CO2 levels went up.
3. AGW theory is wrong.

Voila, problem solved. If only it were that simple…

What’s wrong with these arguments? They sound so logical at first sight.

1. The theory to be falsified has been oversimplified. (There are more forces than only gravity; there are more factors influencing climate than only CO2).
2. The observation has been oversimplified. (The bird has wings which can be used to exert an upward force; the expected trend in temperature does not necessarily rise above the expected level of yearly variability over the course of a decade).
3. Therefore the conclusion does not hold. 

It appears that a lot of “skeptics” start with their desired conclusion and work back to which part-observations and simplifications are needed to get there. I prefer not to fall either, but the fact is, observing a bird in the sky doesn’t disprove gravity. Whether we want to or not, we’ll have to learn through falling and getting up.

Update: Gravity has apparently been shown to be a hoax based on Newton’s private correspondence being released.

A Review of Robert Service’s Trotsky: A Biography
By David North
11 November 2009

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/serv-n11.shtml

Trotsky: A Biography
Robert Service
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009

The Specter of Leon Trotsky

In 1955 James Burnham, the intellectual godfather of modern American neo-conservatism, reviewed The Prophet Armed, the first volume of Isaac Deutscher’s monumental biography of Leon [Lev Davidovich] Trotsky. Fifteen years had passed since Burnham had resigned from the Fourth International at the climax of a political struggle in which he had crossed polemical swords with Leon Trotsky. It had been a difficult experience for Burnham, who felt somewhat overmatched in this political and literary contest. “I must stop awhile in wonder,” Burnham had written in a document addressed to Trotsky, “at the technical perfection of the verbal structure you have created, the dynamic sweep of your rhetoric, the burning expression of your unconquerable devotion to the socialist ideal, the sudden, witty, flashing metaphors that sparkle through your pages.” (1)

In the aftermath of his repudiation of socialism, Burnham moved rapidly to the extreme right (as Trotsky had predicted). By the mid-1950s he viewed Trotsky’s life and work through the prism of his own ideological commitment to a global struggle against Marxism. Deutscher’s work filled Burnham with alarm. The problem was not literary in character. Burnham readily acknowledged the author’s masterful reconstruction of Trotsky’s revolutionary persona.

“Mr. Deutscher has cast his story of Trotsky in the Greek mould, and with sufficient justification,” Burnham wrote. “His Trotsky is a protagonist of the most dazzling brilliance, who rises in 1905, 1917 and in the Civil War to successive heights where he fuses with History and becomes her voice.” Burnham allowed that the author had succeeded in conveying to his readers Trotsky’s extraordinary qualities: “the flaming oratory, which many who heard him believe to have been the greatest of our century; the linguistic facility; the witty and vibrant prose; the quickness with which Trotsky mastered every new subject; the breadth of interest, so rare among the dedicated revolutionaries.”

Burnham noted that Deutscher’s portrait of Trotsky was not one-sided; that he “conscientiously displays, also, Trotsky’s weaknesses…” But despite the many literary virtues of the biography, Burnham denounced it as an “intellectual disaster.” Burnham’s reason for his condemnation was that “Mr. Deutscher writes from a point of view that accepts and legitimizes the Bolshevik revolution.” The biography was “organically warped” and unacceptable. “Not all the scholarly references from all the libraries are enough to wash out the Bolshevik stain.”

Burnham confessed his horror that Deutscher had received “all the courtesies of our leading research institutions, the aid of our foundations, the pages of our magazines, publication and promotion by the great Anglo-Saxon Oxford Press.” Did the establishment not recognize the danger in allowing, and even encouraging, the details of Trotsky’s heroic life and revolutionary ideas to reach the broader public, and especially the youth?

Burnham concluded his review with a cry of despair: “The minds of many of our university students and opinion-makers are being deeply formed, on the supremely important issues with which he [Deutscher] deals, by his ideas. It is surely one more among the many indications of the suicidal mania of the western world.” (2) The conclusion that implicitly flowed from this review was that Deutscher’s book and others like it, which portrayed the October Revolution and its leaders sympathetically, should not be published.

Burnham’s fears, at least from his political standpoint, were not without justification. He foresaw the subversive potential of Deutscher’s rehabilitation of Trotsky, whose historic role and political ideas had been buried for so many decades beneath the massive heap of Stalinist lies. In February 1956 Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party more or less admitted that Stalin was a mass murderer and vindicated the indictment issued 20 years earlier by the dictator’s implacable opponent. In the years that followed, the political stature of Leon Trotsky rapidly grew throughout the world.

Against the backdrop of growing working class militancy and the radicalization of youth, Deutscher’s biographical trilogy – The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast – introduced countless thousands of youth, intellectuals and workers to the deeds and ideas of Leon Trotsky. Organizations that claimed to base themselves on the political heritage of Trotsky grew significantly in the 1960s and 1970s. This was particularly the case in Britain. As early as 1964, the leadership of the Young Socialists, youth movement of the British Labour Party, passed into the hands of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and even into the 1980s, the activities of Trotskyist organizations were a major preoccupation of the principal British Intelligence agency, the MI5. (3)
A New Offensive Against Trotsky

This historical experience is worth recalling as one considers a peculiar literary phenomenon: the publication, within the space of little more than five years, of three biographies of Leon Trotsky by British historians. In 2003 Professor Ian Thatcher of Leicester University (and previously of Glasgow University) produced his Trotsky, which was published by Routledge. Three years later Longman published the Trotsky of Glasgow University’s Geoffrey Swain. And now, as 2009 draws to a close, the Trotsky: A Biography by Professor Robert Service of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, has been brought out with considerable fanfare. The British publisher is Macmillan. In the United States, Service’s book has been published by the Harvard University Press. What underlies this evident interest of British academics in Leon Trotsky, who has been dead for nearly 70 years?

This reviewer has in another place submitted the works of Thatcher and Swain to an exhaustive analysis, and proved that they are crass exercises in historical falsification, of absolutely no value to anyone interested in learning about the life and ideas of Leon Trotsky. As if heeding Burnham’s warning, Thatcher and Swain were determined not to provide Trotsky with a platform, and therefore took care to quote as little as possible from his writings. Both works set out to reverse the popular image of Trotsky that had emerged from Deutscher’s great trilogy. Thatcher and Swain belittled Deutscher for creating the “myth” of Trotsky as a great revolutionary, Marxist theoretician, military leader, political analyst, and opponent of the totalitarian bureaucracy. The Thatcher-Swain biographies set out to create a new anti-Trotsky narrative, utilizing slanders and fabrications of old Stalinist vintage in the interest of contemporary anti-communism. (4)

Now comes Robert Service’s contribution to the on-going efforts to demolish Leon Trotsky’s historical reputation. In its pre-publication promotional material, the Harvard University Press proclaims: “Although Trotsky’s followers clung to the stubborn view of him as a pure revolutionary and a powerful intellect hounded into exile by Stalin, the reality is very different. [Service’s] illuminating portrait of the man and his legacy sets the record straight.” Does it really?
Biography as Character Assassination

Trotsky: A Biography is a crude and offensive book, produced without respect for the most minimal standards of scholarship. Service’s “research,” if one wishes to call it that, has been conducted in bad faith. His Trotsky is not history, but, rather, an exercise in character assassination. Service is not content to distort and falsify Trotsky’s political deeds and ideas. Frequently descending to the level of a grocery store tabloid, Service attempts to splatter filth on Trotsky’s personal life. Among his favorite devices is to refer to “rumors” about Trotsky’s intimate relations, without even bothering to identify the rumor’s source, let alone substantiate its credibility.

Trotsky once declared, as he defended himself against the slanders of Stalin’s regime: “There is not a stain on my revolutionary honor.” Service, however, portrays Trotsky as an individual without any honor at all. He attempts to discredit Trotsky not only as a revolutionary politician, but also as a man. Service’s Trotsky is a heartless and vain individual who used associates for his own egotistical purposes, a faithless husband who callously abandoned his wife, and a father who was coldly indifferent to his children and even responsible for their deaths. “People did not have to wait long before discovering how vain and self-centered he was,” Service writes of Trotsky in a typical passage. [56]

Service’s biography is loaded with such petty insults. Trotsky was “volatile and untrustworthy.” “He was an arrogant individual” who “egocentrically assumed that his opinions, if expressed in vivid language, would win him victory.” “His self-absorption was extreme. As a husband he treated his first wife shabbily. He ignored the needs of his children especially when his political interests intervened.” [4]

Trotsky’s intellectual and political life was, Service would have his readers believe, as shabby as his personal life. Trotsky’s “lust for dictatorship and terror were barely disguised in the Civil War. He trampled on the civil rights of millions of people including the industrial workers.” As for his subsequent political defeat, Service dismisses, without counter-argument, Trotsky’s analysis of the growth of the Soviet bureaucracy and its usurpation of political power. Service simply asserts, as if he were stating the obvious, that Trotsky “lost to a man [Stalin] and a clique with a superior understanding of Soviet public life.” [4]

According to Service, Trotsky was nothing more than a second- or third-rate thinker. Trotsky, he writes, “made no claim to intellectual originality: he would have been ridiculed if he had tried.” [109] “Intellectually he flitted from topic to topic and felt no stimulus to systematize his thinking.” [110] Trotsky wrote quickly and superficially: “He simply loved to be seated at a desk, fountain pen in hand, scribbling out the latest opus. Nobody dared to disturb him when the flow of words was forming in his head.” [319] And what was the result of this “scribbling”? Service writes: “His thought was a confused and confusing ragbag.” [353] “He spent a lot of time in disputing, less of it in thinking. Style prevailed over content…This involved an ultimate lack of seriousness as an intellectual.” [356] This is Service’s verdict on the literary work of a man who must be counted among the greatest writers of the twentieth century. (5)

A biographer need not like or even respect his subject. No one would suggest that Ian Kershaw harbors the slightest sympathy for Adolf Hitler, to whose life he devoted two extraordinary volumes that were the product of many years of research. However, whether a biographer admires, despises or feels a cool and detached ambivalence toward the object of his scholarly attention, he must respect the factual record and strive to understand that person. The biographer has the responsibility to examine a life in the context of the conditions of the times in which his subject lived. But this is beyond Service’s intellectual capacities and the boundaries of his knowledge. Instead, in a manner both pointless and absurd, he assumes from the outset the standpoint of a disapproving career counselor. Trotsky, Service opines in the biography’s introduction, “could easily have achieved a great career as a journalist or essayist if politics had not become his preoccupation.” But Trotsky did choose a career in politics, and revolutionary politics at that, a decision that Service cannot abide or come to grips with.

