Max Sawicky wrote: > Loren's a good fellow, smart and all, but I sent him detailed comments > once on something he wrote and never heard back. >
There's something a bit old school about Goldner, as if he is uncomfortable with electronic media other than as a repository for his articles. He has been sending his stuff out to PEN-L and LBO-Talk for over a decade but has never been a subscriber to these mailing lists or any other as far as I know. For all his left communist pretensions, he seems distinctly uncomfortable with the prospect of being criticized and having to answer criticisms. He has a *very* long attack on Kemalism that I plan to respond to before long. It makes some useful points about the history of modern Turkey but is rather dubious in his characterization of Turkey as a prototype of the "anti-imperialist" MRZine hogwash (he does not mention MRZine I should add.) Here's a snippet. Pretty rancid, in my opinion: http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/turkey.html The “anti-imperialist” ideology of the 1960’s and early 1970’s died a hard death by the late 1970’s. Western leftist cheerleaders for “Ho- Ho- Ho Chi Minh” in London, Paris, Berlin and New York fell silent as Vietnam invaded Cambodia, and China invaded Vietnam, and the Soviet Union threatened China. China allied with the U.S. against the Soviets in the new Cold War, and the other “national liberation movements” that had taken power in Algeria, and later in Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau…disappointed. Today, a vague mood of “anti-imperialism” is back, led by Venezuela’s Chavez and his Latin American allies (Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia), more or less (with the exception of Stalinist Cuba) classical bourgeois-nationalist regimes. But Chavez in turn is allied, at least verbally and often practically, with the Iran of the ayatollahs, and Hezbollah, and Hamas, as well as newly-emergent China, which no one any longer dares call “socialist”. The British SWP allies with Islamic fundamentalists in local elections in the UK, and participates in mass demonstations (during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, summer 2007) chanting “We are all Hezbollah”. Somehow Hezbollah, whose statutes affirm the truth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is now part of the “left”; when will it be “We are all Taliban”? Why not, indeed? Such a climate compels us to turn back to the history of such a profoundly reactionary ideology, deeply anti-working class both in the “advanced” and “underdeveloped” countries, by which any force, no matter how retrograde, that turns a gun against a Western power becomes “progressive” and worthy of “critical” or “military” support, or for the less subtle, simply “support”[2]. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
