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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: frankw1900 who wrote (60129)	12/6/2002 6:07:41 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

As usual, Frank, you have parsed things very succinctly. In passing, Abrams appointment is playing very well in Israel, where it is seen as the Neocons winning out over the State Department people, to get to the path to partition that Sharon wants to use. Harris points out in his article that the failure of Marxism to handle the lack of impoverishment of the workers ("immiserized") by Capitalism, and therefore showed the failure of Marx's Socialism, was handled in 1953 by Baran and extended by Wallerstein in 1974, with the concept that Capitalism "Immiserized" third world countries. This concept had not existed before in Marxist thought. It was seized upon by Marxist Intellectuals, taught, and became common currency in Western Thought. It has now become one of those "Everybody Knows" ideas that is used as Gospel by Environmentalists, Anti-Globalists, and various types of people, right and left, who don't know any better. It is demonstrably wrong, but that never stops an idea that sounds good and makes the wanted point. In addition, it was grabbed with both hands by Third World Leaders of all types who needed a reason to explain the poverty in their Countries, and by Muslims who wanted an explanation for the failure of Islam to enrich their Societies. The problem we have with "Name Calling," that we dance around here, is caused, IMO, by the fact that there are people on the far, far, left who think "that America is an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity." They use the same criticism's of our present War efforts as our Liberal opposition, they just push it much further. I think Chomsky is a good example of this, John disagrees. In any case, I am not going to pretend that there are not American Citizens out there who don't like this country and want us to lose. Many of the younger anti-war people have been envious of the "Vietnam Left," who had an acceptable cause to fight for, and now are jumping in to make this the same kind of "Us vs Them" that the '60s was. This causes a lot of the pro-war people, who felt that the '60s protestors "Lost" Vietnam, to jump in and contest them. I could go on and on breaking out various groups of people who are "Pro" or "Anti" for other reasons. So we will go on "Labeling" positions on these issues as "Right" or "Left" because it works to do so. In order to get along here, we just have to be damn careful to stress that we are attacking the Ideas, not the Poster, and be polite about it.

To: frankw1900 who wrote (60129)	12/6/2002 11:00:56 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Pretty good post, Frank. The only comment I've got is that I didn't say Bill said anything. I was reacting to one of the points Harris tried to throw off which is that something called the American left, in his view, was opposed to the US "root and branch." That's not the case. One can argue about specific folk, Chomsky, whomsoever, they have such views. I haven't read Chomsky's political views in so long I would not be able to offer serious commentary and I suspect no one on the thread has done so either. Most treatments of Chomsky here are to simply throw out a quote and run for cover. But Harris made two very serious mistakes in his essay. First, the off hand way he treated serious intellectual positions--Marx, Chomsky, whomsoever. Marx, as you may know, wrote some of the most glowing prose ever written about the US. And Marx' views of the capitalism of the middle 19th century certainly should not be extrapolated directly into views of early 21st century US. Thus, in my view, he was simply using Marx and Chomsky as the usual straw folk caricatures. A terrible way to argue. But Harris is not alone in that. The second, and I think more dangerous, thing he did, was assert that those unresearched views he attributes to Marx and Chomsky, are in fact at the root of the views of the American left. Hardly. And, second point, subpoint A, by the way, those views are characterized as simply hating America. That's where I simply have to sigh and say, "give me a break." It's very easy to differentiate, even though Harris did not, between criticisms of the Bush foreign policy, of American foreign policy, of the American government, of American culture, of American business, of American society, whatever. My experience with constructing surveys taught me that respondents are genuinely serious about their responses and, if you give them categorically choices like the above, they will surprise you by being very precise and seemingly contradictory. But the latter is simply because all of us hold views that contradict one another. And we appear to be quite comfortable with that. Thus, to summarize, the strategy of folk like Harris to label anyone to the left of GWB as unpatriotic is yet one more blow to civil political discourse. So where on the globe do you parachute into SI from? Your posts are quite interesting and, as you can tell, get my fingers typing.