Service describes his book as “the first full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside Russia who is not a Trotskyist.” [xxi] What is meant by “full-length”? Service’s biography is certainly long, plodding on for 501 pages. But in terms of content, it is no more than a super-sized version of the biographies produced by Thatcher and Swain. Like the earlier works, this is a biography without history. There is not a single historical event that is recounted with anything remotely approaching the necessary level of detail.

Service reduces the immense and complex drama of the revolutionary epoch in Russia to a series of vacuous tableaux, which serve only as the scenic background for Service’s ridicule of Trotsky’s alleged political, personal and moral failures. The coming to power of the Nazis in 1933, the eruption of the Spanish Civil War and the formation of the Popular Front in France are dealt with in a few desultory sentences. Even the Moscow Trials and the Terror merit little more than a page. Far more attention is given by Service to Trotsky’s brief intimacy with Frida Kahlo!
A Compendium of Errors

Moreover, the biography is full of factual errors that call attention to the author’s extremely limited comprehension of the historical material. In the course of a disoriented excursion into Trotsky’s pre-1917 views on the subject of revolutionary terror, Service writes that Trotsky “spoke out against ‘individual terror’ in 1909 when the Socialist-Revolutionaries murdered the police informer Evno Azev, who had penetrated their Central Committee.” [113] In fact, Azef (the correct transliteration from the Russian spelling) was not murdered in 1909. He was not murdered at all. Azef, who had organized terrorist acts, including assassinations, while working as an agent of the Okhrana inside the Socialist Revolutionary Party, survived his exposure and died of natural causes in 1918. Service fails to quote even a single sentence from Trotsky’s important article on the Azef affair.

Discussing the events of 1923 in Germany, Service asserts that the revolution failed after “Street fighting petered out” in Berlin. [31] In fact, there was no fighting in Berlin. The leadership of the Communist Party called off the uprising before fighting could begin in the capital. The only serious fighting in a major German city occurred in Hamburg.

In a passing reference to the Chinese Revolution, Service states that the Communist International sent instructions for an insurrection against Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang in April 1927. “It was just the excuse that Chiang needed to conduct a bloody suppression of communists in Shanghai and elsewhere.” [355] This is wrong. No such plan existed and no such instructions were sent. Service confuses the events in Shanghai in April 1927 with later developments in Canton.

In another passage, Service writes that in June 1928 Trotsky was working on his critique of the programme of the Comintern’s Fifth Congress. [371] Actually, the Fifth Congress was held in 1924. The critique to which Service is referring was addressed to the Sixth Congress.

Service even manages to get the year of the death of Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova, wrong. He states, “She died in 1960, deeply mourned by her network of Mexican, French and American friends.” [496] In fact, Sedova died in January 1962 at the age of 79. Several months before her death, in November 1961, as one would expect a biographer of Trotsky to know, Natalia Sedova had written to the Soviet government, demanding a review of the Moscow Trials and the rehabilitation of Trotsky. At the end of the book, in yet another gross blunder, Service misidentifies the wife and daughter of Trotsky’s youngest son, Sergei, as being the wife and daughter of the older son, Lev. [500-501] These errors got by not only the editors at Macmillan and the Harvard University Press, but also eluded the none-too-watchful eye of Professor Ian Thatcher, who, we are informed by Service, read the entire manuscript.

Following the same procedure as Thatcher and Swain, Service fails to engage himself with Trotsky’s writings. With the exception of Trotsky’s My Life, which Service attempts to discredit, there is no persuasive evidence that the biographer worked systematically through any of Trotsky’s published books and pamphlets prior to writing this biography. Aside from the writings of Ian Thatcher, whom he profusely praises, Service has paid little attention to existing scholarly literature on Trotsky. Service affects an attitude of contempt toward biographers, educated in the Marxist tradition, who have taken Trotsky’s literary output seriously. The late Pierre Broué, a highly respected historian and the author of a massively researched and authoritative biography of Trotsky, is dismissed as an “idolater.” Deutscher is mocked as one who “worshipped at Trotsky’s shrine.” [xxi]

There is reason to doubt that Service actually read the work of most of the other historians to whom he pays perfunctory tribute in his preface. For example, Service takes note of Professor Alexander Rabinowitch as a historian who subjected Trotsky to “skeptical scrutiny,” and lumps him together with James White of Glasgow University, who ridiculously denies that Trotsky played any significant role in the October 1917 seizure of power. [xxi] In fact, Professor Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks Come to Power substantiated Trotsky’s role as the principal tactician and practical leader of the Bolshevik victory.

Despite Service’s self-satisfied description of his biography as “full-length,” there are virtually no extracts from, or adequate summaries of, Trotsky’s major political works. Service does not even review the basic concepts and postulates of the Theory of Permanent Revolution, which formed the foundation of Trotsky’s political work over a period of 35 years. His voluminous writings on China, Germany, Spain, France and even Britain are barely mentioned.

On the few occasions when Service does refer to one of Trotsky’s books, what he has to say is usually wrong. In a thoroughly confused reference to Literature and Revolution, Service attributes to Trotsky the view that “It would take many years … before a ‘proletarian culture’ would be widely achieved.” [317] Trotsky, as anyone who has actually read Literature and Revolution knows, emphatically rejected the concept of “proletarian culture.” (6) But Service does not know this – either because he did not read the book or because he was not able to understand it.

By now the reader must be wondering how Service, without paying attention to Trotsky’s writings, manages to keep himself occupied for 501 pages. How is it possible to write a “full-length biography” of a man who was among the most prolific writers of the twentieth century without paying the necessary attention to his literary output?
Unearthing Trotsky’s “Buried Life”

As if anticipating this question, Service informs his readers at the very outset that his central concern is not with what Trotsky wrote or actually did. “This book’s purpose,” Service writes, “is to dig up the buried life.” He allows that “the evidence starts with the works – his books, articles and speeches – which he published in his lifetime.” But that is not sufficient. Even the study of all of Trotsky’s writings would “tell us about his big objectives without always elucidating his personal or factional purposes at any given moment. As an active politician he could not always afford to spell out what he was up to.” [4-5]

Service continues:

His written legacy should not be allowed to become the entire story. It is sometimes in the supposedly trivial residues rather than in the grand public statements that the perspective of his career is most effectively reconstructed: his lifestyle, income, housing, family relationships, mannerisms and everyday assumptions about the rest of humanity. … As with Lenin and Stalin, moreover, it is as important to pinpoint what Trotsky was silent about as what he chose to speak or write about. His unuttered basic assumptions were integral to the amalgam of his life. [Emphasis added, 5]

This statement is truly one with which Stalin, who was very careful not to tell other people what he really thought, could agree. It is entirely in line with the inquisitorial principle employed by Stalin in the organization of the Moscow trials. Evidence of crimes against the Soviet state was not to be found in the public statements, writings and deeds of the Old Bolshevik defendants. Rather, their terrorist conspiracies flowed from the “unuttered basic assumptions” that had been camouflaged beneath the public record.

And how does Professor Service intend to ferret out Trotsky’s “unuttered basic assumptions”? Service announces that Trotsky’s “buried life” can be uncovered by examining unpublished early drafts of his writings. “The excisions and amendments tell us what he did not want others to know. This is particularly true of his autobiography.” [5]

This statement forms the basis of Service’s major accusation against Trotsky: that his autobiography, My Life, which he wrote in 1930, is an unreliable and suspect work. Service complains that Trotsky’s “account of himself has been accepted uncritically by generations of readers. The reality was different, for whenever inconvenient facts obscured his desired image he removed or distorted them.” [11]
Trotsky’s Embarrassments

And precisely what did Trotsky conceal or falsify in My Life? There are two major discrepancies that Service claims to have discovered when he compared the first draft of Trotsky’s autobiography, which is deposited at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, with the published version. The first is Trotsky’s supposed efforts to conceal the extent of the wealth of his father, David Bronstein. The second, to which Service devotes obsessive attention, is Trotsky’s supposed attempts to downplay his Jewish origins. Service writes:

As a Marxist he was embarrassed about the wealth of his parents, and he never properly acknowledged their extraordinary qualities and achievements. What is more, the published account of his boyhood in his autobiography tended to drop those passages where he appeared timid or pampered; and without denying his Jewish origin he trimmed back references to it. By examining the drafts and proofs, we can catch glimpses of aspects of his upbringing that have long lain hidden. Thus he stated publicly only that his father was a prosperous, competent farmer. This hugely understated the reality. David Bronstein, married to Aneta, was among the most dynamic farmers for miles around in Kherson province. By hard work and determination he had dragged himself up the ladder of economic success and had every right to be proud of his achievement.” [12]

Before answering Service’s allegation that Trotsky downplayed his father’s wealth and sought to conceal his ethnic and religious background, let us first draw attention to the dubious character of the underlying claim: that the progression of drafts to their completed form is best understood as a process of concealment and falsification. Service asserts what he must first prove. To support his charge, he would have to show why Trotsky’s “excisions and amendments” should not be seen as the proper exercise of artistic discretion by a great master. There are many reasons, which have nothing to do with the intention to conceal, why Trotsky may have removed certain passages and added others.

