>and how
>many times must this be stated in how many ways?
>frustrating to see so many on this list plunge ahead with attacks
>without, apparently, having the least familiarity
>REPEAT, WITHIN
>As long as leftist circles are
>cluttered with the likes of whatever nut
>such troglodytism
Carrol only betrays his own intransigence and intolerance with this kind of language. Yes, Carrol, you don't understand, that's just the problem. It is unintelligible to you that people should have any different views from your own, without being troglodytes, nuts and simpletons who must be harangued with CAPITAL LETTERS - IN CASE YOU DID NOT GET THE POINT.
It seems remarkable to me that Rakesh can be denounced for racism, merely for disagreeing about the best way to fight racism. Presumably Rakesh is a racist in the same way that feminist writer Elaine Showalter is an anti-feminist.
This kind of demotic argumetation only indicates the relative weakness of the argument being put across. So Carrol identifies universalism with multi-racialism - but the two are quite different. The multi-racial idea of many nations, one people was the American ruling class' ideological strategy for mediating between different races while retaining its own central control. The mdeorn development of multi-culturalism is well captured by Aijaz Ahmad in the current issue of Monthly Review:
'The current fashionable postmodern discourse .. leaves the maket fully intact while debunking the nation state and seeking to dissolve it even further into little communities and competetive narcissisms, which sometimes gets called "multiculturalism".'
As Ahmad explains that is a world away from the universalism of the Communist Manifesto. -- Jim heartfield