LBO-talk on various threads (Hitchens, Lacan) ---------- Louis Proyect, "Chomsky and His Critics" ------------Crisis for American Jews by Edward Said --------------- 200145 Chief Rabbi: "Israel Set on Tragic Path" + comments from this item repeated at: 200225 -------------- 6420 twincities.indy who are the antisemites -------------------- native american sorrows ------- aboriginal conception of soul --------------- preexistence amongst the amerindians --------------- Wilfried (socialfiction.org) Hou Je Bek writes: Generative Psychogeography as a tool in the construction of a hive mind. ------------- I was referring very broadly to a psychoanalytic understanding of a patient's development, taking into account the way their "real" relations within their family interwork with fantasy and constitutional factors, and giving emphasis to processes of projection and internalization. Kohlberg and Piaget intersect with this, in some ways easily, in some ways not so. My *impression* (it's been some time since I've thought about Lacan, and I fear I'm resorting to slogans) is that Lacan was pretty tone deaf regarding the tremendously nuanced ways that the idiosyncracies of development manifest themselves in the transference. This flowed out of his emphasis on the symbolic priority of the phallus; this prioritization was, in turn, fortified by the spare theoretical options left open by his recourse to Saussurian linguistics, which he took to require a sort of Uber signifier, a central source of meaning. In practice, this brought him down very heavily on the side of construing the analytic relationship in terms of the paternal transference. During this time English analysts such as Winnicott were reaffirming the importance of the mother's developmental role, and I think Lacan intended to challenge them, though his main critical target was ego psychology. Randy --------------- In for a penny, in for a pound. Here's something on Lacan that is hopefully more helpful than my gloss. It's from a Mitchell Wilson's review of "Jacques Lacan and Co, A History of Psychoanalysis in France," by Elisabeth Roudinesco; the review appeared in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1993. I'd preface it by saying that I've always been puzzled as to why Lacan, with all his theoretical overhead and clinical eccentricities, had so much appeal for radicals, as though psychoanalysis generally had little to offer. In reading the review selection, I'd stress - by avoiding working with resistances, Lacan misses a way of collaborating with the analysand. Resistance analysis doesn't have to imply declarations by the analyst that the analysand is "in a state of resistance to an interpretation." Rather, it can start from looking closely at how the analysand shifts about in their presentation (the resistance appears as a counterpressure, an inhibition, to their own expression of desire), drawing this to their attention, and being able to *show* them that these deflections have meaning. E.g., the analysand talks about their pride in something they've done, starts to trail off, and you move to pick up what was going on at the shift. These days some of the most interesting work in psychoanalysis, by writers such as Paul Gray, Marianne Goldthorpe, and Fred Busch, places emphasis on this "close process analysis." It's not a complete model of analysis, but it's a good way of setting up part of the working relationship with the analysand, you don't do a lot of razzle dazzle depth interpretation, leaving them in awe of you and broadly doubtful of their own abilities. - The idea of avoiding "triumphs of self-awareness" in favor of an appreciation of the decentered nature of subjectivity glides over major optional understandings of what self-awareness can involve. Leaving aside the question of whether accurate recovery of repressed memories is possible (it is, but it's hard to know when), "triumphs" can also include recovery of key organizing fantasies that involve reifications of the analysand. E.g. a patient suddenly recalls a fantasy played out with toy cars in which his younger brother was popping out in a James Bond ejector seat. The brother died shortly afterwards, and the patient thinks of himself as responsible, and the fantasy, in which he throws the brother out of the car, is a key organizer. It one-sidedly captures, "proves," that the patient is cruel. By bringing out this horrible "truth" about analysand in the session, its reifying potential lessens. I've never understood how talking about sliding signifiers adds much liberatory power to this conception of the therapeutic process. Attuning a subject to "the essential drift of language" seems disembodied, abstract, hyperexistentialist. Randy -------- review "Lacan based his ideas about the nature of the ego on Wallon's work with primates and their experience of confronting their image in a mirror. Lacan insisted that the ego in its essence is a paranoid structure based upon alienating identifications. The notion of autonomous ego functions, so precious to ego psychology, represents a denial of the narcissistic foundation of all perception and self-assessment. This is why Lacan distrusted academic psychology, ego psychology, and all other appeals to consciousness and cognition. The analyst must not engage the analysand at the Imaginary level, addressing his or her observing ego in the analysis of resistances. Nor should one rigidly interpret unconscious content. The analyst takes advantage of the polyvalent nature of important signifiers by highlighting them, thereby furthering the free associative process. The nonsensical aspect of signifiers (as purely formal sounds or letters) leads, through free association, to further sense. These signifiers have personal meaning to the analysand because they embody important memories and/or fantasies that have been repressed. Thus, the analyst never imposes content; the analysand discovers a kind of shifting content that is always conditioned by the essential drift of language. Analysis does not, Roudinesco concludes, "provoke any triumph of self awareness, any recovery of the unconscious by consciousness, or of the id by the ego. It uncovers, on the contrary, a process of decentering, in which the subject delves, through speech, into the loss of his mastery, that is, into his Oedipal state" (p. 255). Roudinesco's statement concerning the analytic process seems both true (the oedipal situation is, by definition, a losing battle) and unsatisfying (as, no doubt, it is intended to be). Lacanian theory is radically formalist, and radically dismissive of content. One is left believing that within the psychoanalytic process all the analyst can do is punctuate signifiers. Lacanians claim this is the only convincing epistemological (and ethical) position the analyst can take. By intervening at the level of the analysand's speech, the analyst is said to be addressing the subject's unconscious but not appealing to, or influencing, the subject's conscious assent (i.e., the analyst addresses the "subject," not the "ego"). The analyst never puts the patient in the alienating position of having to agree or disagree with an interpretation. However epistemologically pure this vision of analysis may be, we immediately encounter a number of logical impossibilities. What does it mean for the subject to elaborate his or her unconscious desire, if, 1) that desire is born of lack and insatiability (again, desire takes on a formal, nearly Imaginary, character), and 2) if the subject's ego is to be wholly mistrusted? What is the perceiving instrument of the analysand's unconscious desire if not some aspect of the analysand's consciousness? Further, why is the analyst's perception of important signifiers exempt from narcissistic influence [i.e. are we going overboard with the Phallus??] (and therefore epistemologically pure), while his or her interpretations of resistance or unconscious fantasy are unavoidably self-affirming and therefore alienating for the analysand? It is clear from the extended comments Roudinesco elicited from several of Lacan's analysands that they felt helped by him. Many felt understood, free to speak in a way they never had before. What is the nature of this help if the ego can only misuse it? Roudinesco attempts some answers to these questions, but she resorts, as most Lacanians do, to issues of ontology. Dialogue stops at this point, and one is left, like the alienated analysand, to agree or to disagree." --------------------- The suspicion about psychoanalysts that is currently fashionable creates an interesting dilemma for their biographers. The biographer of a great analyst is always tempted to prove something, to second-guess the dubious reader. Since psychoanalysis as a treatment is itself about the possibility and, indeed, the value of biographical truth--psychoanalysis as the biography that is supposed to improve the biography--we are likely to want something specific from this callow new genre. We want to know whether these people should have been trusted, and why and if we should go on trusting their so-called followers. In other words, biographies of psychoanalysts make us wonder what it is that makes a person trustworthy to us, and what, if anything, this has to do with the significance we give to their lives. By the conventional standards of psychoanalytic orthodoxy, Jacques Lacan (1900-1981) was a heretic. His notoriety was based on his shortening of the psychoanalytic session--sometimes to five minutes. His fame was based on his radical revisions of Freud and his insistence on the ways in which language and sexuality disrupt a life. Toward the end of his life, historian of psychoanalysis Elisabeth Roudinesco tells us, Lacan "usually saw his tailor, his pedicurist, and his barber while conducting his analyses." So what? There is a tension in any biography between what the subject wanted to be--who he or she was always wanting to become--and what the biographer wants the subject to be. In this sober, incisive, and riveting book, a well-documented history rather than a novelistic evocation of the man himself, Roudinesco cannot conceal her dismay that Lacan was not better behaved, more temperate in his appetites, less baroque in his provocations. She wants him to be more poignant and less boastful. How Those New College Savings Plans Rip You Off The Taco Bell Chihuahua Rises Again It's Time To Take That Kashmiri Vacation It was, of course, about excesses--of desire, of meaning, of emptiness--that Lacan wrote so eloquently. For Lacan, a person was by definition in excess of himself. He believed there was something fundamentally unintelligible about the vagaries of a life. But Roudinesco neither takes pleasure in nor makes intriguing sense of the fact that Lacan's theories "denounced the omnipotence of the ego in general, though he himself asserted the supremacy of his own." Lacan's writings are clearly, among other things, the confessions of a self-justifying megalomaniac--unusual in itself, because such people don't tend to explain themselves. But by the same token these are also the most inexhaustibly interesting and stylish psychoanalytic writings since Freud's. The Lacan characterized in this book as flamboyantly voracious for the Freudian triumvirate of women, money, and power is, as Roudinesco suggests, a Balzacian hero: a triumph of appetite over class. This is a story of a man with an amazing talent for finding what and whom he needed to make himself what he wanted to be, the greatest analyst since Freud. As always, from the evidence available, there is no obvious reason why this particular family should have produced that particular psychoanalyst. Lacan's father owned a very successful vinegar distillery; the family were respectable bourgeois Roman Catholics. Lacan's adored youngest brother became a priest, and his sister spent most of her married life in Indochina--so clearly some distance was needed from what was otherwise a typical French family of a certain type. Very early, as one might have expected, Lacan wanted to be top of the class, though in fact he wasn't an especially talented boy. He had a precocious intellectual curiosity. He tended to read, as Roudinesco remarks, rather than play Cowboys and Indians with the other boys. Of course, Lacan's life here is being read retrospectively, partly through the prism of his writings, whereas he was living it prospectively (we have to remember, given that Lacan's work was the theorizing of life stories, that he himself never knew what was going to happen next). If one of the dominant motifs of Lacan's early life is his contempt for his father, as it is in this account, then it can seem virtually inevitable that his early work was about the terrible cultural consequences of the "weakening of the father imago" (there were no strong fathers anymore), and that much of his later work should be obsessed by what he called "the-name-of-the-father" and the symbolic significance of the phallus. But psychoanalysis--and Lacan was particularly shrewd about this--has always been essentially a critique of straightforwardly casual accounts of how people become who they are. Indeed, what distinguishes psychoanalysis is that it can show us the ways in which a life is not merely the effect of its causes (biology, parents, etc.). As Lacan progresses through psychiatry, World War II (as a doctor in France), surrealism, psychoanalysis, structuralism--Lacan's life was apparently a magnet for everything intellectually interesting happening in France: He was, for example, Picasso's personal doctor--he seems to have had a knack for finding useful fathers. His friendships with the likes of writer and critic Georges Bataille, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and linguist Roman Jakobson were formative in ways that he either fails to note or misleadingly acknowledges. Here Roudinesco is rather limitingly censorious, wanting Lacan to pay his debts rather than being amazed by what he could make of what he found in the work of these remarkable people. Lacan was apparently always dismayed by how little his mentors were influenced by him. In this book, it is Lacan's craving for recognition--his almost demonic hunger to be unforgettable--that drives him; and that, every so often, is gently pathologized by Roudinesco. Roudinesco alludes to many mistresses, though always discreetly, in the abstract. Lacan's private life, however, was really a tale of two families. A first marriage, in his 20s, to Malou, the sister of a close friend, with whom he has three children; and then a second marriage to Sylvie, Bataille's ex-wife, with whom he has his adored daughter and acolyte Judith. The children of the first marriage are told nothing of the second marriage until they are young adults. So Lacan leads a bizarre double life. One of the most chilling scenes in the book is when Lacan, Sylvie, and Judith stop at a traffic light in Paris and see two of Lacan's other children. They approach the car, and Lacan drives off. Confronted with some of the most callous follies of this extraordinary life, the "so what?" question becomes more and more pressing. "An act always misunderstands itself," Lacan wrote. Indeed, all Lacan's writing is an elaborate meditation on the ways in which--and the structures by which--we can never be transparent to ourselves. Lacan's life was a struggle against the institutionalization of knowledge, and he flourished by creating havoc, both publicly (in a famous break with the International Psychoanalytic Institute) and privately (among some of his colleagues). He wanted psychoanalysis to be a science of self-deception, a proof against the old pieties. It would be strange to wish that he were more lovable, or honest, or familiar. His life is exemplary in the modern sense, not as a picture