Nerd News: the American Historical Association Versus Russian President Medvedev

I usually have little but contempt for professional nerd organizations that like to issue dicta on current issues. Usually the self-absorbed nerd-diktats are idiotic and overreaching (as when they claim to speak on behalf of others -- such as dissenting members of those organizations). Even so, credit must be given where credit is due, and this time the American Historical Association (AHA) has done something worthwhile.

The organization of historians has written a letter of protest to Russian Putin puppet president Dmitri Medvedev. The topic of concern? Medvedev's recent creation of something that is (terrifyingly) called the "Commission to Counteract Attempts at Falsifying History to Damage the Interests of Russia."

What fresh hell is this? Tell me if I'm crazy, but that sounds far too close to an office designed to whitewash and censor history -- to politicize history.

More here at the Russian Front blog (great name, by the way), which observes that the the Commission is made of 28 members. Of those, only 3 have any claim to be historians. The rest are bureaucrats and Duma representatives. Uh-oh.

Here is the text of the AHA letter in PDF format. (Note too an interesting -- and true -- criticism of some of the wording in that letter. True dat, but I'll go out on a limb and say the AHA deserves some props for saying anything at all -- and therefore displaying some tiny hint of a moral backbone . . . or perhaps just a notochord, but better than nothing.)