Service fails to provide a single example in which Trotsky’s published account of his childhood differs in any material way from the earlier draft. At any rate, Service’s allegations are entirely without substance. That Trotsky “was embarrassed about the wealth of his parents” is a claim for which Service can cite no authority other than his own imagination. Trotsky’s account traced his father’s rising prosperity, though it must be pointed out that David Bronstein achieved significant wealth only well after Trotsky had left home. The Bronstein family did not move from the mud house in which Trotsky was born into a house built with bricks until the future revolutionary was almost 17 years old. But Trotsky provides in My Life a richly detailed and affectionate account of his father’s relentless struggle to rise in the world and to accumulate wealth. Writing of his own social position as a child, Trotsky stated: “As son of a prosperous landowner, I belonged to the privileged class rather than to the oppressed.” [My Life (New York: Dover, 2007), p. 87]

Max Eastman’s 1926 biographical account of Trotsky’s early life states that David Bronstein “got rich working and hiring the peasants to work with him. He controlled almost three thousand acres of land around the little Ukrainian village of Ianovka, owned the mill, and was altogether the important man of the place.” Eastman knew these facts because Trotsky related them to him. Eastman wrote, “Trotsky is proud of his father, proud of the fact that he died working and understanding. He loves to talk about him.” [The Young Trotsky (London: New Park, 1980), p. 3]

Service’s own account of the Bronstein family – whom he refers to as “plucky Jews” [14] – is based entirely on what was published in My Life and Eastman’s Young Trotsky. He has conducted no new and independent research that either adds to, or refutes, the information provided by Trotsky and Eastman. There is not a single detail in Service’s account of Trotsky’s early childhood that cannot be traced back to these two earlier works.

Even more astonishing, in light of his claims to have exposed the untrustworthiness of Trotsky’s autobiography, Service relies for his depiction of Trotsky’s youth almost entirely on the published version of My Life, not on the earlier draft. In the second chapter of his biography, entitled “Upbringing,” Service includes nine substantial extracts from Trotsky’s autobiographical writing. Eight of them are reproduced from the published version of My Life; only one is from the earlier draft. In not one instance is Service able to pinpoint an important discrepancy between the published work and the draft.

That does not mean that Service comes up entirely empty handed in his exploration of the draft version of My Life. For example, he discovers that a young school friend whom Trotsky identifies as Carlson in the published edition of the autobiography was identified as “Kreitser” in the draft. This discovery, proudly noted by Service in a footnote, must surely be counted as a major breakthrough in the field of Trotsky studies! If he had accomplished nothing else, Service has, with one mighty footnote, restored young Kreitser’s name to its proper place in history.

Trotsky’s Origins

Let us now turn to Service’s contention that Trotsky sought to downplay his Jewish ancestry. There is, to be blunt, something rather unpleasant and suspect about Service’s preoccupation with this matter. The fact that Trotsky was a Jew occupies a central place in Service’s biography. It is never far from Service’s mind. He is constantly reminding his readers of this fact, as if he were worried that it might slip from their attention. Indeed, given the emphasis placed on Trotsky’s ethnicity, this book might have very well been titled, Trotsky: The Biography of a Jew.

Before we explore this disturbing element of Service’s biography in greater detail, let us first respond to the allegation that Trotsky sought to conceal or deflect attention from his ancestry. This claim is as false as the biographer’s contention that Trotsky sought to downplay the wealth of his parents. As always, Service assumes that his audience will never bother to read Trotsky’s autobiography, in which Trotsky exhibits not the slightest reticence in discussing his ethnic and religious background. And how could he have possibly avoided the subject? The circumstances of his childhood were inextricably intertwined with his Jewish ancestry.

…In my father’s family there was no strict observation of religion. At first, appearances were kept up through sheer inertia: on holy days my parents journeyed to the synagogue in the colony; Mother abstained from sewing on Saturdays, at least within the sight of others. But all this ceremonial observance of religion lessened as years went on – as the children grew up and the prosperity of the family increased. Father did not believe in God from his youth, and in later years spoke openly about it in front of Mother and the children. Mother preferred to avoid the subject, but when the occasion required would raise her eyes in prayer. (7)

As for his own relation to his Jewish origins, Trotsky explained:

In my mental equipment, nationality never occupied an independent place, as it was felt but little in every-day life. It is true that after the laws of 1881, which restricted the rights of Jews in Russia, my father was unable to buy more land, as he was so anxious to do, but could only lease it under cover. This, however, scarcely affected my own position. As son of a prosperous landowner, I belonged to the privileged class rather than to the oppressed. The language in my family and household was Russian-Ukrainian. True enough, the number of Jewish boys allowed to join the school was limited to a fixed percentage on account of which I lost one year. (8)

Trotsky reflected on the relation of his Jewish background to his intellectual development:

This national inequality probably was one of the underlying causes of my dissatisfaction with the existing order, but it was lost among all the other phases of social injustice. It never played a leading part – not even a recognized one – in the list of my grievances. (9)
The Torah and the Rabbi

Service is quite clearly dissatisfied with this explanation, which he does not even bother to quote. He sets out to “correct” Trotsky’s account by attempting to make the subject’s life conform to the prejudices of the biographer. This effort proves unfortunate for the credibility of Mr. Service. In a key passage, which supposedly refutes My Life, Service writes that Trotsky

liked to give the impression that he was integrated into every common aspect of school activities. This was not so. St. Paul’s, like all Imperial schools, had to teach religion. Leiba Bronstein (10) entered it as a Jew and did not convert to Christianity. He had to continue his spiritual devotions under the guidance of a rabbi who taught the Jewish pupils, and David Bronstein paid for his services. The rabbi in question failed to make clear whether the Torah was superb literature or holy writ – and Leiba was later to conclude that he really was an agnostic of some kind. [37]

This account is attributed by Service to Max Eastman’s The Young Trotsky, which was published in 1926. But has Service been faithful to Eastman’s narration? Let us take a look at the original text. This is how Eastman tells this story:

It had been the ambition of his father’s – as combining cultural elevation with a certain conventional piety – to have a private tutor read the Bible with his son in the original Hebrew. Trotsky, being only eleven years old, was somewhat abashed before the bearded old scholar who undertook the task. And the scholar, being old and full of his duty, was hesitant about unveiling his own critical views to so young a boy. So it was not clear at first whether they were reading the Bible as history or as literature, or as the revealed word of God. (11)

There is a quite noticeable difference between the two accounts. Eastman’s “Bible” becomes, in Service’s account, the “Torah.” Eastman’s “bearded old scholar,” who reveals himself to be an agnostic, is transformed by Service into a “rabbi.” It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the text was, indeed, the Torah – though this word generally conveys a wider range of texts than that encompassed in the Pentateuch. But as Service has no additional information to offer, beyond what Eastman wrote, what is the purpose of this change in wording? There is even less justification for Service’s transformation of the old agnostic scholar into a rabbi. It should be stressed that this is not a translation issue. Service is referencing an English-language text.

It might be possible to dismiss this as nothing more than a careless exercise of authorial imagination but for the fact that Service’s continuous harping on Trotsky’s religious background is obsessive, obnoxious, and, in its cumulative impact, ugly. He employs the suspect device of noting anti-Semitic attitudes and then proceeding to reinforce them. The reader is offered such passages as the following on page 192:

Russian anti-Semites had picked out Jews as a race without patriotic commitment to Russia. By becoming the foreign minister for a government more interested in spreading world revolution than in defending the country’s interests Trotsky was conforming to a widespread stereotype of the ‘Jewish problem.’ … As things stood he had already become the most famous Jew on earth. America’s Red Cross leader in Russia, Colonel Raymond Robins, put this with characteristic pungency. Talking to Robert Bruce Lockhart, head of the British diplomatic mission in Moscow, he described Trotsky as ‘a four kind son of a bitch, but the greatest Jew since Christ.’ Trotsky, furthermore, was merely the most famous Jew in a Sovnarkom where Jews were present to a disproportionate degree. The same was true in the Bolshevik central party leadership. If Lenin were to have dispensed with the services of talented Jews, he could never have formed a cabinet. [Emphasis added]
Robert Service and the Jews

This passage is shortly followed by a chapter entitled “Trotsky and the Jews,” which begins: “Trotsky hated it when people emphasized his Jewish background.” [198] This emotion may have had something to do with the type of people who were inclined to do the emphasizing. There follow several pages of pointless and ridiculous observations. On page 201 the reader is helpfully informed that “Trotsky’s rejection of Judaism by no means meant that he shunned individual Jews.” After naming a few of the Jews with whom Trotsky was on good terms (all major figures in the Russian and European socialist movement), Service notes (also on page 201) that “Trotsky also had companions who were cosmopolitans without being Jews.” Trotsky, you see, “spoke a lot with August Bebel,” the founder-leader of the German Social Democratic Party. The biographer allows that “there was no trace of Judaism in Trotsky’s adult lifestyle,” although there were many “secularized Jews [who] continued to observe religious food prohibitions and celebrate traditional feast days.”

Service then proceeds to call his readers attention to the fact, in case they had not made the appropriate mental note, that Trotsky’s four children – Nina, Zina, Lev and Sergei – “were given names without association with Jewishness.”