of virtue, or even as a struggle to live out some kind of personal truth, but rather as a question: How complicated can we allow people to be before we stop trusting them? Related on the Web The first chapter of Jacques Lacan is available courtesy of the New York Times Book Review. (Note: You must register with the New York Times Web site before you can get access to this page.) ----------------- [This Counterpunch version looks pretty much identical to AC's column in this week's Nation. This is looking like a record low for Ace, with the idiotic defense of McGaa, the use of the rather repulsive phrase "outside Jewish money," the equally repulsive comments on abortion and Malthusianism, and the patronizing remark addressed to Katha Pollitt. To conclude a column this awful with a swipe at Paul Krugman is pretty rich, since Krugman is doing far better work than Cockburn is these days.] Counterpunch - August 20, 2002 Splenetic Thoughts for Dog Days From Cynthia McKinney to Katha Pollitt, to the ILWU to Paul Krugman by Alexander Cockburn Let's start with Cynthia McKinney, who at time of writing is fighting for political survival in a too-close-to-call Democratic primary in Georgia. Don't you think that if Arab-American groups or African-American groups targeted an incumbent white liberal, maybe Jewish, congressperson, and shipped in money by the truckload to oust the incumbent, the rafters would shake with bellows of outrage. Yet when a torrent of money from out of state American Jewish organizations smashed Earl Hilliard, first elected black congressperson in Alabama since Reconstruction, you could have heard a mouse cough. Hilliard had made the fatal error of calling for some measure of even-handedness in the Middle East. So he was targeted by AIPAC and the others. Down he went, defeated in the Democratic primary by Artur Davis, a black lawyer who obediently sang for his supper of the topic of Israel. At that particular moment the liberal watchdogs were barking furiously in an entirely different direction. Ed McGaa, a Green candidate, has had the effrontery to run in Minnesota for Wellstone's senate seat. Such an uproar! Howls of fury from Mark Cooper and Harold Meyerson, lashing McGaa for his presumption. Even a pompous open letter from progressive organizer Steve Cobble hassling the Minnesota Greens for endangering St Paul. Any of these guys think of writing to Artur Davis, or to Majette, telling them to back off, or to denounce them as catspaws of groups backing Sharon's terror against Palestinians? Only Cobble. Then it was McKinney's turn. A terrific liberal black congresswoman. Like Hilliard she wasn't cowed by the Israel right-or-wrong lobby and called for real debate on the Middle East. And she called for a real examination of the lead-up to 9/11. So the sky has fallen in on her. Torrents of American Jewish money shower her opponent, a black woman judge called Majette. Buckets of sewage are poured over McKinney's head in the Washington Post and the Atlanta Constitution. Here's how it worked. McKinney sees what happened to Hilliard, and that American Jewish money is pumping up Majette's challenge. So she goes to Arab-American groups to try to raise money to fight back. This allows Tom Edsall to attack her in the Post as being in receipt of money from pro-terror Muslims. Lots of nasty looking Arab/Muslim names suddenly fill Edsall's stories. Now just suppose someone started looking at names in the pro-Israel groups funding Majette who by mid-August had raised twice as much money as McKinney. Aren't they aren't supporting and helping fund terror that has US-made F-16s machine-gunning kids in Gaza? What's the game here? It's the reiteration of the same message delivered to politicians down the years, as when Senator Charles Percy went down. Put your head over the parapet on the topic of Israel and the Palestinians and we'll blow it off. Oh, and when furious blacks start denouncing the role of outside Jewish money in the onslaughts on Hilliard and McKinney, what then? There'll be intricate articles with intricate exit poll calculations promoting the conclusion that the money from the Jewish groups "wasn't a factor". Then there'll be an avalanche of hysterical columns about the ever-present menace of black anti-Semitism. Just you wait. It's a closed system. Footnote: Organizer Steve Cobble, did the right thing, fundraising and writing pro-McKinney material for telephone campaigns to get out McKinney voters, and urging the Jacksons, father and son, to campaign for the beleaguered Congresswoman. Next splenetic thought Yes, Katha Pollitt, you did raise a little stink in The Nation re McKinney, in overly decorous but still commendable terms, which reminds me, here's what I wrote to a fellow angered over a piece by Ellen Johnson we'd run in CounterPunch, criticizing you for saying Dennis Kucinich's position against abortion rendered him ineligible as the progressives' 2002-champion. "Hi Matt, I'm forwarding your note to Ellen, and she may drop you a line, but allow me to say that I think your reaction is too hasty. Ellen raised some very serious points about the monoptic way NOW and leading feminists address the abortion issue. I think it is right to emphasize that we should battle for social conditions where abortion ceases to be regarded by many progressives as a prime indicator of freedom and liberation for women. "Surely you cannot regard the killing of fetuses as somehow, an intrinsically "good thing". The real friends of abortion are the Malthusians who want to rid the world as much as possible of the "over-breeding" and disruptive poor, particularly minorities. Just the other day in New York I listened with some astonishment as two progressive lesbians who had just had an unsuccessful effort with a turkey baster to get one partner pregnant, cheering the news that Mayor Blumberg has instructed that New York doctors (I guess somehow those attached to the city payroll, I'm not sure of the details) b e trained in aborting fetuses. Would you see anything sinister or out of whack about that? "More generally, I think the liberal women's groups gave Clinton the pass on savage assaults on the poor because the Clintons unrelentingly preached commitment to abortion. In sum, we ran the piece because we think it is high time to get beyond bunker liberalism, where progressives huddle in the foxhole, holding onto "choice" as their bottom-line issue, with a sideline in telling black teen moms that they are socially irresponsible. Best Alex Cockburn" More spleen The ILWU? That's the West Coast Longshoremen. Their contract expired at the end of June. The contract is being renewed on a daily basis . The employers are playing very tough, well aware that the Bush high command has told the ILWU leaders that Bush would invoke Taft Hartley, bring in troops if necessary, destroy the ILWU as a bargaining agent for the whole West Coat. Separately Tom Ridge, calling in his capacity as chief of Homeland Security has done some heavy breathing in the ear of ILWU leaders about the inadvisability of a strike at this time. The ILWU's coastwide contract was won in the 1934 strike, along with the hiring hall, which replaced the old shape-up system where the boss could keep out organizers and anyone liable to cause trouble. These are bedrock issues for which strikers fought and died in 1934, in San Francisco and in Seattle. The west coast Longshoremen stand as a beacon of what union organizing can do. Of course the Bush White House yearns to destroy it, maybe using the War on Terror as half a pretext. If ever there was time for solidarity, this is it. Final splenetic thought on Paul Krugman Krugman? He has just conceded that maybe neo-liberal policies haven't worked too well in Latin America. Look it up. It's in his column for August 9, "The Lost Continent". He spent 184 words on the matter. "Why hasn't reform worked as promised? That's a difficult and disturbing question." Well, gee Paul, since you constitute the entirety of the Democratic Party's opposition to the Bush administration I know you're as busy as hell. But since you and your crowd supervised a good deal of the economic destruction of Latin America, and your economic faction offered all the basic rationales for that devastation, I sure hope you return to the problem. Maybe you won't be so snooty about the opponents of "free trade" and all that jazz. Maybe even have a quiet word with Friedman. -------------------- >What would be a better phrase? Name the contributors and institutions instead of using a phrase rich with racist associations that invokes images of a vast Jewish conspiracy, outsiderhood, great riches, etc. Doug ------------------ On this one, I think you are being a little to hypersensitive....however, this the way the zionist lobby plays ball -- hard! It is not a "conspiracy," it is the standard mode of operations. Look, "outside right-wing interests" find their way to switchboards and email addresses all over the country when whipped into a frenzy by Rush and the 700 Club. In truth, it is the very best AND the very worst of democracy. Participation is the life blood of a vibrant democracy -- whether it comes from an active "jewish lobby" an active "christian lobby" or or any other active lobby. By the same token, one should not get too stressed when those people or constituencies are called out. As for the "worst," all too often, the pure of heart have no scrupples because they are fighting the "good fight." This is true of the jewish lobby, the far-right christian lobby, the far lefters out there, etc. What worries you Doug, as I see it, is the pattern that seems to be emerging from AC on this and other issues. In this instance and in isolation, however, I do not think your point is well-taken. I remain agnostic as to your broader criticism of AC. ----------------- Remember, this came from the typing fingers of the same guy who complained recently that you can't point out that the New York Times is owned by Jews without being take for Goebbels. Indeed. But, whatever AC's faults, insentitivity to language isn't one of them. He wrote the phrase "outside Jewish money" knowing exactly what its connotations were and how they would be taken by lots of Nation readers. In fact, I'm pretty certain that annoying Nation readers was one of his main intentions with that column. Which isn't always a bad thing, but in this case he's writing just the critique that the pro-Israel lobby would want - one that evokes anti-Semitism. That sort of approach won't win any converts. What's the point of writing political columns? To convince readers, or at least make them think, or amuse yourself and alienate large numbers of people? Targeting McKinney was awful. But you can make that point without sounding like you're rewriting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And, as is always the case when the Jewish thing is foregrounded, U.S. strategic interests get effaced. Another piece just up at counterpunch.org/neumann0820.html makes that argument explicitly - that Israel doesn't serve U.S. strategic interests, and that the U.S. is serving instead as a patsy for the Zionists. This is by the same guy, Michael Neumann - who is related to the author of Behemoth, by the way - who announced recently that he wanted to have some fun with anti-Semitism. And what about a phrase like "killing fetuses"? No doubt that was chosen to annoy Nation readers as well, but it also suggests a creepy affinity with pro-lifers. Why is it ok to compromise on a fundamental principle, the right to abortion, to make friends among the populist masses? Don't working class women need abortions too? Doug ------------ Two things: (1) the "money" was from "outside" the state and from "jewish" sources. Your repsonse to AC is muted compared to the crap McKinney took for her "outside Arab money." So, one point AC could be making, aside from just stirring the bees, is that there is a menacing double standard in American treatment of Israeli-jewish issues and Arab-Islamic issues. Look at Billy Grahams son....shit if you substituted jewish for islamic, the New York press would have destroyed him.....(we can discuss NYC as the epicenter for this hyper-senstitivity to antisemitism later). (2) as for why use the language, for the reason we are not talking about your writing or Max's or even Brad's (lord knows his views piss off a lot of people here): sex sells...or least "sexy" writing sells. ----------------- So? "They did it too" isn't much of a defense, unless you're about 5 years old and dealing with your kindergarten teacher. And the crap she took was vile poisonous crap and I hate it. Doug ----------- I dont understand why you get quite so worked up about this. I am of Jewish origin and really dont see why every statement about the Jews must be examined in this way when almost no effort is ever expended on anti-Arab or Muslim sentiment which isnt even debatable but rather plainly stated. I certainly didnt take the phrase to be racist. I dont think the question is whether "they did it too" but where you spend your resources. Jews in America get a free pass as compared to other minorities. Many of the people doing the funding and scare mongering were Jews or Jewish (does that phrase make a difference?) -why cant one say that? Why cant one note the way that Tom Friedman, Bob Scheer and Richard Cohen just might be granted opportunities that Arab Americans are not (without even comparing the ADC to AIPAC etc)? It is not of course simple a issue of being Jewish which results in American policy in the gov. and the NYT but to deny it a role seems starnge. -------- No effort expended by whom? Not me, not most members of this list, and certainly not AC. Why get worked up? For the thirteenth time: 1) the phrasing itself is ugly and redolent of a long tradition of bigotry, 2) it alienates potential supporters, 3) it could attract some of the wrong people, 4) it stokes black-Jewish tensions, 5) it promotes the notion that the U.S. is manipulated by Israel, thereby obscuring U.S. imperial interests (which might appeal to some reactionary American nationalists, who like to believe in our superior virtue). But there were several things I objected to besides this particular phrase - like the odious use of "killing fetuses." Taken all together, along with routine praise for Ron Paul and suchlike, and it suggests a rightward march by the guy who used to be the best left polemicist in the U.S. Doug ---------------------- I agree the phrasing has an odor about it. I've smelled worse (including from Ace). We seem to be ignoring that on the purely analytical side, Cynthia was not merely attacked by some Jews. She was targeted by the DLC, from whose innards her opponent sprang, and by the Right, which orchestrated a huge crossover vote. The diversity of opposition ought to discount somewhat further, though not erase, the 'jewish' role. mbs --------------------- dave dorkin: Are you saying that jews in the US are aggrieved? If arabs, moslims and blacks received one thousandth of the attention jews' grievances receive and the attention paid to them in the media i think i would faint. --------------- Is there some law, like the conservation of hatred, that says you can't object to slurs against both Arabs and Jews? That you have to pick one or the other? Doug ----what is the slur exactly? I am saying that perhaps anything is a potential slur for many where some jews are concerned and almost nothing seems to be for other groups, not that one must fight fire with fire. Arabs would be very lucky if they were "insulted" by phrases such as those in AC's article when they must deal with far worse with no comment from most. This doesnt mean I like slurs or engage in them-but where was the slur? To spend so much of one's time on the "jewish