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science) wasn't Marxist, so Trofim Lysenko obligingly cooked up a set of irreproducible experimental results showing that genetic traits could be acquired during one's life and passed on.The Russian mistake was to dress up bad science in political jargon.
Nowadays it is fake scholarship in the service of a vicious political agenda that is gussied up with the borrowed terminology of science.
The body of Horowitz's book is a kind of rogues' gallery.
As a professor of Armenian studies, I've met over my lifetime hundreds of survivors of the Armenian Genocide and have read scores of testimonies in Armenian and other languages.
I've also traveled to Eastern Anatolia and spoken with Turkish and Kurdish farmers who spoke freely of the massacres.
Often the ruins of Armenian villages and even quarters of whole cities are untouched.
So I note with appreciation the inclusion of Hamid Algar, a professor of Persian and Islamic studies (and, for the record, a superb scholar) who in 1998 spat on members of the Armenian Student Association at UC Berkeley.
He is quoted as having said to them: "It was not a genocide, but I wish it were, you lying pigs...You stupid Armenians, you deserve to be massacred!
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Juan Cole of the University of Michigan is criticized for his anti-Zionist conspiracy theories, but that scarcely exhausts Ann Arbor's charms: a colleague who applied for a job in Armenian studies there recalled to me being told they would not hire anyone planning to talk about...
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