Saturday, November 5, 2011

Sacramento: Paranoia Over Professor Michael Vann And Journalist Ann Garrison

[Dear blog readers,
Please have a look at who the Rwandan government has discovered. The daily tabloid running the Rwandan government's propaganda has been looking for somebody anybody - who will publish something that remotely tries to hide true image of the butcher of Rwanda, President Paul Kagame. The war criminal defending tabloid found a blogger by the name of Phil Quin and latched on to a post that is amateur at best. What's more, the article actually says more about Kagame and his followers' intolerance for disagreement. Congratulations on adding a new “contributor” to the Rwandan propaganda tabloid, The New Times==MK/HTPJ].


The
NEWTIMES
Rwanda's Government Supporting Daily
Look who the Rwanda-haters have recruited now
By Phil Quin
The New Times
11/5/11

Photo: Phil Quin

There is a fringe element of the global left who will work with anyone — including genocide deniers and perpetrators – if it means vilifying the US, the UK or “the West” in general. This is the crowd that loved Sadaam Hussien, Gadhaffi and Slobodan Milosevic. It is guys like John Minto in New Zealand who argued after 9/11 that the Taliban were misunderstood liberal democrats who were just trying to bring about a semblance of law and order in Afghanistan. These forces happily array against the small African country of Rwanda, whose leader Paul Kagame has become one of their targets—du—jour.

One of the leading Kagame-haters is Ann Garrison whose obsessive efforts to defame, diminish and defeat the Rwandan President has long since rendered her a muttering, sputtering fringe—dweller whose self—styled journalism attracts reactions ranging from head—shaking pity to “who on earth is this Ann Garrison woman, and remind me never to invite her to a dinner party.”

Garrison's latest ally in her jihad against Paul Kagame is a very minor history professor at Sacramento State University where the President was scheduled to give a keynote address on genocide, a topic he is rather self evidently qualified to address since he — I don't know, remind me again, oh yes that's right — stopped one that killed a million people planned and carried out by Ann Garrison's ideological stablemates back in 1994. His name is Michael Vann. Don't be surprised if you've never heard of him.

Associate Professor Michael Vann who, based on my research, appears to be a Marxist historian who specializes in French colonial history, especially in Vietnam if my reading is not mistaken. My research does not fill me with confidence since the name Michael Vann or Associate Professor Michael Vann or Michael Vann Sacramento or any variation thereof attracts almost no hits on Google, Google News, Google Blogs or, most importantly, Google Scholar. Vann is all but invisible; his published work is hard to find and far from abundant; and he is a demonstrable featherweight as an academic historian. His Marxist approach to the study of history, to which I have no fundamental objection, is consistent with the other fringe leftists who align themselves to the anti-Rwanda cause as well as the men and women who made up the Committee to Defend Milosevic. Vann gets published very rarely — “which is the way one academic might politely describe another as “not that great at their job.”— but one publication that loves his work in the Radical History Review. This amused me since it told me everything I needed to know about why this small—potatoes academic time—server would jump on the feral fringe of the Kagame—obsessed denier crowd spear-headed by Garrison.

The Radical History Review was memorably described by a fellow leftist publication The New Criterion as: "a publication that plainly states it µrejects conventional notions of scholarly neutrality and 'objectivity', "and approaches history from an engaged, critical, political stance.'''

You will note that TNC is quoting the journal directly, in its own words: the Radical History Review explicitly take pride in rejecting neutrality and objectivity. The latest edition of the journal, for example, is solely dedicated to blaming America for 9/11 including a piece that claims that the very notion of terrorist threats are the product of an FBI-run conspiracy.

In its own words, the Radical History Review addresses “issues of gender, race, sexuality, imperialism, and class, stretching the boundaries of historical analysis to explore Western and non—Western histories”. RHR is the favored publication of the strand of historicism that places Western (white, male and patriarchal) misdeeds at the heart of every single thing wrong with the world, past and present.

So it should come as no surprise that in her desperation to find someone -anyone-at Sacramento State to join in her monomaniacal loathing of President Kagame in the lead-up to his proposed keynote address there, the only person Ann Garrison has managed to find to speak out on her behalf is a minor Marxist with ties to a school of historicism that explicitly rejects the needs for facts and evidence to get in the way of a good story.