question" with a microscope given this seems a bit much. As it happens, I only have so much time and I generally spend it on the underdog. I am Jewish and was not offended and wonder why you were. --- budge: that was my point. jesse jackson took a HUGE amount of shit (and people like rush limbaugh are still flogging that horse today) for his unfortunate comment in, what 1988? but i basically agree with doug, though, AC choses his language very carefully and he intends to inflame. personally, i don't think he gives a shit about persuading anybody about anything -- he just likes to stir things up. -- ----- Maybe AC does do this quite a bit but as another writer who just had her book reviewed in the Nation explained the use of "cripple" instead of "disabled" to me -- the reviewer used cripple for shock value. This is for Nation readers, a kind of way to make the story more controversial, to draw in a reader. So what does that say about what the media demands from people who write for them? Marta ------ I can speak from experience that the Nation editors don't encourage the use of shocking language. Columnists are allowed lots of freedom, but elsewhere, rude speech is not welcomed. Doug ---------------- Who writes the headlines? The review I'm on about is "Handicapping the Crippled." (Aug. 19) So if the Nation editors don't write the headlines and the reviewer does, the Nation has chosen a reviewer who wants to shock. What is the difference? Nevermind about the rest of the review which by stating that "crippled" is preferred over "disabled" invites the world to call us cripples! While we may call ourselves crips, cripples, gimps or people who are all buggered up (PABU), whatever, within our own circles these words are not words for the nondisabled population to use. These words can help build our community but it is still pejorative for others to call us cripples. The writer knows this. Therefore he and the Nation have used a shock approach. There are other problems too with this review but I'll spare you the details.. This is not so much about PC language though as it is about concepts. Negative or positive doesn't really matter. What is important is to say what disability is. Disability is a social experience which arises from the specific ways in which society organizes its fundamental activities. Work, transportation, leisure, education, domestic life disable persons when they are not accessible. We are "disabled" or not by the way a society is organized. To revert to using "cripples" would be to individualize the experience and to base it on function rather than social relations. That is my quibble with the Nation. It has never gotten it. The Nation is a publication which has ignored disability in its pages for the most part. In this regard the Congress is way ahead of the "vanguard" intellectuals of the Nation. The Congress said in the preamble to the ADA -disabled persons are an insular minority which has suffered egregious discrimination at the hands of the majority way back in 1990. Please correct me if I am wrong but I've not seen any radical political work written in the pages of the Nation on disablement. Race? plenty. Gender? plenty. Disablement? Next to nothing and badly done when done. marta --------- mipu: http://www.goodbyecynthia.com/contributions.htm ----------- This issue is tied to our discussion a few days back about the percentages of participation necessary for effective activism. Look that the power wielded by jews generally, and the Orthodox jewish community in paricular in New York. They reliably vote. They vote. And they give money. Thus, despite the fact that they are less than 50% of the electorate, they can control the news cycle on a given issue and cause headaches for poitential candidates. The NYT is sensitive to tghis because ..... it is a business. Thus, not unlike CNN saying it self censored to not offend the American populace, the NYT (and the other papers as well, if not even more so) goes out of its way not toffend this paper reading clique. Now, given that everyone admits that NYC is the center of the universe (sarcasm and hyperbole alert), this "sensitivity" makes its way into the reast of the media stream. Note: I have never used the word conspiracy; never used the word abal or any such thing. This is not part of some Zionist plot. rather, it is evidence of how one group effectively turns its electoral reliabiltiy into political and cultural power. Gay and lesbian have learned this lesson as well...voting and money make the world go round. Cultural acceptance comes later. ---------- Yoshie: The gap between "pro-Israel" contributions and "pro-Arab" ones is indeed large: ***** PRESS CLIPS A look at the money-in-politics angle of some of this week's top news stories. By Vikki Kratz August 15, 2002 ...With only a week left until Georgia's Democratic primary, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution reports that challenger Denise Majette has raised more money than incumbent Rep. Cynthia McKinney. Majette now has more than $1 million, while McKinney has raised about $600,000. Most of Majette's financial support is coming from out-of-state donors, however. The Friends of Israel PAC gave Majette a $5,000 contribution earlier this month, and Majette recently attended a fundraiser in New York City. Many of Majette's Jewish supporters say they are turned off by McKinney's unwavering support for Palestine. The Washington Post reports that McKinney has received contributions from at least 18 donors who are under investigation by the FBI for their ties to Muslim foundations. McKinney has said that all the donations she's received were legal. Earlier this year, the Center released a report on pro-Israel and pro-Arab giving that found pro-Israel donors gave substantially more. Since 1989, pro-Israel interests have given $41.3 million in individual, PAC and soft money contributions. Two-thirds of the money went to Democrats. Pro-Arab groups have given just under $300,000 since 1989, 68 percent to Democrats. capitaleye.org/inside.asp?ID=37 ***** "Pro-Israel" voters and donors aren't necessarily Jewish, though. At the national level, the majority of them must be non-Jewish (though I have yet to dig up empirical evidence for my claim here). At 12:20 PM -0400 8/21/02, Doug Henwood wrote: >Cian wrote: > >>Doug Henwood said >> >...the use of the rather repulsive phrase "outside Jewish money," >> >>What would be a better phrase? > >Name the contributors and institutions instead of using a phrase >rich with racist associations that invokes images of a vast Jewish >conspiracy, outsiderhood, great riches, etc. > >Doug According to the Federal Election Commission, Denise L. Majette received $774,907 from 1083 individuals, (the contributors' names are available at x), and $64,400 from "Non-Party (e.g. PACs) or Other Committees": ***** Presented by the Federal Election Commission Committees Who Gave To This Candidate MAJETTE, DENISE L THE CANDIDATE MAJETTE FOR CONGRESS INC PRINCIPAL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE OF THE CANDIDATE Contributor's Name Amount American Dental PAC 3000.00 Americans for Good Government Inc 1000.00 Citizens Organized PAC 06/04/2002 750.00 Citizens Organized PAC 07/16/2002 4000.00 Equifax PAC 1000.00 Grand Canyon Caucus 1000.00 Hudson Valley PAC 5000.00 Independent Insurance Agents of America PAC (INSURPAC) 1000.00 International Paper PAC 1000.00 Joint Action Committee for Political Affairs 500.00 The Loose Group 06/28/2002 5000.00 The Loose Group 07/09/2002 -5000.00 The Loose Group 07/10/2002 5000.00 Zell Bryan Miller via Zell Miller for Senate Inc 1000.00 MOPAC 2000.00 Southern Company Employees PAC 1000.00 Suntrust Bank Good Government Group-Georgia 1000.00 Wachovia Corporation Employees Good Government Federal Fund I 200.00 x* You can't very well list the names of all 1083 individuals, and, with the exception of some, the PAC names aren't descriptive of their political objectives and/or the social bases of their respective contributors. While I very much agree with Doug on his criticism of Cockburn, especially on the abortion issue, I'm not sure how you can get around mentioning ethnic identities if what you want to analyze sociologically is whether there is any ethnic pattern in campaign contribution and what it may mean if there is any. -- --------- I've gone around on this a few times. We only get tempted to look at Majette's donors because somebody else did it to CMK. I started to do this and realized, hey, what am I looking for? Goldsteins? This is b.s. We are becoming what we're criticizing. "Moe Sad"? Anything incriminating is going to be concealed. Let's not go all Al Gore and blame outside forces. CM should have disavowed her Daddy's odious statements; she should have asked Louis F. to go home. She should not have fudged her endorsements. She should have returned the contributions from Alamoudi (the Hamas 'moderate') and, as a practical matter, Sami 'Death to Israel' Arian. This is just ABC politics. No compromise of principle is involved. Most important, she should not have succumbed to conspiracism, even for a second. If you are progressive, in politics a second can kill you. max ------------------ Very true. I found myself ethnic-profiling the names of the contributors to Majette (for I thought that her backers might be mainly out-of-state and indeed "pro-Israel" but might not be predominantly Jewish as alleged), which I wouldn't have done but for the controversy. To be fair to Cockburn, the same thought would have occurred to me without his article posted here, for others -- corporate media as well as what's circulated on the Net -- had already made an issue of it (with a less flamboyantly inflammatory language, to be sure), beginning with Earl Hilliard's campaign. Is there any way we can discuss this sensibly, without stirring ethnic hatred? Because all Americans who read newspapers -- Jews, Arabs, and blacks included -- must be by now thinking similar thoughts, whether or not they mention them in public.... ------- At 9:48 PM -0400 8/21/02, Max B. Sawicky wrote: >Let's not go all Al Gore and blame outside forces. >CM should have disavowed her Daddy's odious >statements; she should have asked Louis F. to go home. >She should not have fudged her endorsements. She should >have returned the contributions from Alamoudi (the Hamas >'moderate') and, as a practical matter, Sami 'Death to >Israel' Arian. This is just ABC politics. No compromise >of principle is involved. Most important, she should not >have succumbed to conspiracism, even for a second. >If you are progressive, in politics a second can kill you. ---------- I agree with you on all scores, and Cockburn should have discussed them, too, if he wanted to really analyze McKinney's demise. Progressive candidates can't expect to win by out-fundraising the opposition anyway besides. On the other hand, unreasonable demands that go way beyond the ABC of electoral politics could be placed on progressive candidates, pressuring them to reject all Arab-American contributions for instance: ***** James J. Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, said he feared a return to the 1980's, when Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988, rejected his group's endorsement, and Mayor David Dinkins of New York refused to meet with him, concerned about angering Jewish constituents. "This painting of Arab-American donors and political participants as being terrorists in disguise is a garish and grotesque caricature," Mr. Zogby said. "This is not about three or four donors, this is about widely targeted politics of exclusion that could end up in the disenfranchising of the entire Arab and Muslim American community."nyt** Comparable flaks would never materialize if candidates met and received support from right-wingers who supported settlements and wished to see all Arabs expelled from the occupied territories, even if they flat out said so in public. Actually, some politicians are already saying that -- "I happen to believe the Palestinians should leave" (Dick Armey) -- without anything untoward happening to them. ----------- And Rummy recently defended Israel's taking of the occupied territories - and no outside Jewish money was involved at all. Nothing untoward is happening to him either, because, Michael Neumann to the contrary, the Bush gang thinks that Israel is a fine ally. Doug ------------- Doug, Rummy's point was even more untoward than that - he said they were not occupied territories because Israel won them fair and square. SO, here is an instance when the U.S. is not simply unilateralists vis-a-vis the rest of the world, but when the U.S. rejects 30 years of its own diplomacy.... Ultimately, what does this mean to you fair reader? It means that when we "conquer" Iraq, it will be U.S. property ripe for settlement. ------------- As I have already argued here some time ago, I think that the US government would have taken the same policy toward Israel and the Middle East even if there had not been a single Jew in the USA, for the policy was mainly dictated first by the rising American empire's competition with the declining European empires and later by Cold-War anticommunism. Besides, foreign policy had become a domain reserved for the executive branch, not the legislature, a long time ago. However, the message that Americans -- be they voters or career politicians, Jews, Arabs, or blacks -- are sure to get out of the Hilliard/Davis & McKinney/Majette races is a different one, concerning domestic political behaviors: those who speak out against Israel will get punished, and a number of Jews, among other supporters of Israel, will make individual and collective contributions -- the contributions that may be decisive -- to that end. That will be the message spread in public, whether or not we like it, even if Cockburn had not written his piece (his audience is limited anyway). Why? Because electoral politics is set up in such a way that the critical margin of victory may be provided by well-funded and well-organized minority interest groups, whether they are pro-Israel PACs, anti-abortion Christian fundamentalist lobbies, or whatever. -- --------------- I think we could all agree that it would have been politically expedient for CM to do so. A point to be made however is that it is odd to jump all over her for not doing so when you look at who gets what money from whom and does what in general, apart from CM and odder still to say that AC wrote an anti-semitic tract. The fact that this is one of the only things that will stir up supposedly liberal Jewish voters means that it is long past time to play softball with people whose own errors are rarely questioned. I imagine that there isnt enough time in the day for most people to work on the palestinian side of things and I for one am far more easily convinced and bothered by Richard Cohen or Tom Friedman's anti-arab bias (and they are considered liberals for sure) and it is certainly far more unquestioned without mentioning Armey's plan for "removing" Palestinians en masse. Why is attacking AC then any different from AC attacking Wellstone etc? ----------------- Hey Doug, don't go soft! I have very little problem with this column. I disagree with him about the McGaa fiasco, but a hard-ass third party commitment reflected in running against Wellstone is not disreputable. If you don't like the expression "outside Jewish money," how better would one characterize the line-up of donors in that race? The weakness in the AC column is the failure to acknowledge CM's errors, thereby understating the political impact of outside criticism, over and above mere money. She gave them a sword, and now it's sticking in her ass. I also agree with him about my pal Kucinich. If AC is going to be a populist, switching from the