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(What a lying bastard this kid is. I had never met him before August 21, 2015 when he approached me after Patrick Bond's talk on Rosa Luxemburg's "The Accumulation of Capital" talk in the Verso office in Brooklyn. He told me that he agreed completely with my analysis of Syria and Ukraine. He also mentioned that he was about to start a new job at Salon. I told him good luck. So if he had started to "rethink" things as early as 2014, why would he have come up to spend 10 minutes badmouthing exactly what he had already become? Besides killing and displacing Syrians, the war has had a toll on leftist journalists. Norton is as slippery as an eel coated in vaseline and will likely end up like David Horowitz. That's what happens when you begin to write articles relying on the Saudi media for "the truth".)
I admit I was wrong, and it was gradually from 2014 into 2015 that I began to see that. When Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra was openly leading the opposition, and yet Cliffites continued to support it (with Trotskyite writers like Louis Proyect and Michael Karadjis cheering on al-Nusra’s offensives), I was hit with the realization that I had been fooling myself.
Max Blumenthal and Rania Khalek came to similar realizations on a similar timeline. The three of us are close friends and colleagues who talk frequently. We discussed the issue at length; our views evolved together organically.
full: http://bennorton.com/syria-war-views/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
