On 10/25/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie:
>I don't think I have behaved antagonistically toward you or anyone
>else for that matter, on Iran or any other issue. IMHO, the direction
>of personal insults, etc. was opposite. I don't have time for that.
Yoshie, there are two ways to be insulting. You can openly sarcastic as I
am. You can also be drippingly patronizing, which is your style. For
example, your continuous reference to "Western leftists" is singularly
off-putting. Now I am the first to admit that I am a sarcastic asshole, but
you might want to admit to yourself one of these days that you have your
own ways of being obnoxious.
By Western leftists I mean leftists in the USA, the EU, and Japan.
The term is indeed too broad, for some leftists somewhere in the West
may be doing well unbeknownst to me. Given my own experience and
people I most often talk to on the Net, I'm most often thinking of
leftists in the USA, the UK, and Japan, the major problems in the
world.
There is a tendency amongst Western leftists, though, to take an
attitude of a fault-finder toward the rest of the world, not the
tendency shared by all of the Western leftists but probably a
predominant one today. The attitude has us seek problems and problems
alone in other countries (seen in isolation from others) and urges us
to protest against them, as if we were Amnesty International or
something. (Some of them who are closer to the center go further than
that and call upon Western governments to intervene to correct them,
but we'll ignore them for the moment for the sake of discussion.)
It seems to me that, while we shouldn't ignore problems in other
countries, more importantly, we should seek what capacities they have
and how they fit into the process to move toward the overall
medium-term goal we want to achieve (criticisms of problems in other
countries are meaningful only in this context, imho). In my case, the
overall medium-term goal is to check American hegemony and move toward
a multi-polar world, for such a world would be more favorable toward
building socialist society anywhere. By listening to most Western
leftists, however, I don't get a sense of what overall goal they have
in mind and how other countries fit into their scheme of things.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