survivalists out in the woods to DK is a distinct improvement. mbs --------------- I agree with Max but think that the Greens in Minnesota are following a defensible course. But then I may be prejudiced. === C. G. Estabrook Green Party Candidate for US House of Representatives 15th Illinois Congressional District carlforcongress.org --------- Your former presidential and vice presidential candidates, Nader and LaDuke, don't agree. So why are you supporting a pro-military guy? Doug ---------- Ralph said he'd appear at a news conference with Wellstone, to promote corporate reforms. That would be good thing for Wellstone (who supported Gore, as did McGaa) to do. I said that I thought the Greens in Minnesota were following a defensible course: I meant (a) they ran an open nominating process, and (b) Wellstone (supporter of, e.g., the Patriot Act) is surely open to criticism. Here's Cockburn on (a): "...liberals are now screaming about "the spoiler," who takes the form of Ed McGaa, a Sioux born on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a Marine Corps vet of the wars in both Korea and Vietnam, an attorney and author of numerous books on Native American religion. The Minnesota Green Party picked him as its candidate on May 18 at a convention of some 600, a lively affair in which real politics actually took place in the form of debates, resolutions, nomination fights and the kindred impedimenta of democracy." And on (b): "...Steve Perry, a journalist with a truly Minnesotan regard for gentility and good manners, wrote in Mother Jones last year the following bleak assessment: '10 years after he took his Senate seat, Wellstone has disappeared from the national consciousness. He never emerged as the left's national spokesman for reforms in health care, campaign finance, or anything else.' "Early on, Wellstone took a dive on the biggest organizing issue for reformers in 1993. He abandoned his support for single-payer health insurance in the face of blandishments from Hillary Clinton. No need to go overboard here. As with all liberal senators, Wellstone has had some lousy votes (yes to an early crime bill, no on recognition of Vietnam) and some honorable ones. He denounced the Gulf War in 1991 but in 2001 endorsed Ashcroft's war on terror, when Russell Feingold was the only senator to vote no. Wellstone has been good on Colombia but, in common with ninety-eight other senators, craven on Israel. (McGaa has spoken up for justice for Palestinians and is now being denounced as an anti-Semite for his pains. Imagine, a Sioux having the nerve to find something in common with Palestinians!) "So one can dig and delve in Wellstone's senatorial career across twelve years and find grounds for reproach and applause, but one thing is plain enough; he's not shifted the political idiom one centimeter to the left, even within his own party, let alone on the overall national stage. In the Clinton years, when he could have tried to build a national coalition against the policies of the Democratic Leadership Council, he mostly opted for a compliant insider role... "The suggestion that progressive politics will now stand or fall in sync with Wellstone's future is offensive. Suppose he were to lose of his own accord, without a Green Party third candidate? Would it then be appropriate to sound the death knell of progressive politics in America? Of course not. Even the most ardent Wellstone supporters acknowledge that Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party is moribund. Hence Ventura's triumph. The Greens have every right to hold Wellstone accountable, and if they have the capacity to send him into retirement, then it will be a verdict on Wellstone's failures rather than some supposed Green irresponsibility." --------------- You mean the guy that in a recent Nation column referred to Ron Paul as "the great Texas libertarian"? That AC? You think is giving up the rightwing nutballs? Don't count on it. ----------------- Ron Paul is "great" (and he'd no doubt endorse calling abortion "killing fetuses"). Wellstone is bad, though probably not as bad as Sanders. That clarifies things, right? Doug --------------- Frankly, much as I usually disagree with Cockburn these days, I agree with Max that this column is mostly on the money. Outside Jewish money DID target two black incumbents and unseat them, something liberals normally concerned about money influence should be beating the outrage drum over. And as a lefty pissed off by stupid divisive Green attacks on Wellstone from the left, I'm equally pissed off at stupid divisive attacks on McKinney and Hilliard by the Jewish pro-Israel right. So Cockburn's equivalency argument is on the money (even if he doesn't practice it himself in reverse). And frankly on the abortion issue, I spent too much time fundraising from Planned Parenthood members on the phone not to recognize that the euthanasia strain of pro-choice politics and funding is very real. I don't agree with the "seamless garment" leftwing Catholicism of David Bonior and Dennis Kusinich, but it serves more respect on its own terms than many folks on the left give it. -- Nathan Newman -------------- > "In the era between the Great Depression and Roe v Wade a significant number of activists, intellectuals, academics, and professionals viewed eugenics, euthanasia, and birth control as kindred causes." Ian Dowbiggen, "A Rational Coalition": Eugenics, Euthanasia, and Birth Control in America, 1930-1970. Dowbiggin teaches history at the University of Prince Edward Island. These intellectuals, says Dowbiggen, were concerned with the "responsible care of human life" and disabled persons as well as elderly persons were targets of this "care." I am certain not one damn one of them actually considered the oppression of their subjects. Marta -- From: Michael Pugliese (debsian@pacbell.net) Date: Thu Aug 22 2002 - 18:20:45 EDT Next message: Doug Henwood: "abortion and eugenics" Previous message: Chip Berlet: "RE: McQuinn responds to smears - Q1" Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ] ------------ ########### FEATURE: HOFFMAN ANSWERS HITCHENS THE HOFFMAN WIRE Dedicated to Freedom of the Press, Investigative Reporting and Revisionist History Michael A. Hoffman II, Editor http://www.hoffman-info.com/news.html ********** August 20, 2002 Michael A. Hoffman II Answers Christopher Hitchens: Punks of ZOG: 2002 http://www.hoffman-info.com/wire2.html The preceding is a link to a reply to a Hitchens column about Hoffman titled, "Jewish Power, Jewish Peril," published in the current, September, 2002 issue of "Vanity Fair" magazine (subscriberdirect.com/vf/0209/toc.cfm) # ## FEATURE: HITCHENS ON HIS ETHNICITY forward.com/issues/2001/01.01.26/arts1.html The Part-Jewish Question: Double the Pleasure or Twice the Pain? Of 'Semi-Semites' and Those Who Fear Them Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots By Barbara Kessel Brandeis University, 127 pages, $19.95. By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS ---------------- The Part-Jewish Question: Double the Pleasure or Twice the Pain? Of 'Semi-Semites' and Those Who Fear Them ------------ Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots By Barbara Kessel Brandeis University, 127 pages, $19.95. -------- By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS According to the laws of Moses, the Law of Return, Israel's civil code and the Nuremburg Laws, I am a Jew. This definition, however, is both too exhaustive and not exhaustive enough. I have many friends who, unlike me, were raised in Jewish homes, but who only derive the Mosaic from the paternal side; this would exclude them from the tribe of Moses according to Israel's civil code (absent the conversion of the mother) but would not exempt them from the vengeance of the Nuremburg code. I'm fairly globalized: My father was Anglo-Celtic; my first wife is Greek; my second wife's family came from Odessa or thereabouts, and I have a godchild in Zimbabwe. In practical terms, you are reading a guide for the perplexed, written by an anti-Zionist atheist of whose progeny one is wholly Jewish while two are Anglo-Cypriot. I had no say in the making of these rules and know of no rational way to observe them. Recent advances in DNA testing have either simplified or complicated the claims of holy books and founding texts. A riveting recent essay in Commentary described the results of a match-up between the genetic database of the Kohanim — those whose Jewish ancestry is supposedly the strongest and best-attested — and that of a "lost tribe" in Namibia that has long claimed Jewish descent. The fit was amazingly close. So it is with other groups in the Asian diaspora, many of whose folk stories had been thought to be merely legendary. It also turns out that there is a close DNA affinity between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs; a finding that, if it does not confirm Freud's weird speculations in "Moses and Monotheism," at least reinforces his theory of the narcissism of the small difference. How long before we can codify Khazar DNA and find out if Koestler was right or if the Ashkenazim have any genetic claim to Gaza? (The learned author of the Commentary article, eventually concluded that enough was enough already, and that better uses could be found for the research money than the infinite theoretical expansion of the prolific seed of Abraham.) My maternal grandmother was the same way. Born of a Blumenthal-Levin union that originated in a departure from Breslau (now Wroclaw) to Liverpool in the late 19th century, she wanted her first grandson to be an assimilated English gentleman. (You may judge for yourself how well this aspiration succeeded). But she didn't want the story to end with her, either, and when my mother had died and my brother had chosen a Jewish bride and my father was dying, she came right out with it. "I was so happy," said this old lady of no great education or, I regret to say, intuitive intelligence, "so happy to see you boys both had the Jewish brains." And now I have a pile of old German- and Polish-Jewish birth and marriage certificates in a drawer (plus my own marriage certificate from the great Rabbi Bob Goldburg, who had also officiated at Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe's wedding) and, if I'm traveling in some near-"Judenrein" spot such as Istanbul or Asmara or Sarajevo or Salonika or Damascus, I do what I never normally do and pay a visit to the temple. What am I looking for? That is the question which both these books attempt to answer. "The Half-Jewish Book" is in one way relentlessly joking and upbeat and show-business-minded — the perfect Chanukah stocking-stuffer. Maybe you knew, but I thought "Who Knew?" as the parade of semi-Semitic celebrities went by. Gwyneth Paltrow? (I know one should always mentally replace the "w" with the "v" in this culture, but still.) Winona LaDuke? (She "went with" her Native American paternal side.) Between all the lines, however, is a serious argument that partial or quasi-Jewishness is both inevitable and beneficial, and that those who fret about dilution or "marrying out" are either too pessimistic or too tribal, or both. Interest declared: The authors cite with approbation my essay "On Not Knowing the Half of It," adding that my book title "Prepared for the Worst" is "distinctly Jewish-sounding," a compliment I think it would be churlish to decline. Here's what we would all like to know about the Lemba — which is the name of that lost tribe in Namibia — but are slightly reluctant to ask. Did members of the Lemba minority furnish the majority of Southwest Africa's political revolutionaries, freelance intellectuals, doctors, comedians, union-organizers and lawyers? (Also, how did they fare when the region was under the control of German colonialists and ethnologists?) Or did the Lemba keep within their ghetto walls, muttering about the Second Temple and the tendency of their mutinous young people to marry Ovambo or Herero shvartzes?  I ask a serious question in a flippant way; the Jews of Europe did not really come into their own until the French Revolution began to emancipate them both from Christian persecution and from their own theocracy. The fate of the Jewish genius was often that of Spinoza, whose name we are lucky to know given the attempt by his "own" people to silence him. This difference of emphasis can be seen in Barbara Kessel's book, which is really a series of first-person narratives and discoveries, strongly inflected by the Shoah and tending to the idea of a recovered identity. This is a necessary task in one way; many among the Nazi-created Diaspora were of the especially hated "mixed race" variety; many were too fearful to mention their origins ever again; many were raised as "gentiles" by the non-Jews who "saved" them. But is it a vital task? Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, speaks in these pages of the Jewish "souls" lost in Poland by the erasure, not just of people, but of family history and awareness. For these, and for their heirs, there should obviously be an ingathering. And it will be endlessly fascinating; I was able to tell Michael Dobbs of The Washington Post that the Czech embassy had informed Madeleine Albright of the true situation of her family several months before the date she gave as the date of her "discovery": In other words, I know for a certainty that she was lying, but I still have no idea why. From Ms. Kessel I learned that there is a Society for Crypto-Judaic studies, tracing the arcane world of the Sephardic converso, and realized that it would be more extraordinary if there were not such a body. Ms. Kessel's own view, which she puts in the mouth of one interviewee, is that America needs a more exact and principled idea of "identity," not a vague and mushy denial of the particularism with which it is only human to be preoccupied. But this principle would have to be just as true for Latvians and Iroquois, and one has to ask whether Jews who think it kosher to "think with the blood" are happy when other groups do the same. The fact, of course, is that they (we) are not easy with this thought. But then the fact also is that Jews are matrilineal for a reason; they know that ethnic purity is a fantasy, and they must also suspect that inbreeding can be unwholesome. (One English friend of mine only discovered his "roots" when his firstborn had Tay-Sachs disease.) So this is what I'm vaguely seeking when I visit the far-flung "shul" or obscure half-obliterated Jewish quarter: the leaven in the dough. Societies that have expelled or ostracized the Jews have historically been condemned to all the consequences of their own stupidity and cruelty. But one element in the litany of accusations against Jews — that they are rootless cosmopolitans — deserves not to be repudiated. The worst anti-Semites did not so much hate the observant and docile shtetl types; they didn't really even hate the moneychangers they couldn't do without: They hated and feared the skeptical, scientific, artistic, secular, intellectual and discontented Jews whose names we all know. Of this virus, even if one can doubt that it's really in the genes, one could be proud to be a carrier. And a half-bottle of the right stuff, carefully deployed, can be as potent as a Magnum. Mr. Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and The Nation. His latest book is "Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere" (Verso Books). ----------------- Independent History & Research Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816 -------- Hoffman Answers Hitchens Punks of ZOG: 2002 by Michael A. Hoffman II The following is a response to "Jewish Power, Jewish Peril," an article about Hoffman by Christopher Hitchens, published in the September, 2002 issue of "Vanity Fair" magazine, pp. 196 and 198 SINCE THE SEPT. 11 ATTACKS, Christopher Hitchens has exhibited a bizarre jingoist malady, in addition to his congenital afflictions, seeming more like Victor Davis Hanson with each passing day. In "Jewish Power, Jewish Peril," (Vanity Fair, September 2002), Hitchens has penned a farrago about the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" and fiendish journalists in the Arab and Muslim world who publicize it in their campaign against the Holy People. Vanity Fair illustrates Hitchens' glossolalia with centerpiece photos of two pages from a vintage issue of this writer's revisionist history newsletter, the "One Honest Man vs. the Punks of ZOG" issue from 1989. Here is what I wrote and what Hitchens cannot forget, even thirteen years later: The tempest over the Ayatollah Khomeni's assassination order against anti-Islamic author Salman Rushdie displays the corruption and depravity of the West's intellectual elite. Gas bags like Christopher Hitchens and Pete Hamill pontificate at the top of their lungs about their absolute fidelity to freedom of the press. ..Hitchens told a meeting of consciences-on-their-sleeves NY intelligentsia that "Where books are burned, men will be burned." Writing in the NY Times, Hitchens declared himself for "the absolute right of free expression and inquiry..." Norman Podhoretz, chief apologist for Zionist zealots who have bombed and censored "holocaust" revisionists, wrote, "It is horrible that Rushdie's life should be in danger." The worst incident of dissident books deliberately burned by religious fanatics occurred on July 4, 1984 in Torrance, California at the offices of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). Over $400,000 worth of revisionist history books--many of them questioning the atrocity propaganda of the "Nazi Holocaust"--were torched by professional arsonists using a highly sophisticated accelerant. The FBI barely investigated this incredible assault on free thought and press. The media have not publicized it and the Hitchens's of the world have not breathed one word against it in print. In the fall of 1984, journalist Bradley Smith and this writer confronted the National Writer's Union in New York City, with a demand that they pass a resolution condemning one of the greatest book-burnings in Western history. Not a single one of the yuppie snobs in attendance, including Hitchens' (then) pal and fellow Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, uttered a word of protest. Jonathan Kwitny, another professional conscience-of-America, dismissed the burning of the IHR...as a "local matter" of interest to people in Southern California only. Where are these blowhards when Ernst Zundel's home is bombed because he published the pamphlet "Did Six Million Really Die?" Where are they when he is put through two heresy trials for the sole crime of publishing a book?...Where are they when researcher Ditlieb Felderer is imprisoned for six months in Sweden for publishing satires of Judaism...when Francois Duprat, a "holocaust" revisionist school teacher is killed in a car bombing in France...when the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police enter an Alberta College library and remove two copies of a book questioning Nazi gas chambers? We know where they are: they are on the side of the Jewish fanatics and mystagogues like Wiesel, Podhoretz and Cotler. They have condoned the burning, bombing and jailing of revisionist authors and their publishers...when Leon Weiseltier of the New Republic cited book-burning in perspective, his reference was to the German past, content to pass over the burning of thousands of books just five years ago in California...Though Hitchens and the others throw a pose as passionately committed avatars of human inquiry and rights, they are in fact callow functionaries in the propaganda apparatus of the Establishment, which can tolerate every heresy but the one that dares to blaspheme against the holy people... Only rank hypocrites who insult Shelley and Voltaire by citing them in this one-dimensional rights campaign, would proclaim their free press absolutism from the housetops and then slink away into their hipster enclaves when the spectre of "holocaust" revisionist writers censored, attacked, prosecuted and murdered is raised. Hitchens, Podhoretz, Kwitny, Mailer, Hamill, Sontag, Cockburn and the rest of the poseur elite are not fit to kiss the feet of the Ayatollah Khomeni. At least the leader of Iran is an honest man who makes no secret of his hatreds and fears and does not scruple to project an image at variance with his convictions. Not so Hitchens and Kwitny and Co. They quote the West's great anti-Zionist freedom-fighters (Voltaire loathed Judaism and labeled its adherents as history's most "impertinent liars"), the better to strut their tousle-haired "Romantic-poet-revolutionary" masquerade across the polished stages of college auditoriums and Manhattan symposia. ...And this is why Khomeni was correct to call Rushdie a mercenary. Write a book mocking Islam, make a movie lying about a Christ and you get your mug in the papers, your name in the pantheon...Write a book or make a film--as I have learned--telling the truth about Judaism or mocking its lampshades and bars of soap holohoax hallucinations, and news of the homicide threats against you won't even make it into the local town gazette. You'll lose your job and the only establishment paper your name will appear in will be the blotter at the jail or the morgue. The preceding is an excerpt from "One Honest Man vs. The Punks of ZOG," by Michael A. Hoffman II, the "pamphlet" Hitchens purports to describe in the September, 2002 edition of Vanity Fair magazine: "..on my shelf is an American Nazi pamphlet, denouncing the 'Zionist Occupation Government' (or 'ZOG') that covertly rules these United States. This illiterate screed isn't just a joke: it comes from the same swamp as those who murdered the Jewish radio host Alan Berg in Denver in 1984, and ultimately from the same mind-set that produced the atrocity in Oklahoma City. In these hate-clotted pages, I am -- for the first and only time in my life -- listed with both Henry Kissinger and Norman Podhoretz as a member of the Jewish/Zionist conspiracy." Alas for Hitchens, the factor that causes him to be lumped with other Brahmins of the kosher Overclass like Podhoretz (I never mentioned Kissinger in this connection, Hitchens is lying about that), is the fact that he shares their delusional taxonomy. Anyone who defends the rights of society's authentic outlaws becomes, through the Zionist-in-Wonderland looking glass: a Nazi...an illiterate...a murderer of Jewish radio hosts...hate-clotted... This is the stuff of Podhoretz and Franklin Graham and Limbaugh and a legion of other Israel-first dregs, about whom the snooty Hitchens imagines himself superior. But in fact, they all share a mindset in one fundamental area. They all spout the same, formulaic phantasmagoria about those who refuse to march to the beat of the Judaic war drum. I wrote an essay decrying the inquisition against revisionist writers and publishers and Vanity Fair and Hitchens turn it into an "American Nazi" pamphlet. This is the sort of lethal falsification that is so infuritating, and which leads to so vast a credibility gap between what the liberal caste supposedly advocates (intellectual honesty and reason), and what they actually represent: a fanatically occluding partisanship that cannot concede an iota of intelligence or humanity to their opposition. But Hitchens has smeared and fascist-baited the wrong pigeon this time. I don't fit so neatly into the handy little media stereotype he has fabricated for the benefit of the new breed of imperialist cognoscenti who require an anti-semite-of-the-week to sneer at. I haven't shot at any radio hosts, Jewish or otherwise, but twenty years ago this autumn, Noam Chomsky and Alfred Lilienthal spoke and wrote on behalf of this radio host when I was fired for broadcasting the program "Zionism, Racism and the Beirut Massacre" on a New York radio station. Then there was the riot which peaceful and saintly Jewish persons staged at the cable channel in New York where my interviews with revisionist historians were televised. One of my books, "The Great Holocaust Trial," is banned by the government of Canada and seized at the border and from the mails. Just recently the noble terrorists at the Jewish "Defense" League placed me on their hit list. Shucks, I can't even be blamed for the Oklahoma City bombing. I have written extensively on the use of neo-Nazis by U.S. intelligence services in staging the Oklahoma bombing for the benefit of the further growth of the Federal Leviathan: "Is it any wonder that many neo-Nazis, Klansmen and militia are, in all but name, employees, dupes and agents of a Federal government which stage manages their 'extremist movement' as a shadow phenomena absolutely necessary to the establishment of a Soviet America? The government should name a Federal building after Timothy McVeigh and his network of accomplices, in honor of the massive expansion of the police state which their actions helped Big Brother obtain." (Hoffman, "Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare," p. 193). In a photo spread on p. 198, the editors of Vanity Fair repeat Hitchens' libel that I am the author of an "American Nazi" pamphlet. In fact I am on record as a committed anti-Nazi. In "The Great Holocaust Trial" I wrote: "To endorse the fight for truth and justice is not tantamount to an endorsement of the criminal Hitler or his totalitarian movement...The Nazi system was suited to an ant-hill comprised of servants, lackeys and toadys automatically obeying 'supreme leaders' whose vision was corrupted by the mindless adulation they commanded" ("The Great Holocaust Trial," pp. 135 & 136). The marginal, the unpopular and the truly radical can be stigmatized with the Nazi libel without the least concern for fact-checking or verification of any kind. Hitchens and his reckless accomplices on the editorial staff of Vanity Fair are apparently "evidence proof." My libel attorney, however, wonders if they are damage proof as well. Hitchens distracts his readers with tales of troglodyte Arabs peddling Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion forgeries in backward Middle Eastern media. Hitchens has a convenient memory, though. He "forgot" to mention that the Muslims of Iran have offered sanctuary to persecuted revisionist intellectuals such as Jurgen Graf and Frederick Toben, who are facing imprisonment in Germany and Switzerland due to their having published studies casting doubt on certain official accounts of WWII. Furthermore, Hitchens fails to credit the superb reporting by Al-Jazeera television of Israeli war crimes, which both the United Nations and the journalists of the West investigate and report at their peril. From Hitchens' vantage, it is preferable to frame the complex issue of Jihad vs. McWorld in terms of the Protocols of Zion, that quaint old Model T of classical "anti-semitism," which helps to cast the contemporary dramatis personae in simplistic and familiar roles, which the herd at Starbucks can recognize and hiss mindlessly on cue. He writes: "Nativist and Christian though that 1989 pamphlet is, it was written partly in praise of the Ayatollah Khomeini. And the most horrifying recent development on the international scene is the emergence, in the Arab and Muslim world, of the debauched myths and falsifications of medieval Christianity. Saudi Arabian and Egyptian and Palestinian sources, some of them official, have been circulating The Protocols of the Elders of Zion...updated for the modern world via the reactionary secret police of the Russian czars and the publishers of Mein Kampf..Here again we find a version of the same sick joke..." As in 1989, so in 2002. Hitchens serves up haughty invective against rebels worldwide, whose principled protest against Israeli mass murder and the racist Talmudic ideology that sustains it, is alleged to be "the same sick joke" which polluted the Czar and the pages of Mein Kampf. That this virtual Hitchens cartoon can find acceptance as meaningful analysis in the pages of Vanity Fair, is one more testimony to the depth of delusion gripping America's intelligentsia as they prepare to march on Baghdad with fire and sword. Here is a challenge for His Eminence: let Hitchens share the stage with this "illiterate" at some western venue of his choosing --Berkeley, Boulder, Portland, Eugene, Missoula-- and we'll debate the issue of "Jewish Power, Jewish Peril." Surely a wordsmith of Hitchens' august stature would make quick work of someone of my diminished capacity. Might Sir Christopher deign to engage in an encounter so unscripted, without benefit of the protections afforded his reputation by his media bully pulpit? Or will he choose to remain a rank hypocrite and a punk of ZOG? -------- Judaism's Strange Gods by Hoffman; softcover, 144 pages ----------- HOFFMAN WIRE Dec. 27, 2001 Conservative Columnist George Will Urges Extermination of Muslims with Tactics Sherman used in the American South An "Analogy between Confederate and al Qaeda elites" Editor's Note: I try to avoid joining the chorus of those always-scandalized ones who are too often dismayed by the latest choc du moi from some neo-conservative lapdog of Ariel Sharon. Neo-conservatives are just rabbis without yarmulkes, so it is not very shocking when they utter some odious Likudism. What does warrant attention and outrage however, is when "Holocaust" pieties on the "Never Again" bandwagon are turned inside out. George Will, conservatism's number one gentile homilist of the "Holocaust," is here advocating the extermination of both the yeomanry of the American South and of Muslims in Afghanistan. Will's posturing tends to prove that incessant "Nazi Holocaust" badgering has absolutely nothing to do with its stated intent, i.e. to sensitize us to the horror of war and genocide, so as to ensure that such crimes never befall any people ever again. By observing the behavior of the most enthusiastic violin-pluckers in the Six Million symphony, we see that in other times these professional mourners become raging hounds of bloodthirst and --dare we say it?