This passage stood out to me as a means of critiquing the source of the information that one gleans from different texts people read. Kimmerling's main argument here is that Morris has abandoned his "scholarly" responsibility and is now using his credibility as a historian to legitimize ethnic cleansing rather than to examine it critically which therefore directly addresses how academic authority shapes public discourse and political possibilities. This serves as a means of giving "permission" to an entire society by wrapping up extreme nationalism in scholarly respectability. This is why this passage captured my interest, in how this inverts to what historians should do. We expect them to help societies learn from past violence, not to study atrocities and conclude they should be repeated more thoroughly.