Despite the author having no qualification whatever to pronounce such historical absurdities as there being no such thing as Great Russian imperialism or Russian racism or the tyranny of the Han Chinese etc. etc.--mere brain-dead reflexive genuflection to the moral hysteria of Eurotrash cryptonationalist anti-Americanism and bad historiography (not really his field--I have looked at the two English translations he proffered and find that, as far as I can tell, the longer piece on the declining rate of profit as manifested during the 2008 crisis and thereafter provides a concise and even admirable summary of a very important subject in Marxist economics--one that causes so much static among liberals that it is all but impossible to discuss it with them. So this may be worth something.
The shorter piece about lying impresses me less, though I only skimmed it. Of course the Georges Bush etc. lied like rugs about their contemptible military adventures. All governments do this. I wonder if anyone actually took seriously the Gulf War propaganda----for example the nightly nonsense about the infallible shield against Scud missiles supposedly provided by the Patriot antiballistic missile system--which in fact apparently never hit anything though we were meant to be seeing it with our very own eyes. There's a kind of phenomenology of the moments of the propagandistic lie that is amusing. But the analysis is AFAIK essentially timeless. Perhaps you could apply it with equal justice to the Peloponnesian War or Domitian's propaganda about his Dacian adventure. So to that extent the analysis is ahistorical or even antihistorical. What we need now, skipping a few decades, is something to give us a handle on what is unique and different about the ways in which the lies that America (and Russia, China, Syria, Brazil, and India) have told over the decades have changed, not the ways in which they are timeless and resemble all other government lies since governments began lying. The lies of Trump now are different in historically significant ways from the lies of Bush Sr. and in fact nobody really believes them--most Americans assume that the government is lying about everything, hence all the goofy conspiracy theories. Giacche assumes a level of naive credulousness that has barely existed in living memory. The seventy million appalling idiots who love Trump have in fact developed an ecstatic almost-religion of lying in which they cut the truth from themselves and sacrifice it as devotees of Isis once castrated themselves in ecstasy and offered the severed parts to the Goddess. Their statements of belief are, borrowing a page from JL Austin (who wouldn't like it) merely performative assertions of racial, gender, and political absolute authority. This is what matters. The more flagrant the lie, the better they like it. Scary--and different in important ways from the eternal perfidiousness of the American devil. I've gone to all this trouble--probably as Caca himself admits, a waste of time--because I think it's important to take seriously the work of foreign comrades, arrogant though they may be, who take worthwhile positions on matters like the declining rate of profit. I leave the final word on that--or damning silence--to the likes of Michael Roberts and Michael Meeropol. I don't give a fuck about any of Giacche's exquisite ironies, or details of presentation that he may cherish narcissistically, that I may have missed, but want to be fair (how anglosaxon of me) in case there really is anything to the man in spite of his initial bad behavior here. If nobody else cares after this, then the hell with it. Missa est. I absolve myself. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#3766): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/3766 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78404787/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