-- extermination. Really now, Hoffman, you go too far. George Will may be a Zionist sympathizer, but we have not yet reached the point in our body politic where a leading American conservative philosopher of his stature, advocates extermination as a weapon of war. On the contrary, we have indeed reached the point where irony, decency and self-examination have been extinguished in the fires of Israeli absolutism and war madness, so that a poster-boy for Holocaustianity -- like Will -- can hold forth on the necessity of exterminating demonic classes, creeds and ethnicities, and his call becomes part of our polite discourse, rather than grounds for his dismissal and disgrace. It would be comical if the consequences of Will's hate speech were not so lethal and astonishing, in that Will not only upholds the mass murder of Muslims, but the fratricide practiced by Union General William Sherman, who, until recently, was nearly universally execrated for being the first prominent American military leader to initiate attacks on Christian civilians and to seek the genocide of the white Southern male. Here now is venom born from a snakepit, disguised as our nation's guiding light. Will's intended target is not only Southern secessionists and Muslim separatists. He takes aim at all who stand for chivalry and truth without compromise; "the best and noblest" can count on being burned, bombed or perhaps even gassed, to the applause of those who pass for patrician conservatives in this Year One of childhood's end. Michael A. Hoffman II --------- Gen. Sherman's Advice By George F. Will Washington Post, December 27, 2001; Page A23 "I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them." -- Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, 1864 America's Civil War provides many analogies by which we measure -- and sometimes misunderstand -- today's military developments, and American ways of waging war. Because facets of the Afghanistan operations -- real-time intelligence, stealthy aircraft, precision munitions -- are so modern, we miss the fact that the war requires an American tradition of warmaking that has a 19th-century pedigree. And the bloody uprisings by fanatical Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners underscore the pertinence of Sherman's understanding of how to define victory over an intensely motivated enemy. When military operations in Afghanistan began, just four weeks after Sept. 11 and three weeks after Gen. Tommy Franks was told to begin planning attacks, some critics were quick to say the operations did not begin quickly enough. Then they said the tempo of operations was too torpid. Critics compared Franks -- and Colin Powell, ever mindful of allies' sensibilities -- to Gen. George McClellan. Those were fighting words, because McClellan was a reluctant fighter. One of President Lincoln's commanders, McClellan was notoriously reluctant to close with Confederate forces, the strength of which he consistently overestimated. This drove Lincoln to distraction, and to sarcasm about hoping to "borrow" the Army if McClellan was not using it. Sherman, an energetic user of the Army, believed its principal use against the Confederacy was not to occupy territory but to destroy enemy personnel. His reason for believing this has contemporary resonance during a war against fanatics, many of whom come from the privileged strata of corrupt and exploitative societies. Long before secession, Sherman despised the South for its caste and class systems. In 1843, when stationed in South Carolina, he wrote: "This state, their aristocracy . . . their patriarchal chivalry and glory -- all trash. No people in America are so poor in reality, no people so poorly provided with the comforts of life." So why did the Confederate army, composed mostly of poor whites, fight for a social system beneficial only to a tiny landed minority? Partly because of the elan of its martial elite, those whom Sherman called "young bloods" who were "brave, fine riders, bold to rashness and dangerous in every sense." Sherman, writes professor Victor Davis Hanson in his book "The Soul of Battle," considered the Confederacy "a motley conglomeration of distrustful factions." Sherman thought the really dangerous faction -- dangerous during the war, and potentially afterward -- consisted of what Hanson calls "young zealots, men between 18 and 40 who often formed the cavalry of the South and were led by rabid knights like Nathan Bedford Forrest, Joseph Wheeler and Jeb Stuart. These fanatics . . . were the children of the wealthy, excellent horsemen, full of youthful vigor and insolence." The South, although militarily weak, "fielded," Hanson says, "individual warriors who were among the most gallant and deadly in the entire history of warfare." Hence what Sherman called "the awful fact": Victory required "that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright." Donald Rumsfeld says his preference is for al Qaeda fighters to surrender rather than fight to the death: "It ends it faster. It's less expensive." Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, says: "This is not a war of extermination." Such statements are perhaps obligatory and even sincere. However, is surrender really less expensive in the long run? It is a reasonable surmise that a reformed terrorist is a very rare terrorist, and that the rate of recidivism will be high among terrorists who are forced to surrender but continue to believe they are doing God's will when they commit mass murder of infidels. So, as far as is consistent with the rules of war and the husbanding of the lives of U.S. military personnel, U.S. strategy should maximize fatalities among the enemy, rather than expedite the quickest possible cessation of hostilities. Many Americans will vehemently reject any analogy between Confederate and al Qaeda elites. But Sherman might have felt vindicated by a postwar letter from one former Confederate general to another, D. H. Hill to Jubal Early: "Why has the South become so toadyish & sycophantic? I think it is because the best and noblest were killed off during the war." ------------------ Christopher Hitchens Sunday August 25, 2002 The Observer It's important to beware of arguments that depend upon the mantra 'the enemy of my enemy', and it's likewise important to be immune to charges of keeping bad company. In the days of Vorster and Botha I didn't mind in the least working with Stalinists in the anti-apartheid movement (anyway, it's better to have them where you can see them), and when it came to helping imprisoned dissenters in Czechoslovakia I couldn't care less that Roger Scruton thought it was a good cause as well. If you pay too much attention to the shortcomings of your allies, or if you worry about being lumped together with dubious or unpopular types, you are in effect having your thinking done for you. I must say, however, that Henry Kissinger has never let me down, as a person to consult before making up my own mind. Stepping lightly over his one-man rolling war-crime wave, extending from Bangladesh through Indochina to Chile and East Timor, I pause to notice that he was the man who persuaded President Ford not to invite Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the White House. He was the chief defender in the West of the right of the Chinese Communists to massacre their own students in the centre of Beijing. He made himself conspicuous on the American Right by being one of the few to argue that Slobodan Milosevic should be left alone. A week or so ago I wondered when he was going to pronounce on the impending confrontation with Iraq. And I bet right. He is against it. So is his former colleague, and partner in the dread firm of Kissinger Associates, General Brent Scowcroft. The general is known to be a ventriloquist, or rather dummy, for George Bush Senior, who is now widely reported as being in the dove-camp, or dovecote. (This incidentally demolishes one facile argument, or taunt, about George W. picking a fight with Saddam Hussein as part of some Corsican conception of family honour.) Those who don't want a 'regime change' in Iraq now include the Saudi royal family, the Turkish army, the more prominent conservative spokesmen in Congress and the Kissinger hawks. General Sharon, at least in his public pronouncements, appears to be against it as well. And somebody with a good contact among the Joint Chiefs of Staff seems to be leaking pessimistic or pacifistic material at a furious rate. Those who like to think of themselves as anti-war or anti-imperialist might wonder what there is left for them to say: all the war-loving imperialist hyenas are barking for peace at the top of their leathery old lungs. It would be knee-jerkish to conclude merely on this evidence that there might be a respectable radical case for eliminating Saddam Hussein. But it's certainly worth examining the motives of the anti-war establishment. The Saudis do not want an Americanised Iraq because it might favour the Shia Muslim majority, which in turn might favour Iran, and they also know that with Iraqi oil back on stream their own near-monopoly position - the profits of which have been used to finance bin Ladenism worldwide - would be much diminished. The Turks are hostile to the idea because it would almost inevitably extend the area of Iraqi Kurdistan that is currently ruled by its own inhabitants, who abut the restive Kurdish zone of Turkey. A sizeable chunk of the American military and business elite is peacenik as well, either because it fears damage to its polished and expensive arsenal or because it fears the disruption of Opec and the corresponding loss of business and revenue. Jordan's operetta monarchy thinks that it might fall if Iraq is attacked and - even though this collapse might give an opportunity for cleansing the West Bank in the confusion - the Israeli hard-liners are sceptical also. Shall we just say that the anti-war position is the respectable status quo one? That's interesting in itself. Who would be the beneficiaries of an intervention, always supposing it went well and Saddam's vaunted army fought no better than it did the last time? Only the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples. Well, from the Kissinger-Saudi-Turkish viewpoint, and from the vantage of the Dallas boardroom, where is the fun in that? The consequences might be - if we employ the revealing word of choice among the conservatives - 'destabilising'. I have spent a good deal of time over the past year in conversation with the Iraqi opposition factions and the Kurdish forces, who have misgivings of their own about the Bush strategy. They have been used as cannon-fodder in the past, sometimes for operations that were called off at the last minute. They are well aware that from the empire's point of view, the ideal government in Iraq is a centralised Sunni Muslim military regime, though one preferably not run by a homicidal megalomaniac. They know that the United States is perfectly capable of intervening in Iraq's internal affairs, as it did when it supported Saddam's invasion of Iran, or when it provided him with weapons and diplomatic cover during his genocide in Kurdistan in the 1980s. I have been in Halabja, the town that was annihilated with Iraqi chemical weapons, and I have read the Pentagon report that with a straight face blamed the attack on the Iranians. (Those Washington interventions did not arouse the moral ire of the usual anti-war forces.) What the Iraqi and Kurdish democrats would like is American aid for and endorsement of their own efforts to replace the regime. And what they fear is what I also fear - a heavy-handed US attack which results in an Iraqi puppet government that is designed to placate the Saudis and the Turks. That, it seems to me, is where a principled critique of the war-planning might begin. But it's depressing to see the status quo Left preferring to parrot the arguments of pacifist realpolitik. · Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair ------------------ > See, fiction in action..............Just how does Hitch know the prerogatives of the Iraqi and > Kurdish democrats? Do they number more than a 1,000 or 100 or 100,000? Where are his figures, > connections etc.? Well the issue of "democrats" is an open one-- not that Hitchens said it that way in the quote above-- but the issue of the strength of the potential opposition is clear from history, both in the 1970s with the Kurds and post-Gulf War with serious uprisings among the Shia muslims in the South. The denial that there is widespread opposition to Hussein is exactly the "realpolitick pacificism" that Hitchens is rightly condemning. This was the dividing issue in the Gulf War and a fracture during the Kosovo intervention on whether the Left will condemn authoritarian regimes forthrightly while making their analyses. Some will still come out on the antiinterventionist side with that, but at least the basis of discussion is one of moral realism, not realpolitick. There is far too much moral agnosticism on oppression by dictators like Hussein, for fear that acknowledging that brutality will just empower hawks in the US. But as should be clear at this point, the hawks are able to mobilize when they have consensus, while the lack of forthright moral analysis by the Left just undermines its one key asset, its moral authority. There is indisputable evidence that most Kurds and Shia Iraqis would prefer the removal of Hussein and good evidence that many or most other Iraqis also resent his tyrranny. Whether they would all be better off in the chaos that would follow on his removal is worth debating, but whether they want his removal is not an open question. On the Kurds part, they've wanted different arrangements since the beginning of the century when they lost out on an independent Kurdistan. -- Nathan Newman ---------------- Additionally, it would also be good to be given the evidence that, if they want his removal, (i) they want it done under American auspices; (ii) they want it regardless of the probable cost and consequences Furthermore, I thought and think the basic issue at hand is American foreign policy and the right of Washington to decide when "regime change" is or is not needed, or desirable and when, or if, action will be taken to effect it; if so, then realpolitik does come into it. Of course it does. The character of Saddam's regime is not a new discovery. Just the other day, the NYT reported US intelligence assistance to Saddam 1980-88, including the use of gas. By what criteria would someone choose to support or not support such "regime change"? Presumably, many, if not most, were and are opposed to that "regime change" effected 29 years ago come this September. If the criteria is "many or most" resent the regime in question, then such opposition would be misguided. On the other hand, if the criteria is the character of the regime, then we perhaps should all be supporting Washington-inspired "regime change" across the world based upon our political and ideological sympathies. In which case, it really does come down to might and influence. I can decide that I think "regime change" in the US is most desirable. I may even be right, politically and morally. Does that make me right? Does that confer on me the right to take action to effect it? And if I so happen to have the might to so effect it? ---------- Additionally, it would also be good to be given the evidence that, if they want his removal, (i) they want it done under American auspices; (ii) they want it regardless of the probable cost and consequences Furthermore, I thought and think the basic issue at hand is American foreign policy and the right of Washington to decide when "regime change" is or is not needed, or desirable and when, or if, action will be taken to effect it; if so, then realpolitik does come into it. Of course it does. The character of Saddam's regime is not a new discovery. Just the other day, the NYT reported US intelligence assistance to Saddam 1980-88, including the use of gas. By what criteria would someone choose to support or not support such "regime change"? Presumably, many, if not most, were and are opposed to that "regime change" effected 29 years ago come this September. If the criteria is "many or most" resent the regime in question, then such opposition would be misguided. On the other hand, if the criteria is the character of the regime, then we perhaps should all be supporting Washington-inspired "regime change" across the world based upon our political and ideological sympathies. In which case, it really does come down to might and influence. I can decide that I think "regime change" in the US is most desirable. I may even be right, politically and morally. Does that make me right? Does that confer on me the right to take action to effect it? And if I so happen to have the might to so effect it? ------------- First of all, I am not American. And if I were, given what I've been seeing and reading, looking in as through a glass darkly, I'm not sure I'd want to be of the American Left -- which of course does not at all mean I'd want to be of the American Right. I guess I'd just want to be free of both the American Left and Right. Secondly, what is this about a case-by-case approach? Indeed, what is this about "the US blocks intervention...". Specifically, in