More important information follows on page 202: Trotsky “was brash in his cleverness, outspoken in his opinions. No one could intimidate him. Trotsky had these characteristics to a higher degree than most other Jews emancipated from the traditions of their religious community and the restrictions of the Imperial order. He was manifestly an individual of exceptional talent. But he was far from being the only Jew who visibly enjoyed the opportunities for public self-advancement. In later years, they were to constitute a model for Jewish youth to follow in the world communist movement when, like communists of all nationalities, they spoke loudly and wrote sharply regardless of other people’s sensitivities. Trotsky can hardly be diagnosed as having suffered from the supposed syndrome of the self-hating Jew. Hatred did not come into the matter. He was too delighted with himself and his life to be troubled by embarrassments about his ancestry.” [Emphasis added]

Having suggested that Trotsky’s revolutionary career was an example of Jews taking advantage of opportunities for “public self-advancement,” Service develops this idea in the next paragraph:

“Trotsky was one of those tens of thousands of educated Jews in the Russian Empire who at last could assert themselves in situations where their parents had needed to bow and scrape before Gentile officialdom.” Many Jews, Service notes thoughtfully, sought advancement in respectable professions. But “the second route was to join the revolutionary parties where Jews constituted a disproportionate element.” This is a theory of well-known anti-Semitic parentage: revolution as a form of aggressively ambitious Jewish revenge against a society dominated by Christians. But Service has still more to say on this subject. He declares:

“Young Jewish men and women, trained in the rigors of the Torah, found a congenial secular orthodoxy in Marxist intricacies. Hair-splitting disputes were common to Marxism and Judaism (as they were to Protestantism).” It is now possible to explain Service’s previous twisting of the Eastman citation. Trotsky, according to Service’s distorted account, had also been trained in the “rigors of the Torah.” From there, the reader is led to believe, it was only for the career-minded Bronstein a hop, skip and jump to Das Kapital, the Theory of Permanent Revolution, and a corner suite in the Kremlin.

Service, on page 205, writes that: “The party’s leadership was widely identified as a Jewish gang.” No source is given for this statement. He adds, a few sentences down, “Jews indeed were widely alleged to dominate the Bolshevik party.” Again, there is no source provided for this allegation. These allegations are not challenged, let alone refuted. On the next page, 206, Service reproduces a paragraph from an “anonymous letter to Soviet authorities” which is a wild anti-Semitic denunciation of “full-blooded Jews who have given themselves Russian surnames to trick the Russian people.”

In another bizarre passage, dealing with the famous negotiations conducted by Trotsky with representatives of Germany and Austria-Hungary at Brest-Litovsk in 1918, Service writes: “As the Germans and Austrians strode to the table for talks they expected to be treated with deference. They acted as if victory was already theirs. They shared the prejudices of their social class. For them, socialists of any kind were hardly human. Russian communists, who included so many Jews in their leadership, were little better than vermin.” [197]

Service fails to provide a source for this assessment of the attitudes of the German delegates. In his autobiography, Trotsky wrote: “At Brest-Litovsk, the first Soviet delegation, headed by Joffe, was treated in a most ingratiating way by the Germans. Prince Leopold of Bavaria received them as his ‘guests.’ All the delegations had dinner and supper together.” Trotsky noted with bemusement that “General Hoffmann’s staff was publishing a paper called Russky Vyestnik (The Russian Messenger) for the benefit of the Russian prisoners; in its early phases it always spoke of the Bolsheviks with the most touching sympathy.” (12)

Naturally, this initial friendliness was politically motivated and did not last long. The deadly seriousness of the issues that confronted the opposing parties at Brest-Litovsk inevitably found expression in the increasingly tense and confrontational atmosphere. This process is depicted brilliantly by Trotsky in My Life. His characterizations of his chief adversaries, Kühlmann, Hoffmann and Czernin, are true to life. They are political reactionaries, representatives of the aristocratic elite, but not monsters. Their attitude toward the Bolsheviks is a complex mixture of curiosity, bewilderment, fear, hatred and respect. In Trotsky’s account, there is no suggestion that he was dealing with men who viewed the Bolsheviks, with or without Jews, as “vermin.” That thought belongs to Service, not to the leaders of the German and Austrian delegates at Brest-Litovsk.

For all Service’s preoccupation with Trotsky’s religion, his book is remarkably uninformed by any of the very serious and outstanding scholarship on the question of Jewish life and culture in Odessa and Imperial Russia. The important works of Steven J. Zipperstein of Stanford University are not included in Service’s bibliography. There is nothing more than a fleeting reference to the bloody anti-Semitic pogroms that killed thousands. Service does not even mention the infamous case of Mendel Beilis, the Jewish worker who was arrested in 1911 for the ritual murder of a Christian youth – a case that provoked international outrage against the tsarist regime. Had he bothered to do so, Service might have taken note of Trotsky’s important and influential essay on this case.

This reviewer wishes to register his disgust with Service’s inclusion among the biography’s illustrations, for no obvious reason, of a Nazi caricature of “Leiba Trotzky-Braunstein.” The caption provided by Service states: “In reality, his real nose was neither long nor bent and he never allowed his goatee to become straggly or his hair ill-kempt.” Did Service intend this as a joke? If so, it is in very bad taste.

What, then, should be made of Service’s obsessive fixation with Trotsky’s Jewish background? The use of anti-Semitism as a political weapon against Trotsky is so well known that it is impossible to believe that Service’s incessant invocation of his subject’s Jewish roots is innocent. Whatever Mr. Service’s personal attitude to what he refers to as “the Jewish problem,” he is all too obviously making an appeal precisely to anti-Semites for whom Trotsky’s Jewish background is a major concern. It is fairly certain that the Russian-language edition of this biography will find favor within this reactionary constituency. One cannot help but suspect that Professor Service has taken this into consideration.
Service’s Sources

A substantial portion of Service’s book is devoted to the blackguarding of Trotsky’s personality. He extends his efforts to discredit Trotsky as a revolutionary politician to every aspect of his personal life. Service seems to believe that the Theory of Permanent Revolution will be less persuasive if Trotsky can be shown to have been an unpleasant individual. And so, Service’s portrait of Trotsky never rises above the level of a vulgar caricature. His subject is always impossibly vain, insensitive, domineering and egotistical. Service is intent to show that these traits were already painfully apparent when Trotsky was still a teenager. He relies entirely on the testimony of a single individual, Gregory A. Ziv, who first met Trotsky in the late 1890s during the first stages of his revolutionary activities. Much later, in 1921, after he had emigrated to the United States, Ziv wrote a bitter memoir which was extremely hostile to the former friend and comrade who had, in the meantime, become the world famous leader of the Russian Revolution.

No one would deny that Ziv’s memoir is a document that any serious historian would consult in the preparation of a biography of Trotsky. After all, Ziv knew Trotsky at a critical juncture in the life of the emerging revolutionary. But a historian is obligated to approach documents and sources critically, to carefully consider the degree of trust that can be invested in the information they provide. A highly critical approach is certainly warranted in the case of Ziv. There are many reasons to doubt the objectivity and reliability of his evaluation of Trotsky’s personality. First and foremost, Ziv, after he arrived in the United States, became extremely hostile to Trotsky’s stand on the imperialist war. Ziv was a supporter of Russia’s participation in the “war for democracy.” This information is not given to the reader by Service. But Max Eastman, who was familiar with Ziv’s memoir, offered the following background information:

When Trotsky came to New York [in January 1917] during [the] war – anti-patriot, anti-war, revolutionist – he met Doctor Ziv, who he knew had been publishing a little pro-war paper there in the Russian language. He met him most cordially; and wishing to remember the friendly emotions of these earlier days, he invited him to his house. They talked long and drifted back to the mood of their recollections. But Trotsky, knowing that Ziv could teach him nothing and that he could convince Ziv of nothing, refrained from opening the political question. It was characteristically courteous, and a very friendly, exercise of judgment. But to the doctor’s editorial vanity it seemed to have been an unendurable offense, the manifestation of a self-seeking intellectual arrogance which he suddenly discovered had characterized his friend’s activities from the cradle. Hence this little volume of weak and ludicrous personal spite. (13)

Prosecutors are legally obligated to make exculpatory evidence available to the defense. Following this general principle, a biographer should not conceal from his readers information that calls into question the credibility of the witness whose testimony he is citing. But Service is indifferent to such principled considerations. While insisting that Trotsky’s memoirs must be subjected to the most skeptical scrutiny, Service shows absolutely no inclination to question anything written by Ziv in his memoir. And so he quotes Ziv’s statement that Trotsky “loved his friends and he loved them sincerely; but his love was of the kind that a peasant has for his horse, which assists in the confirmation of his peasant individuality.” [46] This observation makes so deep an impression on Service that he repeats it: “Lëva looked on his revolutionary comrades as the peasant regarded his horse…” [46] What intelligent reader would believe such nonsense?
Enter Schopenhauer

Another claim by Ziv that Service seizes upon concerns the influence of a pamphlet by Artur Schopenhauer, the 19th century German idealist philosopher, upon the young Trotsky. Service does not actually provide an extract from this passage, but presents only a summary. For the purpose of clarifying this issue, which sheds light on Service’s method, this reviewer has consulted Ziv’s original text.

In his memoir Ziv devotes slightly more than one paragraph to this question. He notes that Schopenhauer’s pamphlet “somehow fell into his [Trotsky’s] hands,” and then offers a brief summary of the philosopher’s argument. The purpose of the pamphlet is to teach “how to vanquish one’s opponent in debate, regardless of whether one was actually correct or not.” The pamphlet, according to Ziv, “does not teach rules which must be followed in conducting a debate, but rather exposes devices – more or less crude, or more or less subtle – to which debaters resort in order to be victorious in a debate.” Then, in a somewhat surprising admission, Ziv indicates that he does not have any precise information on the impact of the pamphlet on his friend. He writes: “One can imagine how Bronstein was overjoyed by this small pamphlet that by no means was less valuable for its small size.” Yes, many things can be imagined, but that does not make them true. Ziv’s wording suggests that he did not have any direct evidence that the work made a great impression on Trotsky. He did not write, for example, “Bronstein told me that he was overjoyed by this pamphlet…” If Mr. Ziv was giving sworn testimony, as a witness for the prosecution, the defense attorney would question him carefully on this point. Indeed, after noting that Ziv acknowledges that he does not even know how Trotsky obtained the pamphlet, he would probably ask: “Mr. Ziv, do you really know for sure that Trotsky ever read the Art of Controversy? Did you ever actually witness him reading the book?” As a matter of fact, based on what Ziv wrote, we cannot know for sure whether Trotsky did read The Art of Controversy. But the answer to this question is, for the purpose of evaluating this biography, less important than Service’s failure to question Ziv’s claims.