(Due to a scheduling conflict, President Kagame has delegated the Rwandan senate president to deliver his remarks and lead a group of Rwandan scholars to the genocide conference in question).

In their shared aversion to any notion of objective fact and evidence-based truth—telling, Garrison and Vann are a match made in heaven. Did I say heaven? I meant to say the fiery pits of hell.

Phil Quin is a New York- based writer and commentator on media and politics.

Twitter @philquin

About the author:


Phil Quin is an operative of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). He previously worked as an assistant to Helen Clark who was then the prime Minister of New Zealand. He is hired by the Rwandan government much like Andrew Mwenda to spearhead a media war against the so-called "Rwanda haters". He has an extremely imposing and egotistical character and is rabidly intolerant of opposing views. Money has bought the fellow's soul. He is not ready to change his opinions, just because someone persuades him to! 





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5 comments:

  1. Ing MahhNovember 5, 2011 at 9:54 PM

    "Due to a scheduling conflict, President Kagame has delegated the Rwandan senate president to deliver his remarks and lead a group of Rwandan scholars to the genocide conference in question", Dixit Phil Quin.

    This is pure lie from another RPF apologist.

    According to people who attended the conference, the University piped Kagame in on a big auditorium screen. It was a pre-recorded Youtube post. Prof Patrick Cannon, Chair of the Government Department, recommended that they have him speak from a remote location rather than have him come. The Sacramento State Hornet and the university newspaper reported that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousNovember 6, 2011 at 8:18 AM

    No respectable newspaper in the world can accept to publish such hatefull article.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousNovember 6, 2011 at 8:23 AM

    Phil,
    your article lacks of facts and knowledge of Central Africa politics. If you are Kagame supporter, do you see what happened to other dictators?

    ReplyDelete
  4. FrodoualdNovember 6, 2011 at 6:31 PM

    This is incomprehensible and reprehensible to see American spreading defamations against fellow Americans to a foreign newspaper supporting a questionable regime.

    I urge this amateur journalist Phil Quin to rush to apologize to Professor Michael Vann and Journalist Ann Garrison and to never do such an aberration again ever.

    He can freely and responsibly work for the Kigali propaganda without unfounded personal attacks on people who just reported and never created the embarrassing situations the Kigali regime experienced. The named persons are not even alone to be critical to the current Rwandan government if anyone on earth can read numerous reports from Rwandan citizens, UN agencies, international human rights organizations and civilized governments all over the world.

    Let journalism be at the service of the truth for peace and prosperity for all!

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  5. Mamadou KouyateNovember 6, 2011 at 10:30 PM

    [Comment from Ann Garrison at http://www.thenewtasman.com/2011/11/look-who-the-rwanda-haters-have-recruited-now/]

    I attended and listened at the conference all day long.
    At the very end, near five o’clock, when a brief question period opened up, I asked for references to evidence of the arguments presented and said I had heard no reference to a long list of UN reports, the most relevant of which was the 1994 Gersony Report.
    The response was an angry diatribe by the Rwandan Ambassador, about the intellectual deviousness of persons like myself, who try to turn attention away from 1994 with reference to later human rights reports regarding Rwanda in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
    When I was finally given a chance to respond, the moderator warned me that he would limit me to evidence based argument, so I said OK, here’s a piece of evidence, a May 18, 1994 news report from Reuters, a very mainstream news outlet, which says that the Rwandan Patriotic Army led by General Paul Kagame threatened to fire on UN peacekeepers if they attempted to intervene.
    That date, May 18, 1994, was midway through the 100 days of massacres and fighting following the assassination of Presidents Habyarimana and Ntaryamira when their plane was shot down as they flew home from signing peace talks in Arusha, Tanzania.
    Reuters is an internationally known news agency. I was citing a record of their May 18th, 1994 report.
    I was shouted down and eventually surrounded by the Rwandan delegation, one of whom actually laid hands on me.
    There was no respect for “evidence based argument” at this conference.
    It was an academic disgrace.

    ReplyDelete