I am having a hard time deciding whether Jean Bricmont’s article
on today’s Counterpunch is more meretricious than the one that
appeared yesterday by Diana Johnstone. Both attempt to depict
Libya as a second Kosovo with a looming “humanitarian
intervention”. Bricmont’s article is slightly ahead in this horse
race since it starts off with a cheap smear against unnamed
“Trotkyist” [sic] groups:
The whole gang is back: The parties of the European Left
(grouping the “moderate” European communist parties), the “Green”
José Bové, now allied with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who has never seen
a US-NATO war he didn’t like, various Trotkyist groups and of
course Bernard-Henry Lévy and Bernard Kouchner, all calling for
some sort of “humanitarian intervention” in Libya or accusing the
Latin American left, whose positions are far more sensible, of
acting as “useful idiots” for the “Libyan tyrant.”
My first reaction after reading this glob of rhetorical spit was
to post a query on the Marxism listserv as to which Trotskyists
are for a US-NATO war on Libya. Whatever the foibles of this
tendency on the left, it is not known for backing imperialist
interventions. After parsing Bricmont’s prose carefully, I finally
figured out what he was trying to say. There are some groups and
individuals who are for no-fly zones, etc. (Cohn-Bendit) or there
are some groups that accuse the Latin American left (that’s his
term, not mine, for the proclamations of Daniel Ortega, Hugo
Chavez, and Fidel Castro—I see the left as being a lot broader) of
acting as “useful idiots” for the “Libyan tyrant”. That’s a pretty
nifty use of the connective “or”. I imagine that Bricmont must
have learned it from whatever is the equivalent of Time Magazine
in Belgium.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/a-reply-to-jean-bricmont/
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