[Vision2020] Kidnapping Texts: from Proverbs to the Neo-Confederates

[Donovan Arnold]

"I gave this talk at the Idaho Library Association
Meeting in Pocatello on Thursday.  . .  The room was
filled and people were amazed about what was going on
in little ole Moscow.  In the Q & A there were no
questions  about plagiarism; they were all about
Wilson & Co."--Nick Gier


I am sure that the room full of people got an unbiased
and accurate view of Wilson if Nick Gier was the one
answering the questions.

Perhaps Doug Wilson can give a lecture to the Boise
Library about public education and Nick Gier.

Thanks for the Laughs,

Donovan J Arnold



--- nickgier at adelphia.net wrote:

> Dear Visionaries:
> 
> I gave this talk at the Idaho Library Association
> Meeting in Pocatello on Thursday.  I want to thank
> Tim Hildebrand for making the invitation possible. 
> The room was filled and people were amazed about
> what was going on in little ole Moscow.  In the Q &
> A there were no questions about plagiarism; they
> were all about Wilson & Co.
> 
> For the full text (except for amusing intro things)
> see www.class.uidaho/ngier/kidnap.htm.
> 
> Thanks also to Tom Hansen for his wonderful website.
> 
> KIDNAPPING TEXTS: FROM PROVERBS TO THE
> NEO-CONFEDERATES
> 
> By Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of
> Idaho
> 
> Plagiarius: Latin for an abductor; plagiare: to
> steal
> 
> Ancient literature is filled with examples of
> strikingly similar sayings and texts. The Golden
> Rule is found in many ancient philosophies and
> religions, but this is may not be a case of
> borrowing; rather, it is more likely the result of a
> universal moral intuition that this is the right way
> to act.
> 
> But let’s examine these two passages:
> 
> “Spare not your son from the rod, otherwise, how
> can you save him from wickedness. If I beat you,
> son, you will not die, but if I leave you alone, you
> will not live.”
> 
> “Do not withhold correction from a child, for if
> you beat him with a rod he will not die. You shall
> beat him with a rod, and deliver his soul from
> Hell.” 
> 
> The first text is from the Ahiqar, a 7th Century BCE
> Syrian text written in Aramaic.  The second is from
> Proverbs 23:13-14, KJV. Bible scholars are agreed
> that Solomon could not have written this book
> because stylistic and linguistic indications point
> to the 6th-4th BCE. Did the Syrians receive the Word
> of God, too?  This should be a lesson for all those
> who insist on one scripture as a unique and
> distinctive divine revelation.
> 
> Let me now list my favorite examples of plagiarism
> in the 20th Century.  This sin knows no boundaries,
> either political or geographic. Robert Kennedy once
> lifted parts of a paper later found at Syracuse Law
> School.  Joe Biden borrowed parts of a speech from
> Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.  Martin Luther
> King, Jr. failed to give any attribution to copied
> portions of his doctoral dissertation at Boston
> University. The Beatle George Harrison was found
> guilty of plagiarizing My Sweet Lord and had to pay
> a fine.
> 
> A distinguished Indian physicist B. S. Rajput and
> his student were recently caught red handed.  The
> report of a board of inquiry concluded that ‘‘a
> bare comparison of the two works, not from the
> viewpoint of a hyper technical or meticulous
> observer but from the angle of the average
> reasonable reader, would reveal complete similarity
> not only in all mathematical equations and symbols
> but also in the word by word language used in the
> two works. . . .”  Why do people capable of doing
> their own high level work steal in such a blatant
> way?  It is almost as if they want to be caught.
> 
> It has now been discovered that there is a German
> novel from 1916 that Vladimir Nabokov read and
> evidently kept in his unconscious as he wrote
> Lolita, which just turned 50 this year.  This type
> of plagiarism has been called a form of cryptonesia,
> bringing to consciousness things that we no longer
> remember hearing or reading.
> Gov. Jeb Bush recently hired Lloyd Brown as a writer
> even though he had been accused of viewing
> pornography in plain view of others in the pressroom
> of the Florida Times-Union.  He had been fired from
> the paper for plagiarizing parts of his editorials. 
> My source did not clarify if one of these editorials
> was the one in 2000 that minimized the evils of
> southern slavery and its later effects on American
> society.   I chose this particular example because
> of its relevance to my final example from the
> neo-Confederates.
> 	
