Talk:Douglas Pike

Historian

Igny, please stop belittling Pikes status as an historian, all sources go into great detail of his work in this field with only a brief mention of his service with the state dept. The Last Angry Man (talk) 22:52, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

I am not belittling anyone. I am pretty sure that Pike was not ashamed of his title, so why are you? (Igny (talk) 23:53, 11 September 2011 (UTC))

Given all sources give but one line to his state dept service and the rest on his scholarship it is obvious you are belittling his achievements by focusing on his state dept service over his many years as a historian. You are still in violation of 3r so why not self revert? The Last Angry Man (talk) 23:57, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

I reiterate that I am not belittling anyone, I've just provided a sourced fact from Pike's biography, I did not deny he was a historian also. I still do not understand why you try to hide his title. And I am not in violation of anything, you are simply mistaken. (Igny (talk) 00:01, 12 September 2011 (UTC))

Sure your not, you are giving undue weight to one sentence to the exclusion of his scholarship, this is not on and you are most certainly in violation of 3r, just self revert and be done with it. The Last Angry Man (talk) 00:11, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

WP:IDONTLIKEIT?

I see an attempt by a user to remove all criticism of Pike's position on Cambodia/Khmer Rouge/PRK. Removal of scholarly sources should proceed with a justification and discussion, an edit comment like ″Vickery is a communist apologist who still denies that the "fascist" "Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique" he once praised murdered millions. His support for the brutal puppet regime installed by Vietnam necessitates his baseless self-published criticism of Pike.″ is not enough. I don't know whether Vickery 'denied' it or not, but according to sources Pike most surely did deny!
Edits that remove multiple scholarly sources from the article with one strike so to say are hardly justified. The fact is, Pike has been criticized by numerous authors for downplaying Khmer Rouge atrocities and I see no reason why this may not be mentioned in the article. This looks like WP:CENSOR to me. Lokalkosmopolit (talk) 18:54, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Here's the WP:TRUTH: During the Cambodian genocide, every left-wing intellectual loved, loved, loved the Khmer Rouge--from Noam Chomsky to Gareth Porter, from Jan Myrdal to Malcolm Caldwell, and even David Chandler and Ben Kiernan. After Vietnam overthrew their former clients, every single one of these intellectuals changed their tune, demonizing the KR as racist CIA-sponsored Nazis who committed "self-genocide". They defected to Hanoi's puppet dictatorship (founded by ex-KR Heng Samrin), which massacred tens of thousands and enslaved hundreds of thousands, while portraying the foreign aid that saved millions of Cambodians from starvation as an American plot to restore Pol Pot to power. Authors with a record of condemning KR atrocities, such as William Shawcross, were smeared as "pro-KR" for being insufficiently enthusiastic about Vietnam's attempts to starve the opposition. The CIA's estimate of 50,000-100,000 executions in a single purge was reiterated without reference to their total estimate of 1.5 million excess deaths caused by the KR. Fabricated "confessions" of support were ascribed to American officials like Zbigniew Brzezinski. The American-backed Khmer People's National Liberation Front was conflated with the KR, even though the former actually engaged in extensive fighting with the latter. I thought Kiernan calling out Stephen J. Morris for imaginary KR sympathies was the zenith of the academic conspiracy's chutzpah (especially since Kiernan is still in denial about the scope of KR crimes against humanity, and belittles them with fatuous comparisons to the 24-year war in East Timor), but as ever I have underestimated the left singularity. (Modern mythology, which holds that the KR were "created" by American resistance to the KR, was concocted earlier but became standard around this time.) Pike was on the forefront of exposing communist atrocities in Indochina, such as the Hue Massacre, when his critics were engaging in a propaganda campaign the likes of which would have made Goebbels blush. Libeling him kills two birds with one stone.

But does their criticism belong on WP? Not in its current form. Pike was one of the most eminent scholars of the Second Indochina War, and he wrote a great deal. You have failed to demonstrate that these cherry-picked quotes have any notability. Show me a biography of Pike that pays any attention to this supposed "controversy". Indeed, show me an actual book or article by Pike that defends the KR or denies their mass murders. If you can provide several sources that demonstrate the significance of this "controversy" relative to the rest of Pike's work, I will concede the point. Andreopoulos quotes Pike's "80%" figure (which he calls a "fantasy"), and you in turn present a strawman version of Pike's argument as relayed by Andreopoulos (making no attempt at NPOV), even though you admit to not having read the very primary source you are quoting. Since Andreopoulos delegates the matter to a footnote, he doesn't establish any notability, let alone support your claim of "KR sympathies". A self-published criticism from extreme New Left revisionist Michael Vickery and an article by Pike that strongly condemns the KR and urges moderation to prevent civil war (distorted beyond recognition by your synopsis) don't support your WP:SYNTHESIS either. As such, there is no reason for this paragraph to exist. Only Bellamy can be cited to support your first sentence, but we shouldn't be too reliant on a single source, because they might be a pathological liar. Indeed, on the very same page he accuses Pike, Bellamy claims "The CIA published researched which denied that the communists had committed mass atrocities in 1977-78." Bellamy may be an academic, but anyone can check the CIA report and see for themselves that there is no such denial. Likewise, anyone can check Pike's work and see he is anything but an apologist for communist mass killing.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 21:26, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

