![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistso apparently the Columbia University Anthropology department had to be closed monday because of all the threats they are getting. and they had to turn the phone off. all of this is on accound of one Nick De Genova, a (non-tenured, and now never-to-be-tenured) anthropology professor who, in a fit of fucktardation, picked an ANTI-WAR TEACH-IN to express his wish/hope for "a million Mogadishus." go rent Black Hawk Down if you don't know what I'm talking about. I mean, he said a lot of shit. that was just the one that the media ran with, which anyone could have anticipated. But among other things he also said that the only true heroes are the ones the help defeat the US military, and that Americans who call themselves patriots are imperialist white supremacists.
Whoa there Nelly.
Okay. Time for analysis and reflection. The media and the government are doing their damndest to demonize the anti-war movement, to misrepresent them in a light that invalidates all the time and energgy being poured all over the country (we are talking about US-about-US-discourse at the moment) into building and sustaining an oppositional platform to the war that can hopefully cross over to "the average American" (and by "average" I mean your average CNN poll-taker who believes that Saddam Husein was directly responsible for 9-11). We write to the press, explaining our positions and objecting to the usage of "pro-troops" to mean "pro-war" thus, in a false syllogysm, implying that "anti-war" means "anti-troops." Personally, everyone I know really wants the US soldiers, many of whom are from economically disenfrenchised areas, and who join the army to support themselves and their family, which makes sense, since the army offers more economic incentives than higher education, just look at where federal money is cut from and where it goes to, to come back to the US alive. And it would also be really great if Rums666field & Co. stopped bombing the shit out of poor Iraqui civilians who are fucked historically, in the moment and for the foreseeable future. It would be great if the US had not alienated the UN, and that the option of peace-keeping troops would have been possible. It'd be great if the US had not started this war. It'd be great if Al Gore was in the White House after he won the presidency. He said at a conference today that he would not have started this war, which we all knew anyway. But anyway, the point is everyone I know is against this war for many reasons--legal, economic, moral, but the biggest one is because of the devastation and loss of life. Duh. It's the fucking PEACE movement. And I don't think Mr. De Genova is part of the peace movement. And that's his prerogative, obviously. But to bust out like that at a teach-in, which is perceived to be an anti-war forum, with the press standing ready with its charcoal whipped out to paint the "unpatriotic" protesters really black, and with horns, what the fuck? "A Million Mogadishus would be great." What? How is it ever okay to encourage a murder of millions of people? Also, does Mr. De Genova not recollect how many Somalians died during the Mogadisha? Should that happen too? Should millions of Iraquis die as well in his scenario that is supposedly opposing the current scenario in which Iraqui civilians are getting slaughtered?
Moving on to other problems. I am tempted to go off on a tangent about how much I hate the RCP, MIM and all other "revolutionary" parties who don't give a shit about context, realistic paramenters and working together, and only about propagating their assinine ideas through disruptive assinine means, knowing full well that they are damaging the face/cause of left activist movements en masse. I am not even going to get into the insane argument that I was tricked into during the 3/22 March where this RCP lady comrade kept criticizing my button (it said STOP THE WAR BRING THE TROOPS HOME) arguing that it was THE SAME THING as what Bush was saying, and also kept trying to make me buy a copy of RCP news or whatever (at a flat rate, the "from each according to ability/to each according to need" sliding scale was not in evidence) and me getting all aggro and saying that I have no desire to read something that is lying next to Chairman Mao's Greatest Hits, or Quotations, or whatever (unless it's in Borders or something, cuz then it's alphabetical, and Thomas Mann could be right next to it, and I'll read Thomas Mann when I am in the mood for Faustian German Homoennui), and her saying that Mao was a great man, and, basically, you get the picture. So I hate them. You know who I also hate? People like De Geneva. You know why? Because they suffer from maCHEsmo (which is not a diss on Che, btw, I do have my problems with the man, but maCHEsmo is characteristic of a position of privilege, like a Columbia anthro prof with cultural capital up the wazoo wanking about The System or whatever). people with Machesmo are like people with machismo but they also imagine themselves to be old-skool "narodniki" "going to the people" in the old Marxist-Lenininst sense of the word, even decades after the Marxist discourse fell apart, and a total revolution ain't gonna happen, man. But, choosing to live in some politically anachronistic version of la-la land inside their heads, they parallelly exist in the real world in a pointless, irresponsible way, indulging their macho tendencies/hubris/liberal guilt/whatever while fucking it up for everyone actually trying to change things.
