Mason Gaffney wrote:
> I apologize to Yuri if this looks like a criticism aimed at him - that is
> not my intent at all. I just like to raise consciousness of semantic
issues.

This is precisely how I understood Professor Gaffney's comment.

> [...] I wonder if "vandalism" is the best word?

Again, this is not my characterization. I alluded to books which have
"revolutionary vandalism" in the title. See http://tinyurl.com/2fz9uz.

> I grant that burning old chains of title
> is a sort of vandalism per se, but I don't think that is the major point.

Probably it was a very big point to people like Edmund Burke or Alexander
Pushkin. I happen to have, at hand, a quotation from the latter:

"An enlightened Frenchman or Englishman values any single line written by an
ancient chronicler, with the mentioning of the name of his ancestor, an
honourable knight who fell in a certain battle or returned in a certain year
from Palestine, but the Kalmyks [Pushkin uses a handy ethnonym to denote
those who lack Burkean "prejudices"] have neither nobility nor history.
Savagery, baseness and ignorance have no reverence for the past, but only
grovelling before the present." (Translation is mine.)

Yuri Tulupenko