> I don't see how a call to lift the arms embargo equates with or
> implies support for NATO. While there are some unpleasant names on
> the list - Toady the Git prominent among them - Joanne Landy and the
> Jacobsons are no friends of U.S. imperialism. Perhaps Yoshie can
> explain the connection.
I don't think being "friends of U.S. imperialism" is quite the right issue. I doubt that the DSP are really "friends of Australian imperialism," but they might as well have been. The treatment of the Yugoslav War in *New Politics* was (mildly put) disconcerting. What seems to me to be happening is a sort of loss of nerve in many sectors of the left in the face of the new policy of "Humanitarian Intervention" which has been developing. Gitlin is just a more or less extreme instance, useful in that such extreme instances give us a benchmark as it were for identifying less extreme but damaging instances.
A bit of jargon which I have never used since it is the focus of so much mockery now seems to me to be a useful label on attempts to pick and choose amongst humanitarian interventiions to be supported or opposed: petty bourgeois individualism, an intense preoccupation with one's personal moral accounting which blots out any focus on the core political issues involved. I think this might be the generic label for the species of obfustication which Yoshie has been analyzing under the label "postmodern."
Re that label. I am beginning to see an interesting analogy between disputes over the appropriateness of that label now and the use of the label "New Criticism" in the 1950s. I remember at the time (when I considered myself a New Critic, and was studying under one of the leaders, Austen Warren) I often found general use of the term offensive and inaccurate, and my response to it would be that the general descriptions of it offered did not fit this, that, or the other major critic so labelled. But in retrospect it is becoming quite clear that the label did fit a huge cohort of literary students of the day, and that in fact the New Criticism was merely a variation on the Arnoldian invocation of Culture as a barrier against the working class -- or, more broadly yet, that it was one more manifestation of the core bourgeois principle that change comes only through change in the sensibility, moral character, what-have-you of isolated (abstract) autonomous individuals. In short, the new critic was, ultimately, concerned only with the state of his [usually his] own soul. I predict that 40 years from now, perhaps sooner, this paragraph will apply without much modification to the state of "cultural studies" (to use the broadest designation) of today. And whatever label one uses, the performance of those who are obsessed with the rich ambiguities of various humanitarian interventions is pretty offensive.
I have admired much that I've read by the Jacobsons, but I think their waffling on Yugoslavia might in the longer run be more damaging to the struggle against imperialism than the obscenities of a Gitlin. (I am aware of the slippery slope argument against that observation, but the remedy is not to suppress such observations but to maintain political vigilance against sliding down the slope. In any case if we ever have a gulag in the U.S. under leftist auspices, it will probably be leftists guarding against stalinism, not stalinists guarding against social democracy.)
Carrol