Quite the opposite. Service goes far beyond the claims of Ziv. He writes, “Lëva prepared himself as if for a military campaign. He scrutinized Schopenhauer’s The Art of Controversy with the purpose of improving his debating skills.” [45] In fact, as we have shown, Service does not have the evidence to support this claim.

Why is this matter important? Service implies that Schopenhauer’s arguments provide a key to understanding the development of not only Trotsky’s polemical style, but also his allegedly aggressive and domineering personality. Roaming far from Ziv’s actual text and offering his own bowdlerized interpretation of Schopenhauer, Service misrepresents the philosopher as an advocate of an array of unscrupulous debating ploys and tricks. “Victory, crushing victory,” declaims Service, “was the only worthwhile objective.” The philosopher, according to Service, “went on to declare that the ideas of ‘ordinary people’ counted for nothing.” [45]

Service finally declares: “Schopenhauer did not belong to the regular armature of Russian revolutionary thought, and Lëva Bronstein did not openly acknowledge his influence on his techniques of argument. Yet he probably found much that he needed for his politics and personality in The Art of Controversy.” [45, Emphasis added]

So, in the end, what are we really left with? Service’s claim that Trotsky discovered in Schopenhauer a philosophical justification for his alleged contempt for humanity and poisonous polemics is based on assumptions, suppositions and guesses unsupported by facts.

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that Trotsky read – nay, studied with great care – Schopenhauer’s Art of Controversy, that does not tell us whether he agreed or disagreed with it; what he accepted and what he rejected. Trotsky read many things as a youth, including, as he tells us in My Life, the writings of John Stuart Mill. Yet no one would accuse Trotsky of being an admirer of British empiricism and liberalism. Finally, Service seems to assume that Trotsky’s alleged study of The Art of Controversy could only have had malign consequences. In the opinion of this reviewer, it is more likely that Trotsky, if he had read The Art of Controversy, might have found in this pamphlet material that proved later to be of assistance in exposing the calumnies, distortions, half-truths and lies of his many unscrupulous enemies. Indeed, one suspects that Stalinism taught Trotsky far more than Schopenhauer on the subject of dishonest polemics.
Trotsky and Sokolovskaya

The relentless efforts to malign Trotsky backfire, and cast Service himself in a very unflattering light. He appears to be organically incapable of feeling any sympathy whatever for the many emotional injuries and traumas endured by his subject in the course of a life dedicated – or, to use the words of his first love and wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, consecrated – to the revolutionary cause. Even when dealing with the plight of the 19-year-old Lev Davidovich, imprisoned and in solitary confinement, Service’s attitude is contemptuous and sneering. For example, he quotes from a deeply moving letter that Trotsky wrote to Sokolovskaya in November 1898. The young man is consumed by loneliness and suffers from insomnia. He confesses that he has contemplated suicide, but then reassures Alexandra that he is “extraordinarily tied to life.” And what is the response of Robert Service? He writes: “There was showiness and immaturity in these sentiments. He was a self-centered young man.” [52]

Eventually Trotsky and Sokolovskaya marry and are sent into Siberian exile. They have two children. Trotsky’s reputation as a brilliant young writer brings him to the attention of the major leaders of Russian socialism. Anxious to expand the scope of his activity in the revolutionary movement, the young man resolves to escape from Siberian exile. In his autobiography, Trotsky writes that Sokolovskaya encouraged him in this decision.

But Service, without presenting any evidence that contradicts Trotsky’s narrative, declares: “This is hard to take at face value. Bronstein was planning to abandon her in the wilds of Siberia. She had no one to look after her, and she had to care for two tiny babies on her own with winter coming on.” Service brings his diatribe to a climax with an utterly vulgar comment: “No sooner had he fathered a couple of children than he decided to run off. Few revolutionaries had left such a mess behind them.” [67] Service, contradicting himself, concedes that Trotsky “was acting within the revolutionary code of behavior.” [67] But he then asserts, “Even if Alexandra really did give her consent, Lev showed little appreciation of the sacrifice he had asked of her. ‘Life,’ he said as if it were a simple matter of fact, ‘separated us.’ In reality, he had chosen to separate himself from his marital and parental responsibilities.” [67]

Aside from the libelous character of this allegation, contradicted by everything that is known about the realities of revolutionary struggle, it is hard to imagine a more anachronistic approach to the writing of history. Service presumes to judge the behavior of revolutionaries in late 19th century Russia, who were engaged in a struggle to the death against the tsarist autocracy, with the hypocritical standards of a wealthy, conservative and self-satisfied upper-middle class philistine in modern-day Britain.

Let us, by the way, note that Service cuts off Trotsky’s sentence before its conclusion. “Life separated us,” Trotsky wrote, “but nothing could destroy our friendship and our intellectual kinship.” (14)

The enduring character of the profound friendship and mutual solidarity of Trotsky and Sokolovskaya was confirmed by the latter in discussions with Eastman in the 1920s. Alexandra never betrayed that friendship, for which she ultimately paid with her life. Stalin murdered her in 1938. Service makes this cold and contemptuous comment on her tragic fate: “Her troubles started with a short-lived marriage contracted to keep her and Trotsky together in Siberia – and it was in Siberia that she finally expired.” [431]

Service’s treatment of the tragic fate of Trotsky’s daughter Zina, who committed suicide in Berlin in January 1933, is callous and malicious. He writes, “Trotsky coped with the tragedy by blaming everything on Stalin and his treatment of her.” He continues:

This accusation, frequently repeated in accounts of Trotsky, was ill aimed. Zina had spent all the time she had wanted in Sukhum; it had been Trotsky who summoned her abroad and not Stalin who had deported her – and it had been Trotsky with whom she wanted to live. Trotsky’s attempt to politicize the death was not his finest moment. [386]

Service chooses not to quote from the letter Trotsky wrote to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on January 11, 1933, less than a week after his daughter’s suicide. He does not inform his readers that Zina was unable to return to Russia, where her husband, daughter and mother still lived, because the Stalinist regime had revoked her Soviet citizenship. As Trotsky wrote, “Depriving her of her citizenship was only a wretched and stupid act of vengeance against me.” (15)

Determined to discredit Trotsky in any way possible, Service absolves the Stalinist regime of any responsibility for the death of his daughter. And this is despite the fact, as Service knows full well, that Stalin would, within just a few years, murder Trotsky’s first wife, his sons, his brothers and his sister, and even his in-laws.
A Shameful Episode

Despite the considerable length of this review, it has left much unsaid. A comprehensive refutation of all of Service’s distortions and misrepresentations would easily assume the size of a substantial book. This reviewer will leave for another time the exposure of Service’s political falsifications as well as his persistent defense of Stalin against Trotsky. In this regard, another important issue that remains to be explored is the significance of the Trotsky biographies of Thatcher, Swain and Service as manifestations of the confluence of neo-Stalinist falsification and traditional Anglo-American anti-Communism. Indeed, a striking feature of the on-going campaign against Trotsky is the degree to which it draws upon the lies and frame-ups of the Stalinists.

There is one final issue that needs to be raised, and that is the role of Harvard University Press in publishing this biography. One can only wonder why it has allowed itself to be associated with such a deplorable and degraded work. It is difficult to believe that Service’s manuscript was subjected to any sort of serious editorial review. There are still, or so one would like to believe, professors in Harvard’s Department of History who can distinguish serious scholarship from trash.

There was a time when Harvard was justly proud of its role as archivist of the closed section of Trotsky’s papers, which it guarded under lock and key – in accordance with the instructions of Trotsky and Natalia Sedova – for nearly 40 years. The Houghton Library considered these papers to be among its historically significant collections. In 1958, Harvard, on its own initiative, published the diary that Trotsky kept in 1935. The publisher’s foreword noted respectfully that Trotsky “is to many today one of the heroes of our time.” A half-century later, it provides its imprimatur for a slanderous and slovenly work. Is Harvard today, in a period of political reaction and intellectual decay, atoning for its earlier displays of principles and scholarly integrity? Whatever the reason, Harvard University Press has brought shame upon itself. One suspects that at some point in the future, with the recovery of morale and courage, it will look back upon this episode with great regret.

Notes:

1. “Science and Style,” in In Defense of Marxism (London: New Park, 1971), p. 233. [return]

2. Russian Review, Volume 14, No. 2 (April 1955), pp. 151-152. [return]

3. See Defend The Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, by Christopher Andrew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), and Spycatcher by Peter Wright (New York: Penguin, 1987). [return]

4. See Leon Trotsky and the Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification, by David North (Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2007) [return]

5. It should be noted that Service hews closely to the line developed previously by Geoffrey Swain, who complained that Trotsky has been viewed as “a far greater thinker than he was in reality. Trotsky wrote an enormous amount and, as a journalist, he was always happy to write on subjects about which he knew very little.” [3] It must be also be noted that Service, in his 2004 biography of Stalin, dealt far more respectfully with the Soviet dictator and mass murderer. “Stalin was a thoughtful man,” Service wrote, “and throughout his life tried to make sense of the universe as he found it. He had studied a lot and forgotten little. … He was not an original thinker nor an outstanding writer. Yet he was an intellectual to the end of his days.” See Fred Williams’ review of Service’s Stalin in the World Socialist Web Site [http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jun2005/stal-j02.shtml]. [return]

6. In opposition to the proponents of “Proletcult” in the early 1920s, Trotsky argued that the proletariat, as an oppressed class, cannot create its own culture. The culture of the future, which will emerge on the basis of a far higher development of the productive forces, when there is no need for a class dictatorship, “will not have a class character. This seems to lead to the conclusion that there is no proletarian culture and that there never will be any and in fact there is no reason to regret this. The proletariat acquires power for the purpose of doing away forever with class culture and to make way for human culture. We frequently seem to forget this.” [Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005, p. 155] [return]

7. My Life, p. 84.

8. Ibid, pp. 86-87.

9. Ibid, p. 87.

10. Leiba was the name given to Trotsky at birth, and this is how Service refers to him in the book’s early chapters.

11. The Young Trotsky, pp. 12-13.

12. My Life, p. 363.

13. The Young Trotsky, p. 21.

14. My Life, p. 133.

15. Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932-33 [New York: Pathfinder, 1972], p. 80.

