Up until now I have drawn a distinction between Monthly Review magazine and the American branch office of Qaddafi, al-Assad, Ahmadinejad Inc. otherwise known as MRZine, a publication that was originally intended to provide a platform for Marxist analysis by ordinary people--a sort of Marxist counterpart to the more broadly radical Counterpunch. As we all know MRZine is a shameful garbage dump that functions mostly as an aggregation of propaganda of the sort that can be found on the mad professor Michel Chossudovsky's Global Research.
In a visit to MRZine today to catch up on the latest talking points of the pro-Baathist left, I saw a link to the latest issue of Monthly Review, a prestigious journal that has been published since the Wallace campaign of 1948. There's a preview of article by Max Ajl that will appear online toward the end of the month: The Fall of Libya Max Ajl Maximilian Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2012), 341 pages, $27.95, paperback. Perhaps no war in recent memory has so thoroughly flummoxed the Euro-Atlantic left as the recent NATO war on Libya. Presaging what would occur as U.S. proxies carried out an assault on Syria, both a pro-war left and an anti-anti-war left [gave] endless explanations and tortuous justifications for why a small invasion, perhaps just a “no-fly-zone,” would be okay—so long as it didn’t grow into a larger intervention. --- Let me perfectly blunt about this. Forte is a cheap propagandist. One of his articles appeared on MRZine on April 20, 2011 titled "The War in Libya: Race, 'Humanitarianism,' and the Media" (http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/forte200411.html). It is a whitewash of Qaddafi's anti-immigrant policies, taking an "if Stalin only knew" approach to the attacks on immigrant workers that took place in 2000. It gives credence to the idea that resistance to Qaddafi can be explained by internal enemies "trying to thwart his plans for Libya's deeper integration with the African continent." Part of that integration included all-out support for Idi Amin. Now I happen to have a good friend on Marxmail who is from Uganda originally. He was there during Idi Amin's genocidal romp and managed to escape with his life as the village he was living in came under attack. He wrote a letter to the editors of Monthly Review after MRZine began spewing its pro-Qaddafi bullshit. He did not receive a reply. I understand that Monthly Review enjoys quite a bit of prestige. It is an important institution of the American left that is read by socialists everywhere in the world. But to print a flattering review of Maxmillian Forte's bullshit is really quite appalling. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