> Let me now spend a little time on the Jay Sokolow
> case.  Coming to Texas Tech in 1976 he impressed
> every one with his prodigious scholarly output in
> the history department. He came up for promotion and
> tenure in 1981 with a very impressive portfolio.  An
> outside member of the tenure committee from the
> English department discovered that one of
> Sokolow’s articles had been plagiarized.  
> 
> Sokolow decided to resign rather than face dismissal
> proceedings, which his cautious department may not
> have done.  His colleagues kept the whole case mum,
> and Sokolow was free to continue his academic
> career.  There is bitter irony in the fact that he
> was hired by the National Endowment for the
> Humanities to review research proposals from
> historians who were presumably upholding the
> principles that he had betrayed. 
> 	
> Not only were some of Sokolow’s articles
> plagiarized, but also a book that got past reviewers
> at Farleigh Dickinson University Press.  When this
> book was exposed, the matter came before the
> American Historical Association, which published a
> policy on plagiarism in 1986. Even after a reprimand
> by the AHA, he went on to publish another book on
> Fourierism with the University of Kentucky Press
> even though charges of plagiarism in that MS. were
> circulating among historians.
> 
> E. B. White once said that there were three types of
> plagiarists: the thief, the dope, and the total
> recall guy.  White defined the dope as “a little
> vague about the printed word and regards anything in
> the way of printed matter as mildly miraculous and
> common property,” and explained the plagiarism of
> a certain Cornell University president using this
> category.
> 	
> Thomas Mallon believes that we need a pathological
> category for people such as Sokolow and Rajput, who
> are neither common thieves nor dopes.  Unlike most
> of our students, they have the skills and training
> to do their own work at a high professional level.	
> 
> Mallon builds his case for pathological plagiarism
> citing various authorities. Martin Amis observes
> that the psychology of plagiarism is
> “fascinatingly perverse: it risks, or invites,
> deep shame, and there must be something of a
> death-wish in it.”  Peter Shaw proposes that the
> pathological plagiarist is very much like the
> kleptomaniac: each do not need to steal, but they
> compulsively do it anyway.  Physicist Rajput has not
> attained this level yet, but Sokolov certainly did.
> 	
> The cyber age has brought us yet another type of
> plagiarist.  The computer can now make all of us
> potential “total recall” guys and gals.  Steve
> Wilkins is a conservative Presbyterian minister in
> Monroe, Louisiana. He loves his Southern heritage,
> and he hired several of his parishioners to digitize
> dozens of books on the history of the South. In the
> early 1990s word was spreading that Wilkins’ own
> articles and books contained large sections of the
> words of others.
> 
> Wilkins is a founding director of the
> neo-Confederate League of the South.  The League
> proposes that 15 Southern States leave the union and
> form a Calvinist theocracy that would preserve the
> values of the Anglo-Celtic culture. A key word for
> the League is “hierarchy,” the God-given right
> for superiors to rule over inferiors. Wilkins
> believes that only propertied males should be able
> to vote.
> 
> In 1994 Moscow pastor Douglas Wilson invited Steve
> Wilkins to a conference on slavery in Moscow.  The
> result was a booklet co-author by both entitled
> Southern Slavery As It Was, published in 1996 by
> Wilson’s own Canon Press.  Wilson and Wilkins
> argued that the lives of Southern slaves were not as
> bad as we’ve been told, and they described the
> antebellum South as the most harmonious multiracial
> society in human history.
> 
> It was not until October of 2003 that the booklet
> was discovered and the town literally exploded in
> discussion.  Over 1200 residents of Moscow and
> Pullman signed a petition condemning Wilson’s
> views on slavery, women, and homosexuals. In the
> Moscow-Pullman Daily News Wilson declared that
> homosexuals should either be executed or banished,
> and his “Federal Vision” for American Society
> would deny most women the right to vote.
> 
> A professor at the University of Washington, an
> expert in the history of the American South,
> determined that 20 percent of the slavery booklet
> had been plagiarized from a book entitled Time on
> the Cross.  He is a conservative Christian and he
> attends a church established in Seattle by some of
> Wilson’s 
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