Also, wow. The only true heroes are the ones who help defeat the US military? Careful with the binaries there. Especially binaries that enclose "hero" narratives. Sounding like The Shrub, are we? Nietzsche's caveat about staring into the abyss, abyss starting back, blah, blah. All people who call themselves patriots are imperialist white supremacists? Well, first of all, that completely goes against a productive discourse that people are trying to build of "protesting is American and Patriotic" (a.k.a. "this is what democracy looks like" and "Free Speech is American" etc.) which is CONSTRUCTIVE because it has a lot of crossover appeal. It is along those platforms that libertarians join up with liberals, expanding the movement. It appeals to ACLU supporters, some NRA members (the libertarian faction), and immigrants from countries where speech and press was censored far worse than it is here, even right now. So, to sum that point up, the counter-discourse/reappropriatioin of "patriotic" in the context of "protesting is patriotic" = productive. De Genova axing off the multivalency potential of the word "patriotic" = unproductive and alienating to everyone. Secondly, what about all those non-white people who support the war and call themselves patriots? I can't believe his argument forces me to write something in defense of people who support the war, and this is not even really in defense, it's just that this is so offensive that I can't let it slip by. So, does that make all minorities who do support the war white supremacists? Yes, there's been much press about how African-Americans are overwhelmingly across the board against the war, but that's not surprising, considering that Bush's "minority votes" did not come from them. They came from the American Hispanic population, some of whom at this point in time support the war. Just like some people from every racial and economic background in America support the war, there are statistical patterns, but no homogenous uniformity one way or the other. So does that make them all white supremacists? What about immigrants who support the war? First generation immigrants who work below minimum wage for cash? I may think their reasons for supporting US wars and foreign policies are fucked up and I disagree with them, but I understand the internal logic in their argument, even if I don't share it, and in some way that argument is a little more compelling to me than just mindless born-and-bred-All-American adherence to the Fox News platform. Or does De Genova mean that by supporting the war anyone non-white becomes a race traitor, kind of like a class traitor, but it sounds like for him they are metonymically interchangeable anyway (as is the case with any dehistoricized and purely rhetorical instance of speech grouping "white" and "imperialist" together). What about the black US soldiers in Iraq recruited by the Army through ads targeting minorities? Should they die in the Mogadishus too, since they are such imperialist white supremacists?
I guess none of those questions really matter, though, if the words don't stand for anything except the speaker performing an act of ideological onanism designed, as all macho undertakings are, at the root, that words may be traded and flung, but he's got the biggest dick of them all.
Whoa there Nelly.
Okay. Time for analysis and reflection. The media and the government are doing their damndest to demonize the anti-war movement, to misrepresent them in a light that invalidates all the time and energgy being poured all over the country (we are talking about US-about-US-discourse at the moment) into building and sustaining an oppositional platform to the war that can hopefully cross over to "the average American" (and by "average" I mean your average CNN poll-taker who believes that Saddam Husein was directly responsible for 9-11). We write to the press, explaining our positions and objecting to the usage of "pro-troops" to mean "pro-war" thus, in a false syllogysm, implying that "anti-war" means "anti-troops." Personally, everyone I know really wants the US soldiers, many of whom are from economically disenfrenchised areas, and who join the army to support themselves and their family, which makes sense, since the army offers more economic incentives than higher education, just look at where federal money is cut from and where it goes to, to come back to the US alive. And it would also be really great if Rums666field & Co. stopped bombing the shit out of poor Iraqui civilians who are fucked historically, in the moment and for the foreseeable future. It would be great if the US had not alienated the UN, and that the option of peace-keeping troops would have been possible. It'd be great if the US had not started this war. It'd be great if Al Gore was in the White House after he won the presidency. He said at a conference today that he would not have started this war, which we all knew anyway. But anyway, the point is everyone I know is against this war for many reasons--legal, economic, moral, but the biggest one is because of the devastation and loss of life. Duh. It's the fucking PEACE movement. And I don't think Mr. De Genova is part of the peace movement. And that's his prerogative, obviously. But to bust out like that at a teach-in, which is perceived to be an anti-war forum, with the press standing ready with its charcoal whipped out to paint the "unpatriotic" protesters really black, and with horns, what the fuck? "A Million Mogadishus would be great." What? How is it ever okay to encourage a murder of millions of people? Also, does Mr. De Genova not recollect how many Somalians died during the Mogadisha? Should that happen too? Should millions of Iraquis die as well in his scenario that is supposedly opposing the current scenario in which Iraqui civilians are getting slaughtered?