From time to time examples of scientific fraud come to light and raise questions about the integrity of scientific endeavour. The most well-known example of recent years must surely be South Korean stem cell biologist Hwang Woo-Suk, whose ground-breaking discoveries in the field of therapeutic cloning were exposed as bogus (In addition to his science reputation being in tatters, Hwang was convicted in October 2009 of embezzlement and violation of bioethical laws, although he escaped a custodial sentence).

In physics, the multiple re-use of the same graphs as data for entirely different experiments led to the downfall of a leading young nanoscientist (this was the subject of a 2004 episode of the BBC’s Horizon series The dark secret of Hendrik Schön). Are Hwang and Schön rare examples bringing unwarranted criticism to a body of otherwise exemplary scientists, or are their crimes indicative of much wider malpractice within the scientific community?

University of Edinburgh researcher Daniele Fanelli has shed some light on the the extend of scientific fraud in an article How many scientists fabricate and falsify research? A systematic review and meta-analysis of survey data. Published in the open access journal PLoS ONE in May 2009, the research brought together data from a number of earlier smaller studies on scientific misconduct to generate “the first meta-analysis of these surveys” (p1).

Fanelli was interested in examining the rates of self-reporting of scientific misconduct and knowledge about the misconduct of colleagues. Recognising that “any boundary defining misconduct will be arbitrary” (p9), he limited discussion to incidents where there was clear “intention to deceive” (p1, p9) rather than generation of incorrect results as a consequence of shoddy experimental design and/or accidental misinterpretation of the data. For the purposes of this study, Fanelli also excluded plagiarism and other examples of “questionable research practices” (QRPs; such as failure to include a contributor amongst the list of authors for a paper) from his definition of scientific misconduct, which was instead limited to fabrication and falsification. The grounds for this decision seem valid; whereas fabrication (the invention of data) and falsification (the wilful distortion of results) change the actual body of scientific knowledge, these other unprofessional activities lead instead to changes in the distribution of credit for the work, the substance of which remains unaltered.

To identify the previous studies of misconduct, Fanelli conducted a search of citation databases, scientific journals, “grey literature” databases and internet search engines using the terms “research misconduct”, “research integrity”, “research malpractice”, “scientific fraud”, “fabrication, falsification” and “falsification, fabrication”. An initial search generated 3276 potentially relevant studies. The vast majority (3207) were easily excluded because they were not surveys of research misconduct.

The author then applied very strict criteria to limit the meta-analysis to genuinely appropriate studies. For example, papers were excluded if there was no quantitative data, if the data included no clear category of never/none/nobody (e.g. if only mean values were shown), if the sample had been generated in a non-random manner, or if undergraduate and/or other non-researchers were included in a manner that did not permit their removal from the dataset). Having done so, the initial pool of potential papers was whittled right down to 18 suitable studies.

Quantifying research malpractice

What were the conclusions of Fanelli’s analysis? The main issues addressed were the proportion of respondent admitting to misconduct or questionable practices of their own, or knowledge of similar behaviour committed by colleagues on at least one occasion.

In the various studies reviewed, between 0.3% and 4.9% of respondents confirmed that they had modified results to improve the outcomes. This led to an average of about 2% self-reporting of misconduct (although it was nearer 1% if the responses were limited to those that specifically mentioned ‘falsification’ or ‘fabrication’.

A rather larger number, 9.5%,  were willing to admit that they had carried out broader questionable practices. Again, however, the phrasing was important with more respondents willing to say they had “modified research results” than admitting that had reported results that they “knew to be untrue”. This may fit with an underlying assumption that it is okay to omit data that you “know” are outliers or otherwise “wrong”. As Fanelli puts it “many did not think that the data they “improved” were falsified” (p9).

When asked about the actions of others, a crude average of around 16.7% (range 5.2% to 33.3%, Fanelli elects to report this statistic as “up to 34%” (p10)) of scientists said they had personal knowledge that a colleague had fabricated or falsified data on at least one occasion. A much wider range (6.2% to 72%; crude mean 28.5%) said that they were aware of peers who had indulged in QRPs.

So, were Hwang and Schön isolated miscreants or does their identification mark the tip of an iceberg of scientific misconduct? The truth seems to lie somewhere in between. As Fanelli notes, usual rules of self-reporting bias – in which some people (typically older women) under-report criminal behaviour whereas others (typically younger males) over-report such activity – do not apply here. It is highly unlikely that anyone in a community where trust is taken seriously will over-report their own wrong actions. It is likely, therefore, that the calculated values of self-reported malpractice are underestimates.

The data regarding knowledge of other researchers’ actions are harder to validate. It is theoretically possible, for example, that more than one correspondent might be describing the wrongdoings of the same colleague. In contrast, the criteria was knowledge of malpractice on “at least one occasion” and therefore the data may not take into account serial offences.

Other approaches to measuring misconduct, as reviewed by Fanelli, have generated a range of figures which might be seen as very broadly equivalent. For example, about 0.02% of paper  are retracted from PubMed due to misconduct (Claxton, 2005). 1% of papers submitted to the Journal of Cell Biology were found to have been inappropriately manipulated (Steneck, 2006). 2% of clinical researchers were found guilty of serious scientific misconduct in routine US Food and Drug Administration audits (Glick, 1992).

Whatever the accuracy of these numbers, however, it remains true that the vast majority of science is carried out in a spirit of accuracy and integrity.

Attention aux imposteurs en matière de généalogie.

La note que vous lirez est écrite dans un but bien précis: Il s’agit de désavouer certaines affirmations sur  le site tant loué www.roots.lu, et en particulier la mise en ligne des registres paroissiaux de la ville de Luxembourg, Merl-Hollerich et Weimerskirch compris.

Vous trouverez comme auteur un certain Henri K. , et en quelques endroits aussi mon nom. àÀce sujet il y a cette remarque à faire:

J’ai en effet commencé la saisie des baptêmes, mariages et décès, ceci d’abord à des fins très personnels. Elles deviaent être des instruments de travail dans un but bien précis de recherches sur le magistrat de la ville, ses “serviteurs”, fournisseurs et clients.

Par camaraderie j’ai passé des disquettes à un certain nombre de gens, dont Monsieur K.

Ce dernier m’a demandé de pouvoir participer pour meubler ses loisirs en Espagne.

Je lui ai d’abord confié des fiches avec les décès de la ville de Luxembourg.

Plus tard, je n’ai plus pu suivre la notation sur fiches et je lui ai donné des photocopies.

Sur la suggestion de ce Monsieur de publier sur Internet, je lui ai remarqué qu’il faillait d’abord vérifier et, le cas échéant, corriger. J’étais convaincu qu’il était d’accord. Quelle ne fut donc pas ma surprise de découvrir ces enregistrements sur un site que je ne connaissais pas encore, à savoir root.lu.  Irritation plus grande encore en découvrant que mon nom n’y figurait même pas. Violation manifeste du droit d’auteur, même si, je le répète, je n’étais pas disposé à publier dans cet état.

Plus tard cela fur rectifié, mais pas partout.

Je dois cependant me distance d’un certain nombre d’enregistrements figurant sous mon nom, mais:

1. des lectures fautives à partir de mes fiches manuscrites.

2. des omissions et lacunes.

3. des saisies qui ne me sont pas attribuables, en particulier:

- les décès de Saint Michel

- la majorité des saisies concernant Saint Udalric

- les dix dernières années avant 1795 des baptêmes de Saint Nicolas.

Que ceux qui utilisent ces données sachent dont que dans la majorité des cas ils sont en présence de plagiats, de publications non autorisées.

Quant aux actes que je n’ai effectivement pas saisis, la plus grande méfiance est de rigueur, car ils sont pleins de fautes dues à l’ignorance du latin, de l’histoire des institutions du pays etc.

Le Cheikh Si Hamza Boubakeur (1912-1995), père de Dalil Boubakeur, fut Recteur honoraire de la Mosquée de Paris de 1957 à 1982. « À la Mosquée de Paris, il exerce un rayonnement extraordinaire par ses travaux, ses conférences, et recueille la haute estime dans laquelle le tiennent les académies et institutions internationales où il va magistralement représenter et exposer les valeurs de l’Islam. » (d’après le site de la Grande Mosquée de Paris) En 1985, il publie aux éditions orientalistes Maisonneuve et Larose un Traité moderne de théologie islamique.

En achetant cet épais volume (485 p. bien tassées), j’espérais trouver une vision réellement moderne de l’islam. Or, quelle ne fut pas ma déception ! Si le traité de Hamza Boubakeur atteint le but qu’il se donne, il n’en est pas moins un traité d’apologétique qui expose un islam des plus traditionnels et qui n’a absolument rien de moderne. Il n’y a pratiquement aucune autocritique. L’islam (« intangible, inaltérable », p. 51) est glorifié grâce au levier éculé mais non moins puissant qui consiste à critiquer la société occidentale « athée », « matérialiste », « évolutionniste », « amoraliste », « obscurantiste », etc. La Bible n’échappe pas à une critique hallucinante où le Coran et l’islam apparaissent comme les références absolues (ce que l’auteur appelle parfois « critique historique islamique » ! ; cf. p. 83, 90, etc.). Le Coran est le modèle achevé et le type même de l’Écriture révélée auquel la Tora et le Nouveau Testament doivent être comparés et corrigés. On retrouve, en somme, des thèmes et des méthodes chers aux apologètes musulmans, y compris l’idée que rien dans le Coran n’est contredit par la science. En christianisme, ce genre d’idée est défendu dans les milieux intégristes et fondamentalistes.