the case of Iraq, and particularly in the context of the Iraq-Iran war/massacre, the US was an active partner -- on Iraq and Saddam Hussein's side. Hardly a case of blocking intervention. The US intervenes precisely when it thinks its self-interest is involved, and then cloaks it in some just intervention argument. How often has it been when the US blocks attempted, even ham-fisted UN intervention, and then commandeers the UN to cloak its own desired interventions? But really, a case-by-case approach might just be the surest path to hell at this juncture of history. I think -- and do prove me wrong -- that by now there are sufficient grounds to view the matter in a context, and to refuse the context in the name of case-by-case is to refuse to see the forest for the trees. One could write a history of British imperialism using a case-by-case approach and argument for and against British intervention, even show how in such-and-such a case British intervention even did some good -- and in the process make British imperialism disappear. Incidentally, I have no problem with intervention, but I do have a serious problem with intervention when the US desires it, and no intervention when it doesn't, even when many, perhaps most, of the rest of the world does: which further adds to the context in which I'd assess matters. Living where I do, I guess East Timor, uncontroversially, comes to mind, and, more controversially, Cambodia. kj khoo ----------------- yoshie: ***** Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 10:49:43 -0700 From: Institute for Public Accuracy Subject: Iraq's Use of Chemical Weapons Institute for Public Accuracy 915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org _____ Monday, August 19, 2002 Interviews Available Iraq's Use of Chemical Weapons: A Reason for Invasion? Bush administration officials have cited the Iraqi government's use of chemical weapons as a key reason for launching an overwhelming attack on Iraq. Condoleezza Rice said last week: "He [Saddam Hussein] has used chemical weapons against his own people and against his neighbors..." On Sunday, a front-page New York Times article reported: "A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program." The following analysts are available for interviews: KANI XULAM, akin@kurdistan.org, http://www.kurdistan.org Director of the American Kurdish Information Network, Xulam said today: "The Iraqi government's gassing of Kurds in the 1980s should not be used as a ploy for war now. We need to develop ways of bringing war criminals to justice across the board. A major U.S. attack on Iraq will likely unleash the use of much-talked-about weapons of mass destruction on the Kurds because northern Iraq is being used as a staging ground to topple the regime in Baghdad."... ***** ***** Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 10:14:32 -0700 From: Institute for Public Accuracy Subject: Critical Voices on Iraq Institute for Public Accuracy 915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org ____ Thursday, August 22, 2002 Interviews Available: Critical Voices on Iraq * Al Qaeda Link? * Views of Iraqis * Policy Options... ANAS SHALLAL, ashallal@cox.net A "Partner for Peace" with the Seeds of Peace program, one of the founders of the Mesopotamia Cultural Society and an independent Iraqi-American business owner in Washington, D.C., Shallal said today: "There's a lot of misunderstanding about how most Iraqis feel about the situation. I currently have relatives from Iraq visiting me. They definitely want to see some change, but they don't want it to come from outside. They want to be able to make that change themselves. The Iraqi National Congress is an unsavory group of people. They are tainted by all the CIA money they have taken and are not very well respected by the Iraqi mainstream. For any change to be credible, it has to come from within the society. Iraqis are under sanctions and this has taken a real toll, and they blame most of that on the West. The sanctions have also isolated Iraqis in terms of information and freedom of movement and that makes Saddam more powerful."... **** --------- http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/current/1842.html Pugliese posts a response to a Zinn piece from someplace --------- Michael, why do you forward badly formatted things from people unkonwn to most of us, devoid of any context? Why not say what you think for a change? Doug ------------------ The Global Gamble: Washington's Faustian Bid for World Dominance", by Peter Gowan (Verso, 1999). http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9907/0282.html http://www.gn.apc.org/labourfocus/LF64.html http://www.google.com/search?q=Peter+Gowan+Verso Esp. chapter on the Gulf War and Western Liberalism. Critiques the book by ex-Trotskyist, Samir Al Khalil, on the Baathist regime, "Republic of Fear." www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/5735.html “Extremely provocative and informative, this book should quickly become the center of political debate among liberal and left scholars and activists. The book deftly lays out the paradox of a discourse on human rights and international obligations that under certain political conditions undermines the very principles at stake”— Judith Butler, author of The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection In Powerless by Design Michel Feher addresses Western officials’ responses to post–Cold War conflicts and analyzes the reactions of the Left to their governments’ positions. Sometime in the early 1990s, Feher argues, U.S. and European leaders began portraying themselves as the representatives of a new international community. In that capacity, they developed a doctrine that was not only at odds with the rhetoric of the Cold War but also a far cry from the “new world order” announced at the outset of the decade. Whereas their predecessors had invested every regional conflict with an ideological stake, explains Feher, the representatives of this international community claimed that the crises they confronted did not call for partisan involvement. Exemplary of this new approach were Western responses to ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and genocide in Rwanda. In order to avoid costly interventions, U.S. and European leaders traced these crimes to ancient tribal enmities and professed that the role of the international community should be limited to a humanitarian, impartial, and conciliatory engagement with all the warring parties. They thus managed to appear righteous but powerless, at least until NATO’s intervention in Kosovo. Faced with this doctrine, both the liberal and radical wings of the Western Left found themselves in an uneasy position. Liberals, while lured by their leaders’ humanitarianism were nonetheless disturbed by the dismal results of the policies carried out in the name of the international community. Conversely, anti- imperialist militants were quick to mock the hypocrisy of their governments’ helpless indignation, yet certainly not prepared to demand that Western powers resort to force. Are we still in this “age of the international community”? Feher shows that with NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, both liberal and radical activists suddenly found their mark: the former welcomed the newfound resolve of their governments, while the latter condemned it as the return of the imperialist “new world order.” For Western leaders, however, the war against Serbia proved an accident rather than a turning point. Indeed, less than a year later, their indifference to the destruction of Chechnya by Russian troops suggested that the discursive strategy exposed in Powerless by Design might remain with us for quite some time. >From the Inside Flap “Powerless by Design is necessary reading for anyone concerned with the contemporary politics of human rights. Feher offers a lucid and incisive indictment of the humanitarian pretensions of the international community.”—Robert Post, University of California, Berkeley ---------------------- He's sounding more like Michael Walzer every day. Wouldn't it be lovely if there were a good U.S. that would intervene on the side of the angels? Of course the actually existing U.S. intervenes mainly on the side of devils, but it's a nice thought anyway, isn't it? Who the fuck is going to be the agent of this humanitarian intervention? Hitch himself? Doug ----------------- Why not say what you think for a change? Doug ------- This war would be a senseless, useless slaughter of a country devastated by two wars that killed hundreds of thousands. The Kurds, divided into two autonomus zones ruled by the PUK ("left") and KDP (center-right), don't want their relative prosperity and political freedom threatened by a war likely to lead to Sadaamism w/o Saddaam http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2001/msg01052.html after lengthy occupation. Michael Pugliese -------------- From: Chuck Grimes (cgrimes@rawbw.com) Date: Sun Aug 25 2002 -- ``..as should be clear at this point, the hawks are able to mobilize when they have consensus, while the lack of forthright moral analysis by the Left just undermines its one key asset, its moral authority...'' Nathan Newman --------- If there were ever a laundry list of issues where moral indignation and analysis should have achieved mass recognition and lead to threatening levels of public discontent with government---it has been in the last two years. I keep asking myself what is wrong with people? Can't they see what insane shit is going on? Here's a list: 1) a completely fraudulent election for President in which the loser was install by a politically corrupt Supreme Court, 2) an entirely fraudulent natural gas and electricity crisis in which energy suppliers bulked billions out of state budgets and the public's utility bills---with the full complicity of the White House and federal agencies charged with regulation, 3) complete failure of national security and policing agencies to routinely handle obvious terrorist threats prior to 9/11, 4) despicable cowardice of elected federal officials in the face of the 9/11 attacks (in case you forgot, Congress ran out the doors, the President flew to Nebraska, the Vice President hid in the WH basement, effectively leaving the mayor of New York City in charge), 5) meanwhile, completely inadequate and laughable compensation schemes for families and victims of 9/11 crafted specifically to limit corporate and government liability, while handing out massive cash supports for corporations, particularly the airlines which are now going bankrupt anyway, 6) gross over-reaction of the White House and Congress to punish the US public with the Patriot Act and other police state measures that effective abolish the Bill of Rights and routine legal protections, 7) manufacturing a hoax war in Afghanistan to slaughter the innocent, while ignoring obvious supporting regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, 8) un-ending support for an Israeli regime run by militaristic thugs who routinely commit war atrocities with US weapons and money, 9) the unravelling of massive corporate frauds and failures in energy utilities, telecommunications, stocks, banking, and accounting, with no government regulatory response and wrist slapping criminal investigations, 10) yet another proposed bogus war on Iraq which has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, since it is a thoroughly secular and militaristic dictatorship, 11) and just three days ago, the announced WH policy for catastrophic forest fires in the western states was logging. No trees, no fires, get it? 12) And of course all of the above sits on top of the racist thugs and para military fanatics running police departments all over the country, the continuing collapse of public education, the murderous health care system, the on-going development of commercial real estate while millions go homeless or eke out life in grossly substandard housing for shit wages, toxic food, sick and twisted children, amid the usual crumbling urban squalor, and where all else ends up in the prison industrial complex, etc, etc. ``Turn up the tv honey, some asshole is outside with a loudspeaker..'' It seems the only public officials who have noticed that something is wrong with the US government are to be found among the judges in the secret court in the basement of the Justice Department--and their technical qualms are under appeal to another secret court in the same basement---so I guess we'll never know how that turned out. Chuck Grimes ------------- kjkhoo@softhome.net>...It's almost a joke to discuss "regime change" in Iraq for reason of the Kurds when the Western world for the most part ignores what happens and has been happening in Turkey, etc. http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/turkey/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/ story/0,1271,-1924607,00.html Turkey Approves Greater Rights For Kurds Ananova Saturday August 3, 2002 11:52 AM Kurd News ... Sat 3 Aug 2002. Turkey's Parliament abolishes death penalty, grants rights to Kurds in EU-bid Canada Dot Com (AP/Burhan Ozbilici) Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit ... http://www.kurdishdaily.com/ -- pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/ shows/saddam/index.html http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/ shows/saddam/resources.html Are Iraq's chemical and biological weapons attacks on Kurdistan part of a larger agenda of terror? Excellent documentary, marred, to say the least by the post-documentary interview by husband of Christianer Amanpour of CNN, ex-Sec. of State spokesperson, James Rubin, with the Prince of Darkness, Mr. Perle. Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and silence: war, tyranny, uprising, and the Arab world. Extensive material on Anfal and the uprising in '91. http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/ 2000/04.20/iraqiproject.html Kanan Makiya, "The Anfal: Uncovering an Iraqi Campaign to Exterminate the Kurds," Harper's Magazine, May 1992; Raymond Bonner, "Always Remember," The New Yorker, September 28, 1992 http://www.hrw.org/reports/1992/iraqkor/KOREME1.htm Human Rights Watch, Middle East: Iraq's crime of genocide: the anfal campaign against the Kurds, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995. http://www.gendercide.org/genocideinkurdistan.html Genocide in Kurdistan A dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of the Diploma in Legal Studies at the University of Auckland By Heval Hylan ongman, Albert J. (Hg.): Contemporary Genocides. Causes, Cases, Consequences, Leiden: PIOOM, 1996; darin: Bloom, Mia: "The Case of Iraq: The Glorious Anfal Campaign to Eradicate and Eliminate the Kurds". iraqifd.org/MEI-2000-09-18.html >...Anfal campaign against the Kurds 1987-88 carried out by Ali Hassan Al Majeed documented by Human Rights Watch Report which estimates the total dead between 50,000 to 100,000 constituting the crime of Genocide Killing between 30,000 to 60,000 Iraqis following the March 1991 uprising following the end of the Gulf War. Execution of 10,000 shia clergy A total of 281 separate chemical attacks on a population of 4.0 M Iraqi Kurds during the 2 year Anfal campaign. http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/kurdish/ htdocs/his/Khaledtext.html Anfal: The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq by Khaled Salih Gvteborgs Universitet >...Anfal meant co-ordination of many measures starting with destruction of thousands of villages; gathering rural population after multiple chemical attacks; transporting them to the camps; processing the captives through isolating them and determine who should be sent to death; transporting different groups to different destinies - women and children to particular camps, elderly people to southern Iraq and the men aged between 15 and 50 to gravesites- under extreme secrecy; using fire squads to kill large groups of men near pre-dugged mass graves and then covering the mass graves as well as denying to know anything about their fates. Iraqi authorities did nothing to hide the Anfal campaign from public view. 