It is possible that far-left intellectuals supported Pol Pot. But the fact is mentioned and in fact not only mentioned but portrayed in great length in the article on Malcolm Caldwell. There is no excuse omitting the fact that some right-wingers (close to the Washington establishment or not) later supported Pol Pot against the Vietnamese installed regime. Although this is not directly related to the issue at hand, I'm not sure as to Vietnam deliberately starving people in Cambodia as you claim (no source was offered). In fact, I highly doubt this. And you conveniently omit the Western imposed embargo on Cambodia (cf. John_Pilger#Cambodia). As for KPNLF then don't forget the noncommunist opposition was actively pressurized by the West to cooperate with Khmer Rouge. See [1]. The author is a Guradian journalist, not a commie.
Anyway, the issue here is only a paragraph on Douglas Pike's Khmer Rouge apologia. The issue has not been cherrypicked from anywhere, it is just as relevant as Malcolm Caldwell's support for Khmer Rouge. Your accusations of me not ″making no attempt at NPOV″ makes absolutely no sense: I'm just reflecting what reliable sources say. You on the other hand go here in great details on how this supposedly isn't true, citing no sources that we could use to offer counterperspective. Wikipedia is about verifiability, not truth. Also, it's Pike's own words that Pol Pot led a ″bloody but successful peasant revolution″ (just Google it, the quote is obviously well-known) and peasants experienced no brutality. Where is the problem? It looks like a clear case of WP:IDONTLIKEIT. Lokalkosmopolit (talk) 12:31, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Now you're using the outspoken Stalinist Grover Furr as a resource? Pilger had to pay libel damages for claiming the West rearmed the Khmer Rouge, and Pike never said anything analogous to Caldwell's "The revolution in Kampuchea marks the beginning of the greatest and most necessary change beginning to convulse the world in the latter 20th century to shift it from a disaster-bound course to one holding out the promise of a better future for all...The forethought, ingenuity, dedication and eventual triumph of the liberation forces in the face of extreme adversity and almost universal foreign skepticism, detachment, hostility and even outright sabotage ought to have been cause for worldwide relief and congratulation rather than the disbelief and execration with which it was in fact greeted" (Kampuchea, p.45-46).TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 16:40, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

BTW, Lokalkosmopolit, 650,000 Cambodians starved to death during the first year of Vietnamese occupation (Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land, pg. 53). While famine conditions were a legacy of Khmer Rouge rule, there is plenty of evidence of Vietnamese culpability: "In Kampuchea, the Vietnamese victory over the Khmer Rouge four years ago would never have been possible if the people had not been starved into submission by the Vietnamese, who feared that part of the relief might fall to the enemy forces of Pol Pot. While tens of thousands of Kampucheans died of hunger and hundreds of thousands fled into Thailand, thousands of tons of food provided by international relief organizations spoiled on the docks of Kompong Som. The only portions of these supplies that were used went to feed the occupying Vietnamese forces and the Kampucheans under control in the pacified areas."TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 18:39, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

I've never used comrade Furr as a source, instead I've tried to restore criticism in his bio. Could you please stick to the topic? I've never claimed Caldwell didn't support Khmer Rouge nor have I written anywhere that Pike never said anything analogous to Caldwell's [quote follows]. The topic here is Pike, not Caldwell, not Myrdal. As for Pilger he had to pay for an unfortunate portrayal of some SAS members as training Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to lay mines, this specific thing was not true (he never intended to allege the two men trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines, but they accepted that was how the program had been understood). So it was a specific case, he was never found guilty of libel for suggesting the West supported KR in general (which it in fact did). Lokalkosmopolit (talk) 18:55, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

(In case you haven't noticed, you got the Guardian article off Furr's website, which naturally caused me to wonder if you share his Stalinist beliefs. Furr is both a denier of KR atrocities, which he deflates to a paltry 300,000, and a demonizer of KR imperialist fascism/Westernization.)

I apologize for getting off-topic; it was inappropriate. I was simply being open about my biases, and--to be honest--I was assuming that you were a right-winger of some variety based on your Islamophobia. (Evidently I was quite wrong.) Back to the point: Bellamy is the only source you have that supports your language. The rest of your paragraph is synthesis and out-of-context personal interpretations of a primary source, not a controversy of demonstrable significance.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 19:25, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

A dispute resolution noticeboard thread

A dispute resolution thread on Douglas Pike has been opened. --Lokalkosmopolit (talk) 12:52, 24 March 2014 (UTC)