Sur la Tora

« C’est le plus vieux texte monothéiste connu du monde et c’est aussi celui qui est le moins authentique des livres d’inspiration divine. » (p. 81)

« La Thora fut, en sa forme originelle, une révélation authentique ; mais au cours des siècles et à la faveur des malheurs d’Israël, bon nombre de légendes égyptiennes et surtout mésopotamiennes s’y incorporèrent sans pour autant fausser sa base doctrinale, l’affirmation du monothéisme et le rejet de l’idolâtrie polythéiste. » (p. 82)

« Le Judaïsme ayant à sa base un fond d’inspiration indéniablement divine, il n’est pas raisonnable pour un croyant de tirer une conclusion négative des détails invraisemblables, des miracles à dormir debout et des extraordinaires libertés prises avec l’histoire. Si Israël avait été à tort ou à raison moins persécuté, on aurait assurément disposé d’une Thora d’une authenticité inattaquable, car ses rédacteurs successifs n’auraient pas eu de raisons particulières pour se défouler aux-mêmes et s’efforcer de maintenir par le merveilleux le plus naïf, l’espérance dans le cœur d’un peuple méprisé qui a fini, pour se consoler selon sa propre morale et sa propre psychologie, par concevoir un Dieu à son service. » (p. 82)

« La Thora […] [a fait de Dieu] leur roi et leur père qui s’accommode de l’ingratitude et des caprices de ses enfants turbulents, désinvoltes, oublieux et peu sociables. Dieu y apparaît comme l’inlassable et redoutable vengeur des Juifs, le Chef d’État-Major de leur armée. Non seulement Il confond Sa propre cause avec la leur, mais vit encore parmi eux, en chef vigilant. Il campe avec eux, Sa tente est dressée au milieu des leurs et Il les suit dans leurs tribulations. Il se fait tour à tour épicier, tailleur, cordonnier pour nourrir et réparer les hardes et les souliers des juifs errants dans le désert d’Etham, de Mara, d’Horeb et du Sinaï. » (p. 84)

« Leur [= les Juifs] irritante exagération d’alliance avec Dieu les amène parfois à des blasphèmes outranciers tels le triomphe de Jacob au cours d’une lutte sur Dieu lui-même. On se reportera au passage exorbitant 28-29 de la Genèse (Livre XXXII) (sic). » (p. 84)

« Avec candeur ou ignorance la Thora attribue aux Patriarches un âge qui dépasse parfois, et contrairement à la nature et au bon sens, neuf siècles. » (p. 84)

« Moïse y est présenté non pas comme un prophète de l’humanité, mais comme un chef nationaliste, raciste, sectaire qui n’hésite pas à tuer pour défendre les Juifs, dont il est l’avocat attitré auprès de Dieu. » (p. 84)

« …les auteurs musulmans récusent-ils l’extraordinaire récit biblique d’un Josué arrêtant le soleil et la lune dans leur course et leur assignant les lieux où ils devaient l’interrompre. Ils tiennent une pareille assertion pour une stupidité de première grandeur. » (p. 84)

En parlant de la figue de Samson : « Peut-être faudrait-il y voir […] le défoulement d’un peuple brimé qui raffole de légendes inconsistantes, de fables amusantes et de magie pour exhaler ses peines et se consoler des persécutions dont il était séculairement l’objet. » (p. 84-85)

« Ce qui rend suspecte l’authenticité de la Thora, c’est précisément l’abus des miracles sur lesquels le Coran est si réservé. Elle est une véritable compilation de prodiges d’une invraisemblance inouïe. » (p. 85)

« Ce qui y semble [dans la Thora] d’inspiration divine, c’est le Décalogue. Le reste constitue une œuvre humaine d’une haute sagesse. » (p. 87)

Sur le double de la Genèse de l’épisode ou Abraham fait passer sa femme pour sa sœur auprès de Pharaon et Abimélek : « S’agit-il d’une confusion ? s’agit-il d’une répétition ? Nous pensons qu’il ne s’agit ni d’une complaisance habituelle ni d’une méprise, mais d’une falsification blasphématoire d’une Écriture réputée sacrée. » (p. 104)

« En raison des extrapolations, de l’incorporation de légendes absurdes et de mythes, sa narration est inadmissible pour l’Islâm. Seul, le Décalogue est en accord avec le Coran, et le musulman ne peut ajouter foi, en vertu du verset 4 de la sourate II, qu’au premier Décalogue (code de morale sociale), non au second Décalogue (code de taxation et de rites). » (p. 107)

Sur le Nouveau Testament

« Écriture curieuse et paradoxale en vérité que le Nouveau Testament. On y trouve tout sauf le texte lui-même de la “Bonne nouvelle” (Injîl). Les Chrétiens ont suppléé à cette carence par une adroite substitution de la biographie de Jésus (Yashû‘, ‘Isâ) à la doctrine qu’il était chargé de transmettre. » (p. 87)

« […] il existe autant d’évangiles que de biographies. D’où la question : où est l’Évangile révélé ? » (p. 87)

« Le nouveau [sic] Testament forme un tout qui est rattaché artificiellement à la Thora […]. » (p. 88)

« […] les auteurs musulmans dans leur grande majorité les rejettent en bloc [c.-à-d. les évangiles canoniques et apocryphes, sauf l’épître de Barnabé], en raison des omissions, des fausses interprétations, des interpolations et des corrections tardives qu’elles ont subies, notamment la suppression des passages annonçant la venue et la mission de Muhammad. » (p. 89)

« […] tout cela [divinité de Jésus, Trinité, péché originel, etc.] est inacceptable pour l’Islâm, qui considère un tel enseignement plus en rapport avec la mythologie antique qu’avec la Révélation authentique faite à Jésus. Il s’agit selon l’Islâm d’un récit merveilleux progressivement élaboré au cours des cinq premiers siècles de l’ère chrétienne. » (p. 90)

« […] Constantin finit par opter pour la thèse de la consubstantialité […]. C’est donc le pouvoir temporel, en l’occurrence un empereur romain qui a décrété la divinisation de Jésus […], une exagération exorbitante [dénoncée par le Coran]. » (p. 91)

« D’autres séquelles de la préhistoire religieuse se retrouvent incorporées sans nécessité, sans intérêt et sans droit dans les rites et le culte chrétien. C’est le cas du baptême. […] Historiquement, l’idée de sacrement par l’eau est d’origine païenne. […] Le dogme de la Rédemption appartient à la même catégorie d’emprunt au paganisme. » (p. 92)

« Jamais Jésus n’a fait allusion à la théorie du rachat du genre humain par son sang, et c’est si vrai que selon les Évangiles il avait espéré jusqu’à sa soi-disant crucifixion qu’un tel supplice lui serait épargné. […] Or, l’origine de ce dogme remonte aux idées païennes […]. » (p. 92)

« Un autre dogme chrétien discutable est la “Sainte Cène”. […] Lui donner une signification littérale, apparaît au regard de l’Islâm comme un blasphème horrifiant. […] Ce dogme que le christianisme doit encore à l’apôtre des Gentils nous replonge dans les vieilles croyances païennes relatives à Mithra […] L’Islâm ne saurait l’avaliser, pas plus, bien entendu que le dogme de la Trinité, sans sombrer dans la mythologie. » (p. 93)

« Le Coran enseigne que la crucifixion de Jésus fut pour ses persécuteurs une simple illusion. Autant dire que l’Islâm tient pour irrecevable le dogme de la “résurrection” […] en raison des contradictions des sources, de son invraisemblance et de ses anagogies, avec la légendaire résurrection du dieu païen Thammuz et celle d’autres divinités mythologiques […]. » (p. 94)

Sur Paul

Entre parenthèses : « on a pu prouver qu’il appartenait à la police secrète romaine ».

« Qu’était-il ? Juif ? Arabe-Syrien (Idumite) ? Grec? Quelle était sa confession d’origine ? Était-il Juif ? Païen ? Néo-platonicien ? Essénien ? Ébionite ? […] Était-il prince hérodien ? Sorcier ? Doit-on le confondre ou le distinguer avec Simon le Mage ? À quelle date est-il né ? Date de sa mort ? Toutes les réponses données à ces questions demeurent jusqu’ici inconsistantes. Ce que l’on sait c’est que par amour et dans l’espoir d’épouser la fille du pontife Gamaliel, il s’était fait circoncire fort tardivement ce qui veut dire qu’il n’était pas d’origine juive. […] [I]l participa avec son ami Sénèque et le proconsul Galba, au complot de Pison ourdi contre Néron, qu’il fut le principal instigateur de l’incendie de Rome. » (p. 95-96)

Devant une telle débauche d’inepties, citons pourtant deux extraits des lettres de Paul (Romains 11.1 et Philippiens 3.4-6) : Je dis donc : Dieu a-t-il rejeté son peuple ? Loin de là ! Car moi aussi je suis Israélite, de la postérité d’Abraham, de la tribu de Benjamin. […] ⁴ Moi aussi, cependant, j’aurais sujet de mettre ma confiance en la chair. Si quelqu’un croit pouvoir se confier en la chair, je le puis bien davantage, ⁵ moi, circoncis le huitième jour, de la race d’Israël, de la tribu de Benjamin, Hébreu né d’Hébreux ; quant à la loi, pharisien ; ⁶ quant au zèle, persécuteur de l’Église ; irréprochable à l’égard de la justice de la loi.