'On the contrary, as each phase of the operation triumphed, its successes were trumpeted with the same propaganda fanfare that attended the victorious battles in the Iran-Iraq War.' As such, Anfal was a logical extension of nearly two decades of government Arabization of the Kurdish areas. For all its horror, Anfal was not entirely unprecedented, because terrible atrocities had been visited on the Kurds by the Ba'th Party on many occasions particuraly since 1968. In the wake of an official autonomy granted to the Kurds in the firs half of the 70's, the Ba'th Party embarked on the Arabization of the oil-producing areas in Kurdistan, evicting Kurdish farmers and replacing them with poor Arab tribesmen from the south, guarded by government troops. After the the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) fled into Iran after the collapse of the Kurdish revolt in March 1975, tens of thousands of villagers from the Barzani tribes forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to barren sites in the desert south of Iraq, where they had to rebuild their lives by themselves, without any form of assistance. Evacuation, Punishment, and Waste In the mid- and late 1970s, the regime again moved against the Kurds, forcibly evacuating at least a quarter of a million people from Iraq's borders with Iraq and Turkey, destroying their villages to create a cordon sanitaire along these sensitive frontiers. Most of the displaced Kurds were relocated into mujamma'at, crude new settlements located on the main highways in army-controlled areas of Iraqi Kurdistan. KDP revived its alliance with Tehran after the Iranian revolution of 1978; in 1983 they had a joint action to capture a border town, an event that led immediately to retribution by the regime in Baghdad: in an operation against the complexes where the Barzanis Kurds were relocated, Iraqi troops abducted five to eight thousand males aged twelve or over. None of them have ever been seen again. In September 1983, Saddam Hussein gave the clearest indication regarding the fate of the Barzanis: 'They betrayed the country and they betrayed the convenant,' he said, 'and we meted out a stern punishment to them and they went to hell.' In many respects, the 1983 Barzani operation anticipated the techniques that would be used on a much larger scale during the Anfal campaign. No doubt, the absence of any international outcry encouraged Baghdad to believe that it could get away with an even larger operation without any hostile reaction. In this respect the Ba'th Party seems to have been correct in its calculations and judgement of the international inaction. Since 1975, over 4,000 Kurdish villages had been destroyed; by a conservative estimate more than 100,000 rural Kurds had died in Anfal alone; half of Iraq's productive farmland is believed to have been laid waste. The destruction campaigns of April 1987 - April 1989, which MEW rightly calls the Kurdish genocide, had the Anfal campaign as its centrepiece. The Anfal campaign should by no means be regarded as a function or by-product of the Iraq-Iran war, since it was a rational, pre-planned enterprise in which modern techniques of management and expertise were effectively co-ordinated. The Iran-Iraq war provided the crucial element with which Baghdad could cover- up its opportunity to bring to a climax its long- standing efforts to bring the Kurds to heel. The Iraqi regime's anti-Kurdish drive dates back to more than fifteen years, well before the outbreak of that war. Michael Pugliese ------------- "Isabel Paterson, an acerbic libertarian writer of the 1940s, had Hitchens' sort pegged in her classic 1943 book, The God of the Machine. In the chapter entitled "The Humanitarian with the Guillotine," she wrote: "Certainly the slaughter committed from time to time by barbarians invading settled regions, or the capricious cruelties of avowed tyrants would not add up to one-tenth the horrors perpetrated by rulers with good intentions." Pointing to the Western Stalinists, whose hosannas to the Soviet Union dominated the intellectual world when Paterson's book was published, she averred: "We have the peculiar spectacle of the man who condemned millions of his own people to starvation, admired by philanthropists whose declared aim is to see to it that everyone in the world has a quart of milk." The implication being that Stalin had good intentions? -------------- As Hitch once said, in response to the standard Stalin = Hitler equivalence, "At least with Stalin, he was betraying something." Doug ---------------- Raimondo: >Pointing to the Western Stalinists, whose hosannas to the Soviet Union >dominated the intellectual world when Paterson's book was published, she >averred: > >"We have the peculiar spectacle of the man who condemned millions of his own >people to starvation, admired by philanthropists whose declared aim is to see >to it that everyone in the world has a quart of milk." RangerCat67: >The implication being that Stalin had good intentions? Raimondo goes on: "The spectacle, in all its peculiarity, rolls on. Hitchens has his own softness for Stalin & Co., as chronicled in a new book by Martin Amis, Koba the Dread, in which Amis takes Hitchens to task for calling Lenin "a great man, and, toward the end, addresses his old friend directly: "So it is still obscure to me why you wouldn't want to put more distance between yourself and these events than you do, with your reverence for Lenin and your unregretted discipleship of Trotsky ... Why? An admiration for Lenin and Trotsky is meaningless without an admiration for terror. They would not want your admiration if it failed to include an admiration for terror. Do you admire terror? I know you admire freedom" Ah, the humanitarian with a guillotine would reply, but there is no freedom without the terror. Whether "left" or "right," neo-Leninist or neocon, our war-birds are uniformly shrikes." ----- This Raimondo is strange bird. Seems a somewhat propagandistic and reactionary position to take in regards to the Soviet Union and humanitarians and idealists who use force. And I don't completely buy the line that the Soviet Union forced the West to grant concessions to its workers. In the Observer article Raimondo attacks, Hitchens actually wrote: "It's important to beware of arguments that depend upon the mantra 'the enemy of my enemy', and it's likewise important to be immune to charges of keeping bad company. In the days of Vorster and Botha I didn't mind in the least working with Stalinists in the anti-apartheid movement (anyway, it's better to have them where you can see them), and when it came to helping imprisoned dissenters in Czechoslovakia I couldn't care less that Roger Scruton thought it was a good cause as well." So Raimondo would have sided with Botha and Vorster against the Stalinists, the ANC, and other anti-apartheid forces? He equates Lenin with humanitarian interventionists? Here's Hitch's response to Amis and therefore also a critique of Raimondo's view of the left, intellectuals and Stalinism: basically it's an insult to the left-wing opponents of Stalin to erase them from historytheatlantic.com/issues/2002/ 09/hitchens.htm Peter

http://slash.autonomedia.org/  article.pl?sid=02/08/16/0043229 Louis Proyect, "Chomsky and His Critics" posted by jim on Thursday August 15, @03:37PM Printer-friendly layout | email this story from the anarchism-and-its-discontents dept. In the aftermath of September 11th, certain sectors of the US left buckled under ruling class pressure and turned against Noam Chomsky. His uncompromising anti-imperialism might have been acceptable during the 1980s when the Sandinistas were under Washington's gun, but in today's repressive atmosphere no quarter is given to the dissident intellectual. Of course, no quarter is asked from Chomsky, who remains fearless and principled as ever. To the chagrin of ruling class pundits and weak-kneed leftists, a collection of interviews with Chomsky, which has been published under the title "9/11," has become a best seller. According to a May 5th Washington Post article, the book had already sold 160,000 copies and been translated into a dozen languages, from Korean to Japanese to two varieties of Portuguese. In an attempt to warn people away from the book, the Post cites Brian Morton, supposedly "a novelist and essayist of the left," who regards Chomsky as an important intellectual whose arguments have suffered a sclerotic hardening. He says, "Chomsky sees the world in a very stark way and gets at certain truths in that way, but ultimately his view is so simplistic that it's not useful. He's become a phase that people on the left should go through when they are young." It should come as no surprise that the Washington Post failed to identify the segment of the left Morton is associated with. As it turns out, he is an editor of Dissent Magazine, a publication that might be described as social democracy in a state of advanced rigor mortis. Irving Howe, the founder of the magazine, was a staunch supporter of the Vietnam War. The current editor, Michael Walzer, stumped for Bush's war against terrorism in the Fall 2001 issue, stating: "We have to defend our lives; we are also defending our way of life. Everyone says this, but it is true. The terrorists oppose and hate our way of life--and would still oppose and hate it even if we lived our lives far better than we do." Eric Alterman and Christopher Hitchens, contributors to The Nation Magazine, a left liberal weekly that has published continuously since the Civil War, have jumped on the anti-Chomsky bandwagon with a vengeance. Although the magazine has had a reputation for principled anti-imperialism in the past, it has shifted noticeably to the right in recent years. Most would explain this as a function of tail-ending the Clinton administration. Alterman, admits on his MSNBC.com 'blog' that Chomsky "did a lot of good work on East Timor." But when he accused the United States of "perpetrating a holocaust in Afghanistan" and compared the attack on the pharmaceutical factory in Somalia with that on the Twin Towers, he went out of bounds and became "the mirror image of the ignorant jingoism of Bennett, Krauthammer, Kelly, Will, etc." Christopher Hitchens has been the author of the most visible and controversial attacks against Chomsky. In flag-waving attack on the peace movement in the September 24, 2001 Nation titled "Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism." Hitchens describes Chomsky as "soft on crime and soft on fascism." With such people, he adds, "No political coalition is possible." (http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml ?i=special&s=hitchens20010924) For some on the postmodernist left, Chomsky has also become objectionable. Michael Berube, a commentator on the arts and society, feels that "the Chomskian left has consigned itself to the dustbin of history." In accounting for the split between the "Chomskian left" and "the Hitchens left," Berube surmises that "the simple fact that bombs were dropping" might have something to do with it. He writes: >>For U.S. leftists schooled in the lessons of Cambodia, Libya, and the School of the Americas, all U.S. bombing actions are suspect: they are announced by cadaverous white guys with bad hair, they are covered by seven cable channels competing with one another for the catchiest "New War" slogan and Emmy awards for creative flag display, and they invariably kill civilians, the poor, the wretched, the disabled. Surely, there is much to hate about any bombing campaign.<< (centerforbookculture.org/  context/no10/berube.html) Dispensing with the relativism and playful irony that characterizes the postmodernist left, Berube reminds his readers that war is a serious business: >>Yet who would deny that a nation, once attacked, has the right to respond with military force, and who seriously believes that anyone could undertake any "nation-building" enterprise in Afghanistan without driving the Taliban from power first?<< Bad Subjects, another postmodernist outlet, has joined the anti-Chomsky crusade as well. In the latest online edition (http://eserver.org/bs/reviews/  2002-3-11-4.49PM.html), Joe Lockard complains: >>The excursion begins with a simple postulate from which flows all manner of derivatives: the United States is the leading terrorist state. Mr. Smith isn't going to Washington; Mr. Smith is going to Terrorism Central. Why ever do Chomsky-quoters wonder why their hero isn't invited to address a special joint session of Congress?<< My only wonder is how a member of the Bad Subjects collective would deem a trip to Congress worth the trouble. One supposes that despite all the transgressive gestures of our postmodernist friends that bourgeois respectability remains their underlying desire. It is simple to understand why Chomsky has been targeted. As the most visible and respected figure in the radical movement, he is a tempting target. When one is involved in a street fight, it is good psychology to knock out your biggest and most powerful opponent and thus demoralize the ranks of the enemy. This article will consider how Chomsky became such a preeminent figure. In the course of this discussion, we will examine some of his limitations that, needless to say, are of a totally different sort than those alleged by his foes. We understand that it is exactly his ability to stand up to wartime pressures that distinguishes him from the run-of-the-mill intellectual. From Robert Barsky's first-rate biography and intellectual portrait of Noam Chomsky (Noam Chomsky: a life of dissent, MIT Press 1998), we learn that he was born on December 7, 1928 to Dr. William (Zev) Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Chomsky's father was the principal of a Hebrew school and raised his son according to traditional Jewish beliefs. Although his parents identified with the New Deal, various cousins, aunts and uncles were further to the left. Within the extended Chomsky household, various opinions clashed with each other. Against this political backdrop, it was inevitable that he would come to identify with the left, especially since the radical opinions he heard all about him were reinforced by "seeing people coming to the door and trying to sell rags or apples" and " travelling in a trolley car past a textile factory where women were on strike, and watching riot police beat the strikers". The bulk of the young people who became radicalized during the 1930s joined the Communist Party, while a smaller number became anti-Stalinists. And within this minority most joined the Trotskyist movement or the left wing of the Socialist Party, which tended to overlap. There were, however, a smaller number that identified with anarchism or the left communism (sometimes called council communism) that constituted a reaction to the compromises with world capitalism forced on the USSR. Noam Chomsky became part of this current. Chomsky created an eclectic blend of council communism, anarchism and a left-Zionism that was natural to a Jewish household that retained many traditional beliefs side-by-side with progressive politics. All three influences reinforced each other and produce what appears to be a life-long affinity for small-scale cooperatives against "state socialism." While most of his writings focus on US crimes, his ideas about locally based alternatives to capitalism and state socialism form a consistent thread throughout his career. For example,