MIM: the GOCC is taking over

That's the Great Oppressor Cultural Counterrevolution, you soon-to-be-purged right-deviationist freaks! Our old friends at the Maoist Internationalist Movement see it happening in the wake of the Churchill committee findings. And they go to some length comparing this counterrevolution (unfavorably!) to Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR).

Of course, first MIM indulges in a completely bogus analysis of the case against Churchill, claiming that its "heart" was a disagreement over Churchill's extrapolation of the number of deaths among Mandan in the infamous smallpox epidemic.

Um, not exactly.

But they use that argument only to make another point: If Churchill's extrapolation of smallpox deaths was improper, then so are the "extrapolations" of the deaths in China during the Great Leap Forward:

If extrapolation of deaths is "fabrication," you can kiss most of the U.$. China studies people goodbye. In fact, for many of the scholars involved, the error is far worse, because the leading GOCC lights in the China field have made decimal point errors regarding the Great Leap without ever correcting them despite this having been pointed out for years at a time. It's not even a question of extrapolating while nitpicking literalist historians look on.

Yeah, sure. Obviously MIM is nuts, but I might make this trade: "MIM is here to say we're willing to trade the firing of Ward Churchill for the firing of all the China scholars who have extrapolated famines in China in Mao's Great Leap on the basis of less evidence."

They close, as usual, weirdly:

Here in the united $tates, Charles Brennan of the Rocky Mountain News wrote about Ward Churchill's high school football team, ex-wives etc.(1) The only difference is that in China under Mao, the big character posters [denouncing "rightist" scholars and intellectuals] would be written by Ward Churchill's football team and there would be no Charles Brennan selling the stories for profit. We think that says it all right there: where do you think the truth is more likely to emerge, in a proletarian cultural revolution or a bourgeois cultural counterrevolution?

Lemme think about it.

(via commenter G. Knoll at this PB post)

Update: G. Knoll, I've been reliably informed, is a pseudonym for a certain suddenly frequent commenter here who if he pushes will add this site to the (long) list of blogs from which he is banned.