>In my opinion, being self-described
>socialists has never been _by definition_ antithetical to being
>reactionary patriarchs. There are socialists, and there are
>socialists, you see.
All fair enough. Just doing my bit to make sure we don't all end up taking some effectively racist position, that's all. The KLA was a fundamentally tainted piece of work, but we have to be careful not to jump to conclusions about Kosovars and KLA soldiers in particular or Albanians and Muslems in general. These lists got close to that at the time, and it does us little credit, I reckon.
>As I said, the West has chosen its allies "according to its own
>economic & geopolitical criteria," which are not the criteria of wise
>choices imagined by Habermasian critics of Habermas such as yourself.
I wasn't trying to make a Habermasian point at all, Yoshie (at least, I hadn't understood it as one). Just saying that if we're talking the contest-for-sphere-of-influence politics of the early to mid Cold War years, US foreign policy seems to have been rather self-defeating in its own terms. Unless, I suppose, we read those terms as set by a military-industrial complex who wanted to ensure profitable blood-letting for decades to come. I'm not one who reads it as such - I just think US foreign policy was pathetically unnuanced and wholly distorted by the gross paranoid generalisations that pervaded US establishment thinking in those days - but I stand to be corrected.
And I thought your note to PEN-L to be right on point.
Cheers, Rob.