Moving on to other problems. I am tempted to go off on a tangent about how much I hate the RCP, MIM and all other "revolutionary" parties who don't give a shit about context, realistic paramenters and working together, and only about propagating their assinine ideas through disruptive assinine means, knowing full well that they are damaging the face/cause of left activist movements en masse. I am not even going to get into the insane argument that I was tricked into during the 3/22 March where this RCP lady comrade kept criticizing my button (it said STOP THE WAR BRING THE TROOPS HOME) arguing that it was THE SAME THING as what Bush was saying, and also kept trying to make me buy a copy of RCP news or whatever (at a flat rate, the "from each according to ability/to each according to need" sliding scale was not in evidence) and me getting all aggro and saying that I have no desire to read something that is lying next to Chairman Mao's Greatest Hits, or Quotations, or whatever (unless it's in Borders or something, cuz then it's alphabetical, and Thomas Mann could be right next to it, and I'll read Thomas Mann when I am in the mood for Faustian German Homoennui), and her saying that Mao was a great man, and, basically, you get the picture. So I hate them. You know who I also hate? People like De Geneva. You know why? Because they suffer from maCHEsmo (which is not a diss on Che, btw, I do have my problems with the man, but maCHEsmo is characteristic of a position of privilege, like a Columbia anthro prof with cultural capital up the wazoo wanking about The System or whatever). people with Machesmo are like people with machismo but they also imagine themselves to be old-skool "narodniki" "going to the people" in the old Marxist-Lenininst sense of the word, even decades after the Marxist discourse fell apart, and a total revolution ain't gonna happen, man. But, choosing to live in some politically anachronistic version of la-la land inside their heads, they parallelly exist in the real world in a pointless, irresponsible way, indulging their macho tendencies/hubris/liberal guilt/whatever while fucking it up for everyone actually trying to change things.
Also, wow. The only true heroes are the ones who help defeat the US military? Careful with the binaries there. Especially binaries that enclose "hero" narratives. Sounding like The Shrub, are we? Nietzsche's caveat about staring into the abyss, abyss starting back, blah, blah. All people who call themselves patriots are imperialist white supremacists? Well, first of all, that completely goes against a productive discourse that people are trying to build of "protesting is American and Patriotic" (a.k.a. "this is what democracy looks like" and "Free Speech is American" etc.) which is CONSTRUCTIVE because it has a lot of crossover appeal. It is along those platforms that libertarians join up with liberals, expanding the movement. It appeals to ACLU supporters, some NRA members (the libertarian faction), and immigrants from countries where speech and press was censored far worse than it is here, even right now. So, to sum that point up, the counter-discourse/reappropriatioin of "patriotic" in the context of "protesting is patriotic" = productive. De Genova axing off the multivalency potential of the word "patriotic" = unproductive and alienating to everyone. Secondly, what about all those non-white people who support the war and call themselves patriots? I can't believe his argument forces me to write something in defense of people who support the war, and this is not even really in defense, it's just that this is so offensive that I can't let it slip by. So, does that make all minorities who do support the war white supremacists? Yes, there's been much press about how African-Americans are overwhelmingly across the board against the war, but that's not surprising, considering that Bush's "minority votes" did not come from them. They came from the American Hispanic population, some of whom at this point in time support the war. Just like some people from every racial and economic background in America support the war, there are statistical patterns, but no homogenous uniformity one way or the other. So does that make them all white supremacists? What about immigrants who support the war? First generation immigrants who work below minimum wage for cash? I may think their reasons for supporting US wars and foreign policies are fucked up and I disagree with them, but I understand the internal logic in their argument, even if I don't share it, and in some way that argument is a little more compelling to me than just mindless born-and-bred-All-American adherence to the Fox News platform. Or does De Genova mean that by supporting the war anyone non-white becomes a race traitor, kind of like a class traitor, but it sounds like for him they are metonymically interchangeable anyway (as is the case with any dehistoricized and purely rhetorical instance of speech grouping "white" and "imperialist" together). What about the black US soldiers in Iraq recruited by the Army through ads targeting minorities? Should they die in the Mogadishus too, since they are such imperialist white supremacists?
I guess none of those questions really matter, though, if the words don't stand for anything except the speaker performing an act of ideological onanism designed, as all macho undertakings are, at the root, that words may be traded and flung, but he's got the biggest dick of them all.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-04-03 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-04-03 06:49 pm (UTC)A.C.L.U.
Date: 2003-04-04 02:38 pm (UTC)Re: A.C.L.U.
Date: 2003-04-04 05:10 pm (UTC)