À part ça, « la Thora est une Écriture sacrée » (!) (p. 107)  et « entre la Thora, l’Évangile […] et le Coran, le dialogue est possible » (!) (p. 108).

* * *

Voir une recension en ligne de ce livre, par l’orientaliste Daniel Gimaret de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études. Extraits:

« Lire de bout en bout un ouvrage de ce genre, aussi lourdement et naïvement apologétique, quoi qu’en dise l’auteur (209), ne va pas de soi. Il faut s’entendre dire à satiété que, de toutes les religions, l’Islam est, à tous points de vue, la meilleure; que “seul, il répond aux exigences de la raison” (483) ; qu’”aucune religion connue” n’est aussi favorable à la femme (333) ; qu’il a toujours condamné l’esclavage (131, n. 17) ; etc., etc. Cette absolue supériorité de l’Islam est affirmée notamment, comme il se doit, vis-à-vis du judaïsme et du christianisme dont, avec une ironie apitoyée, Si Hamza ne se lasse pas de relever les croyances ridicules, les dogmes absurdes (cf. en particulier les ch. V et VI). Juste revanche, pourra-t-on penser, du mépris dans lequel Juifs et Chrétiens ont tenu (et tiennent encore, souvent) l’Islam. Mais est-ce donc cela, une théologie “moderne” ? [...]

Pour les “orientalistes” dont je suis (cette “corporation dont l’hostilité habituelle quasi-générale à l’égard du véritable Islam est connue”, 399), le livre du cheikh B. a un intérêt à titre de document, en tant qu’exemple d’une certaine forme d’apologétique islamique actuelle. [...] »

]]> http://camelswithhammers.com/2009/10/28/religious-logic/ Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:30:53 +0000 Daniel Fincke http://camelswithhammers.com/2009/10/28/religious-logic/

via

there is a damn shit thing out there which is not mine but looks as is. whover the author of this is – will you please delete/erase this immediately ? ⎡ a certain minimum of net ethics – please read about this ! ⎤

the false post from my site

with no regards / earwolf

6 barangay officials want bail reduced

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

THE Iloilo City Prosecutors Office recommended the filing of falsification and perjury charges with the Municipal Trial Court in the Cities (MTCC) against six kagawads of a village in Iloilo City proper district.

Joel Villanueva and Jose Dino, residents of Brgy. Osmeña, Iloilo City Proper, filed the case against Anita Campos, Roberto Gasis, Leilani Bu, Jocelyn Balmes, Ramon Medey Bu and Roberto Frenila, kagawads of the said village.

Based on the ICPO resolution released last week, the complainants claimed that the six respondents falsified their certificates of candidacy for the October 2007 elections when they declared that they are residents of Brgy. Osmeña.

The respondents, who were eventually elected as kagawads, were among Osmeña residents who were relocated in 1998 and 1999 to give way for the construction of Robinsons Place Mall.

Villanuevas and Dino presented certifications from Punong Barangay Romeo Herrera and the Iloilo City Urban Poor Affairs Office to prove that the six kagawads are not actual residents of Osmeña.

The certifications also showed that their houses are located outside the barangay.

Also, five of the respondents admitted their actual addresses in their respective reply-affidavits: Anita Campos-Brgy. Sto. Niño Norte, Arevalo; Leilani Bu-Brgy. Kauswagan, Iloilo City proper; Jocelyn Balmes-Brgy. So-oc, Arevalo; Ramon Medey Bu-Brgy. Kauswagan, Iloilo City proper and Roberto Frenila-Brgy. So-oc, Arevalo.

Except for Gasis, the respondents said they were evicted from Osmeña because of the mall’s construction.

But the respondents said they still return to Osmeña daily and consider the village as their place of residence as it was not their intention to be relocated.

Campos said she served Brgy. Osmeña in various appointive and elective positions until 2007.

Leilane Bu and Ramon Medey Bu said they both served as Sangguniang Kabataan officials and kagawads since 1992, a proof that Osmeña residents still recognize them as one of their own.

Balmes said she was appointed barangay secretary since 1998 until she was elected kagawad in 2007. Frenila said he was elected kagawad since 2002.

The respondents said the case against them is “motivated by an evil plot to remove them from their duly elected office.”

But the ICPO said there is probable cause to elevate the perjury and falsification charges against the six barangay kagawads.

“It is clearly established that the respondents made a statement under oath which are devoid of truth. The certificate of the barangay chairman shows that they are not residents of the place they claimed to be their residence,” the ICPO resolution said.

The case has been assigned to MTCC Branch 6. The respondents have filed a motion to reduce bail to P3,000 each. 

On August 25, 2009, the National Adjudicatory Council (“NAC”), the national committee that reviews initial decisions rendered in FINRA disciplinary matters, reviewed a matter in which a Hearing Panel found that the respondent approved the falsification of IRA adoption agreements , in violation of NASD Rule 2110. Rule 2110 requires that member firms observe high standards of commercial honor and just and equitable principles of trade.

In determing his sanction, the Hearing Panel had concluded that misconduct was serious, not egregious. In reaching this conclusion, the Hearing Panel emphasized that the concealment of the falsification was attributable to several firm officers, that the respondents misconduct was negligent, not reckless or intentional, and that the nature of the documents supported lower sanctions.

On appeal, the NAC reversed this finding.

First, the NAC found that the FINRA Sanction Guidelines (“Guidelines”) for the forgery and falsification of documents were applicable to the alleged misconduct and that the Guidelines for the forgery and falsification of records recommend a fine of $5,000 to $l00,000. The Guidelines also recommend that the adjudicator consider a suspension in any and all capacities for up to two years, when mitigating factors exist. In egregious cases, the Guidelines recommend considering a bar. The specific principal considerations to determine sanctions for this violation are “the nature of the documents forged or falsified, and whether the respondent had a good-faith, but mistaken, belief of express or implied authority.”

Second, with these principals in mind, the NAC stated:

Based on [his] entire course of conduct, we conclude that his violation was egregious. Although [his] stand alone approval of the falsification may not have risen to the level of egregious misconduct, his attempted concealment of the misconduct, coupled with his outright disregard of the compliance officer’s advice, push his actions into what is egregious under the circumstances presented. Accordingly, we increase the duration of [his] suspension as a principal from six months to one year.

In the Matter of Dep’t. of Enforcement v. Vines, Complaint No. 2006005565401 (NAC Aug. 25, 2009).

June 11, 2009

By Shaun Walker, of The Independent

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I have recently become involved in several quite heated discussions about both “beefing up” resumés, or “dumbing” them down. Where do you draw the line when you are desperate to find a job that might be crucial to your economic survival? As a coach , I am obviously empathetic to the challenges of being unemployed and encounter clients’ job search frustrations daily. From a purely ethical point of view, my personal position is to always suggest that honesty is the best policy. But ethics and integrity aside, which can only be a matter of individual conscience, as a recruiter I can tell you some of the practical dangers of crossing the line.

Sales spin

By this I don’t mean writing a powerful resume, enhanced by strong vocabulary and key words to give a “ sales spin”. Or “tailoring” your CV towards a specific opening, emphasizing certain qualities and down playing skill or experience deficits. Unless you are applying to companies with a high churn, where clearly employees are not a high priority, or encounter an incompetent recruiter , then I suggest you factor in some of the following before you make a decision, because misrepresentation it is not without risk:

• A skilled recruiter will research you prior to interview. The internet is a global data base and recruiters use it constantly – so any changes or modification to your CV would need to be made consistently on every platform. You would need to check where you are listed, or if any reference has been made to you on any other documents, or in any circumstances, anywhere, even photo tags, which can be traced in cyber space.

• You will need to be prepared to account for any missing years , or perhaps convey that your seniority and experience in your previous employment was different to the reality. This might involve economy with the truth or outright lying. If discovered later there might be negative consequences which could damage your later career.

•You will need to prime your referees. They might have to misrepresent or even lie – same possible consequences as above.

•You might be asked to take psychometric tests or be given a behavioral interview where skills levels, either claimed, exaggerated or missing, should normally be identified.

• If discovered, you may alienate a company who could be a potential future employer.

•  While you do all this you might miss a job, for which you are perfectly qualified, because word recognition software will by-pass you, because you are now presented differently in all media.

Square peg

This is before even going into what might happen if you are hired and become that square peg in a round hole, combined with the stress of possibly being found out and the fear of constantly slipping up.

If you can openly and genuinely persuade a company to hire you at any level, with authentically presented qualifications and skills, that is very different to withholding or distorting information to get a job. As Mark Twain said “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything”

This article was first posted in CareerRocketeer on June 12th 2009, http://www.careerrocketeer.com/2009/06/when-does-tailoring-resume-become.html?
at the kind invitation of Chris Perry: Brand and Marketing Generator careerRocketeer@gmail.com Twitter Follow @CareerRocketeer

Eli Lilly has come under fire recently for the manner in which they’ve marketed Zyprexa, a popular antipshycotic drug. Bloomberg reports that Eli Lilly was writing journal articles supporting Zyprexa, and then paying doctors to sign their names to the articles. Internal documents reveal that the company even went to the extent of creating a guide to hiring doctors for this kind of practice, and complained to editors when the articles weren’t published, this after Lilly stated that they aimed to make Zyprexa the best-selling psychotropic in history.

For one thing, this is a major breach in the integrity of medical journals. False information in journals could have potentially affected the way the drug is used, increasing the number of conditions and patients it could be prescribed for. It should be noted that other drug companies like Merck and Pfizer have been accused of using ghostwritten journal articles too. Who knows how much of the medical literature is now tainted with industry-produced data. The FDA does not have any regulations against the practice currently. Journals themselves should certainly ban publication by any of the doctors linked to this scandal. And drug companies should be forced to reveal which articles they’ve produced, so that any false and dangerous data can be removed from the archives of medical literature.

For more, see the Bloomberg story, and this story in USA Today.