On this page, there was a dispute a while ago about two entries for the alternate history/scifi novel. One of them was this:
- Life Imitates Art: In Victoria, leftist extremists destroy American historical monuments because they consider them racist. Only a couple of years later, this happened in real life as well.
The troper who removed this commented that it is wrong to call the people who destroyed this historical monument leftist extremists, arguing that we cannot know their motives: perhaps, he said, their action was strictly apolitical, driven by simple dislike of the statue on purely aesthetic grounds. He asked me to provide a source supporting the contention that these criminals were in fact leftists.
Actually, my source was already provided by the link I gave in the entry, which leads to an article at the CNN online edition. That article states, among other things:
- "The Confederate Soldiers Monument was pulled down [...] to show solidarity with anti-racist activists"
- "[O]ne person climbed a ladder and tied a rope to the top of the statue while the crowd chanted, 'We are the revolution'."
- "In a statement, the Workers World Party said Thompson [...] was a member of the group 'who climbed to the top of the statue to tie a rope around its neck before the crowd tore it down'."
The Workers World Party is described by Wikipedia as "a revolutionary Marxist–Leninist political party in the United States." In other words, the given source shows that the criminals who defaced this historical monument in Durham, North Carolina, were motivated by political causes (point the first), intended their vandalism to be a revolutionary act of violence (point the second), and that their leader was in fact a card-carrying member of a revolutionary Marxist group (point the third).
If CNN is not considered an appropriate source, other news networks also reported on the same incident. For example, there is this piece from their rival Fox News, with a photo of the fallen statue, with an intimidating sign left beside it: Make Racists Afraid Again. This makes explicit that the attack was not simply politically motivated vandalism, but in fact actual political terrorism, seeking to intimidate and frighten the political opponents ("racists") of the Marxist revolutionaries. (As terrorism is defined by the UN: "Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes.")
With that in mind, we still need not necessarily refer to them as terrorists on this page, though that would at least arguably be justified. Either way, however, it seems to me very surely clear that it was indeed leftist extremists who were the culprits. Does anyone object to this description?
Edited by IdumeanPatriot
The other contended point was this, originally under Write What You Know:
I removed this because it made rather serious blanket attacks on the author with no supporting evidence. William Lind has indeed never served in the military, but as a theorist he has been published in major military journals and by serious presses. He originated, or at least was one of the originators of, the concept of Fourth Generation Warfare, which remains current. (It would certainly seem difficult to see how it was in any was disproved by the Gulf War.) Now, obviously there are people in the academic and military communities who criticize Lind and his theories (just as he presumably then criticizes theirs), but that is not the same as them having been disproved, or him not being taken seriously by anyone.
When I removed this entry, it was reinserted by the same troper that deleted the Life Imitates Art example, with the justification:
"'According to writer Robert Coram's book Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art of War, during lectures on maneuver warfare, Lind was sometimes criticized for having never served in the military, for having "never dodged a bullet, he had never led men in combat, he had never even worn a uniform and clearly spending way too much time playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare."' from the other wiki."
This shows that Lind was sometimes criticized when he was a consultant for the USMC, something which has not been disputed. However, it fails entirely to demonstrate that he was (or is) generally not taken seriously, or that all his theories have been disproved. In fact, assuming that the Wikipedia information is accurate, it seems to specifically disprove the idea that he has been ignored by serious people since the Gulf war, since it shows that he was still being invited to hold lectures for USMC officers by 2007 at the latest (this being the release year for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare; the complaint about him playing it too much thus could not have been made earlier).
Until or unless a source supporting the specific allegations made can be provided, I think we are better off removing them. Does anyone else disagree?