Jacob Christensen

Talking your way into something and then out of it again.

And while we’re at it, here is Slate’s Hillary Deathwatch series. Remember, they got Gonzo last year.

400 redundancies in Östersund.

That means work for the movers.

In all kinds of academic writing, impersonality is the norm: The issue, not the writer should be at the centre of attention. Obviously this also applies to academic debates: Academics are detached observers who analyse rather than participate natural and social phenomena.

Von wegen, as the Germans say.¹ Debates involving academics have a tendency to turn ugly and ad hominem faster than … well, very very fast.

The latest case is the debate catfight over the Swedish state agency Forum for Living History which has been commissioned by the government to present an information campaign about human rights abuses in Communist regimes. A number of social scientists and historians recently protested against the campaign in an op-ed article in Dagens Nyheter and a dedicated homepage with the argument that the government – and not just the Swedish government – is turning an academic discipline into a political battlefield.

If we look at the issue, this is an interesting discussion. If you are familiar with the Danish debate, you will know about the heated battle over Professor Bent Jensen and the Centre for Cold War Research which was sponsored by the Danish People’s Party. The DPP not only demanded that the grant should be earmarked for Bent Jensen but also that the Centre should be placed on the Danish Defence Academy – at a safe distance from the marxists who (at least according to DPP’s Jesper Langballe and others) populate Danish universities.

The process behind the Danish centre was orchestrated less elegantly than the Swedish campaign but that both the DPP and the Swedish government have a common ambition about making the coming generations immune to the lure of socialism communism should be obvious. That there is very little positive to say about the human rights records of communist regimes in the 20th century should be equally obvious.

Anyway – all hell broke loose, more so in Sweden than in Denmark, even though Bent Jensen has been involved in his fair share of public and academic fights. That the Swedish government struck back at the protesters instead of addressing the arguments was what you could expect; that the debate among historians and social scientists turned ugly … well, I’m not really surprised.

For examples of ad hominem arguments look here (Bo Rothstein) and here (Emil Uddhammar). And so on and so forth. Växjö University looks just like the place to do conflict research these days.

As it is, Danish has a wonderful expression for this kind of behaviour: Skallesmækkende mimoser, or headbutting mimosae.² And perhaps we shouldn’t be really surprised: In everyday life, academics can be as stupid as everybody else – it’s just because we expect a detached and rational discourse that the catfights look strange. Just to point out that not everybody have lost their heads, I’ll point you to Gissur Erlingsson and colleagues.

But what about the issue at hand? Actually, there is a bit of confusion over what the issue really is in my opinion. In a purely academic perspective, the Danish conflict over the Centre for Cold War Research looks more serious to me: Here the Danish People’s Party’s objective clearly is to use ear-marked research to “out” suspected Soviet collaborators, who have not or cannot be convicted by the Danish courts – or to brand critics of the Danish foreign policy as traitors. On the other hand, the initiative has been orchestrated in such a way that it is unlikely to have a major impact on anybody else than hardcore anti-communists who are intellectually stuck in the 1950s. And maybe it is a great shame that the DPP has succeeded in monopolising the topic in the public debate because communism in Western European countries is a fascinating, if marginal, phenomenon.

The Swedish Forum is an educational rather than a research organisation which means that the immediate threat to the academic freedom of research in my opinion is smaller. On the other hand, there is every reason to ask if it is appropriate if the whims or tactical goals of governments should guide the content of (secondary) education in Swedish and world history. And from a purely academic point of view we may of cause ask why the Forum’s earlier Holocaust campaign was initiated and implemented without any large-scale protests.³

1. Or in Danish: Ja, goddaw do! [↩]
2. A blogging linguist has suggested hyper-sensitive headbashers as an alternative translation [↩]
3. Well, perhaps because no-one would like appear to be excusing or denying the nazi genocides [↩]

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