Carrol Cox <[email protected]> wrote: >> Incidentally, one source of considerable intellectual confusion is the >> continuing Myth that there exists a separate political current called "The >> Neocons." But no real change in policy (real being defined as saving lives) >> has occurred in the last 20 years.<<
this doesn't make sense. In the post-Cold War era, there has been a clear division between those US jingoists who believe that the US should intervene unilaterally in other countries (the neocons) and those who think that the US power elite must bring in allies to legitimate US interventions. The debate between these two may not exist at an extremely high (Olympian) level of abstraction, since they unite to back US imperialism to the hilt, but it's a lower level abstraction that helps explain the twists and turns of US foreign policy.[*] BTW, the distinction can't be "measured" by looking at the number of people who died due to US interventions (or saved by their absence), since that also depends on the situations that interventions faced. Robert Naiman wrote: > It's funny how little intellectual development has taken place in orthodox > Marxism since 1933. It's like Dorian Gray, frozen in time. why does Robert insist on name-calling? -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. [*] The split between two similar schools (exemplified by Walter Cronkite's decision to air his view that the war couldn't be won) helped change the nature of the US war against Vietnam. Maybe not for the better for the Vietnamese people, but in the end, strategic bombing without ground troops doesn't work well at all, so that the Nixonian strategic shift almost inevitably implied that the NLF and North Vietnam would win (at least on paper). _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
