THE GENOCIDE OF TRUTH: Twenty Roots of a Modern Blood Libel
by Daniel Clarke-Serret
Introduction: The Genocide of Truth
Chapter 1: Truth // Chapter 2: Ideology // Chapter 3: Religion // Chapter 4: Science // Chapter 5: Attention // Chapter 6: Distraction // Chapter 7: (True) Expertise
CHAPTER 8: Authority
The Crisis of Citation
The Great Genocide Blood Libel has done more than discredit international organizations. It has destroyed the very basis of academia.
Academic authority, as we’ve understood it, has been based on more than argument from first principles and logical deduction. To be deemed serious by the great and the good, a rigorous academic paper has required citation. A quote here, a reference there, a bibliography in all its glory. Without the last third of your tome decorated in unreadable notes, you condemn yourself to irrelevance in the world of the professoriat.
Yet there has always been a problem with this convention. To the non-politically correct, it has amounted to Chinese whispers. To the politically correct, it was whispers without reference to a particular nationality. Yet the label aside, the practice relied on trust –faith even; that the first reference in the chain was itself accurate. Once that faith dissipates, whither academic writing?
So, for example, Khaled Salih has written recently on the Anfal Genocide1; the systematic attack on Kurdish life in Saddam’s Ba’athist Iraq. The author relies for that legal designation on evidence gathered by Human Rights Watch; evidence that proved invaluable in the case built before the Iraqi High Tribunal.
