Disorganized footnotes to a positive history yet to be written or even hypothesized?
All of Aung-thwin's writing is like a series of disorganized footnotes.
When he writes about questionable colonial era historiographical practices, he gets so caught up in his own argument that he gets confused and starts treating these very errors as a basis for truth.
His errors in logic can be assessed independently of his detailed command of the facts, facts that he pours out on the page to confuse the reader. Again, he is a professor of FUD. Take this disorienting sentence, for instance:
"The Kalyani Inscriptions of King Dhammazedi that supposedly offer proof of the conquest of Thaton had nothing whatever to say about any Shin Arahan and his conversion of Aniruddha, nothing about the latter’s request from any Manuha for the Tipitakas, nothing about the rebuff by that Manuha, nothing about the conquest of Thaton, nothing about transporting thirty sets of thirty sets of Tripitakas on thirty two white elephants, along with 30,000 people and their king, to Pagan" (p. 117).
You mock yourself here. What inscription would have all of this?
Oh, but you quote me out of context, you object.
The problem here, professor Aung-thwin, is to quote you in context I’d have to plop the whole book on your desk. The points you make on any given topic are spread all over the book. I would have to pull the whole thing up by its roots.
Throw out the uber-theory, allow logic and other people to enter your argument, and address the issues on an issue-by-issue basis!
The temptation when offering a rebuttal to your ideas is to go on like you do, stream of conscious style, and start bringing in other aspects of the Mon Paradigm until, walla, I am caught up in your net. I am the Mon Paradigm and you are the saviour of Burmese history exorcising yet another Mon Paradigmist.
Assertion: If I pick almost any part of your text at random there are the same logical problems with your argument, irregardless of whether you have correctly identified another red-herring error in colonial historiography or have found yet another place where the history of Burma sits on shaky ground.
Even though I have devoted a lot of time to reading, translating, and interpreting the Burmese chronicle in the original Burmese language, I am perfectly willing to concede that it may never be possible to disentangle fact from fiction (the chronicle may be literature, not history) but that does not mean that I will give up, throw in the towel, and become purely negative, hounding those who are trying to make sense of it, as you hound them. Cease and desist. Apologize to those whose minds you are trying to control.
When he writes about questionable colonial era historiographical practices, he gets so caught up in his own argument that he gets confused and starts treating these very errors as a basis for truth.
His errors in logic can be assessed independently of his detailed command of the facts, facts that he pours out on the page to confuse the reader. Again, he is a professor of FUD. Take this disorienting sentence, for instance:
"The Kalyani Inscriptions of King Dhammazedi that supposedly offer proof of the conquest of Thaton had nothing whatever to say about any Shin Arahan and his conversion of Aniruddha, nothing about the latter’s request from any Manuha for the Tipitakas, nothing about the rebuff by that Manuha, nothing about the conquest of Thaton, nothing about transporting thirty sets of thirty sets of Tripitakas on thirty two white elephants, along with 30,000 people and their king, to Pagan" (p. 117).
You mock yourself here. What inscription would have all of this?
Oh, but you quote me out of context, you object.
The problem here, professor Aung-thwin, is to quote you in context I’d have to plop the whole book on your desk. The points you make on any given topic are spread all over the book. I would have to pull the whole thing up by its roots.
Throw out the uber-theory, allow logic and other people to enter your argument, and address the issues on an issue-by-issue basis!
The temptation when offering a rebuttal to your ideas is to go on like you do, stream of conscious style, and start bringing in other aspects of the Mon Paradigm until, walla, I am caught up in your net. I am the Mon Paradigm and you are the saviour of Burmese history exorcising yet another Mon Paradigmist.
Assertion: If I pick almost any part of your text at random there are the same logical problems with your argument, irregardless of whether you have correctly identified another red-herring error in colonial historiography or have found yet another place where the history of Burma sits on shaky ground.
Even though I have devoted a lot of time to reading, translating, and interpreting the Burmese chronicle in the original Burmese language, I am perfectly willing to concede that it may never be possible to disentangle fact from fiction (the chronicle may be literature, not history) but that does not mean that I will give up, throw in the towel, and become purely negative, hounding those who are trying to make sense of it, as you hound them. Cease and desist. Apologize to those whose minds you are trying to control.
posted by Jon Fernquest at 12:11 PM
1 Comments:
I have never been exposed to this book. I will look it up.
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