But that is not what professional distorian Robert Service did. I am 51, and have been an avid reader since a teen. Most of what I've read has been history, and in the last decade or so I've read almost nothing but. What I've learned from this is that from womb to tomb we are awash in dreck. It is that simple. There are legions of palace historians out there who enrich themselves by producing politically acceptable, fictional narratives of historical figures and events. Yes! It really is that simple, they lie. They write bourgeois drivel, their fellow distorians roar laudatory blurbs for the book jacket, and then they go on tour where they will be introduced by sympathetic media as a "distinguished" scholar who's written a "seminal" work, a "masterpiece" blah, blah, blah, and people who don't know any better will believe what they hear. And if the book is a particularly effective piece of propaganda, it will receive a Pulitzer etc., etc., etc.
A fine example is Service's execrable bio' of Trotsky. It is utterly corrupt, utterly shameless. In fact, it is so dishonest, even a reviewer from the Hoover Institute, a bourgeois think tank at Stanford, has savaged it.
I read North's rebuttal as a result of an occasionally heated correspondence in which he defended Trotsky. Ordinarily, I must confess, I do not read books on Trotsky written by Trotskyists anymore. Where the Bolshevik is concerned, the only thing David and I can agree upon is Service's ghastly book.
From the article linked below:
But a careful examination of North’s book shows his criticism of Service to be exactly what Trotsky scholar Baruch Knei-Paz, in a blurb on the back cover, says it is: ‘detailed, meticulous, well-argued and devastating.’”...
Patenaude offers a damning assessment of Service’s basic competence as a historian. “The number of factual mistakes in Service’s book is, as North says, ‘astonishing.’ I have counted more than four dozen.” He asserts that “Service’s book is completely unreliable as a reference.” It is difficult to imagine a more damning appraisal by one historian of another’s work. Attempting to give readers a sense of his own disgust at the shoddiness of Service’s work, Patenaude adds: “At times the errors are jaw-dropping.”
Service’s crude mishandling of facts reflects a deeper problem: his ignorance of and disinterest in Trotsky’s ideas. Patenaude writes: “Service fails to examine in a serious way Trotsky’s political ideas in his writings and speeches – nor does it appear that he has always bothered to familiarize himself with them.” Patenaude points out that Service, who frequently misrepresents Trotsky’s ideas, even to the point of attributing to him conceptions relating to art that he actually argued against, “is not about to let the facts get in the way of his exposing the ‘crudity of Trotsky’s judgements’ about culture.”
Yes, it really is that bad. Service's book is an attempt to destroy the legacy of Leon Trotsky who, for many revolutionaries, is (unfortunately) something of an icon. One simply must wonder what possessed a historian to risk his reputation by writing a work which is demonstrably false in many, many instances. He must have felt safe to do so, and he was. Service is still being feted everywhere he goes, and Patenaude's damning critique will never be available in mainstream media. He is being protected. By whom? And why?
Unfortunately, while Service's book may be an extreme example, such historical deception is quite common. Most of the historians who appear on the History Channel and the like have written dis-histories like Service's.
As somebody once said: History is a battlefield.
http://wsws.org/articles/2011/jun2011/pers-j28.shtml
