East and West

Press, 23 February 1987, Page 20

East and West

Sir,—Apart from that common proletarian, anti-intellectual fondness for the “show trial” rhetoric of Beria or the Red Guards, what else fuels M. Creel’s denouncement of Sir Karl Popper (emeritus professor of logic and scientific method, University of London), for “pettifogging pedantry” and “egotistical oracularity” (February 14)? In similar vein, M. Creel employs a bit of misrepresentation with “fascism is not an analysis of history in terms of Popper’s fallacious ‘race struggles’, etc.” “Race struggles” being a fascist analysis of history and not Popper’s (Popper has no analysis), what does the correspondent mean by “fallacious" and why does he attribute it so to Popper? If the correspondent is simply disguising and employing the term “fallacious” as meaning “not Marxist” then that would be obscurantism. Are fascist “race struggles” getting too close to “class struggles” for Marxist comfort?—Yours, etc., DAVID SHANKS. February 17, ssB7.