Such instances are to be combated empirically, *case by case*, which is exactly made *impossible* by those who are fond of bombarding us with the charges of an apologia for Serbia & Milosevic. Name names, quote them at length, and explain why this or that writing is incorrect. Be as pedantic as you wanna be, with footnotes and all. Three cheers for serious scholarship & academic Marxism!
>During the Gulf War I remember a
>considerable number of lefties saying good things about the Iraqi
>regime too. Both the Serb and Iraqi regimes seem to me pretty
>abominable, and I don't want my critique of U.S. imperialism taken as
>a defense of them.
As I have already told you and others, repeatedly, those who go against the ruling ideas -- "bomb them back to the stone age!" -- cannot expect to be fairly represented, however nuanced, subtle, etc. our analyses may be. You are a sectarian hard-liner, from the point of view of the ruling ideology, even though you might be a wussy liberal in the eyes of Mark Jones. :) That is why it is *absolutely necessary* to make it impossible to let anyone dominate political discussion with pro-Serb or pro-Milo or pro-Iraq or pro-Saddam baiting! We have to *shut them up* & *shout them down*, by our louder voices! (I'm not talking about state censorship, obviously; we have to change the nature of *our* conversations, amongst rank-and-file *leftists*.) Otherwise, we lose, *as we have*.
>Ideology also works by forcing people into either/or positions -
>either you're pro-NATO or pro-Serb. Nathan pulls that rhetorical
>trick all the time. People who think they're free sometimes fall into
>those binaries.
Sometimes, binaries are necessary. There is no such thing as being a little bit pregnant & aborting half a fetus. To bomb or not to bomb, that is the question. To strengthen or not to strengthen NATO, that is the question. Which side are we on? Choose because we can, and must.
suddenly Kantian,
Yoshie