Last week Canon Press did a Friday afternoon news dump to announce the findings of their investigation into Doug Wilson’s most recent plagiarism eruption in A Justice Primer. The anonymous investigators for Canon Press have identified the real culprit as Rachel Miller — the person who caught the act of theft.
@mediaeval9 Your work here is above reproach. Well done!
— Valerie Hobbs (@vhobbs5) January 21, 2016
Canon Press’ about-face is not surprising, except that it took so long. There must have been a meeting with Poppa Wilson. I wonder how many flower pots he had to smash?
The retraction by Canon Press is what we have come to expect.
To use a Soviet-era analogy, in 1934 an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich (“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”) was well-received by both critics and the general public. It remained popular until Joseph Stalin attended it and disapproved. The newspaper “Pravda” then wrote an article denouncing the opera, and Soviet music critics who had praised it previously admitted they had failed to see its shortcomings.
This is how things work in the other Moscow. Canon Press releases a statement calling a spade a spade — “A Justice Primer” was plagiarism.
But Comrade Wilson disapproved. After meeting with their leader, Canon Press saw the shortcomings of their previous statement. And they had to admit that a spade was not a spade. It was a heart. Or a diamond. Or a club. Or whatever Doug Wilson said it was.
George Orwell captures the evil of totalitarian societies well in his novel “1984”:
–How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
–Four.
–And if the party says that it is not four but five — then how many?
Is Doug going to apologize for his word thievery? Some how I doubt it. In a decade and half of watching his antics I have yet to see, read, or hear about his sincere regrets or his willingness to take personal responsibility for any “mistakes” (which really should read willful acts of hurting others) that he has committed.
Rose Huskey