I think that Leo must have flipped his lid.
What his bizarre rant has to do with anything I said is a mystery to me.
Leo says
>as if there was a serious,
>thoughtful position (in defense of Slobbo, in excuse of Rwandan genocide, and
>so on) we are debating, we give them a credence we should not.
Well, I can only agree.
There is no rational defence to be made of the tinpot nationalist Slobodan Milosovic, nor for ethnic slaughter in Rwanda. In fact, nobody that I am aware of has made any such case. I certainly haven't.
It is only Leo's poisonous caricature that anyone who dissents from the view that the West must intervene across the globe is, therefore, necessarily a supporter of repressive regimes in the third world.
This is just the sort of Hobson's choice that the left was continually forced into in the Cold War. If you don't support our boys then you must be a supporter of Stalin. (Reading between the lines, I guess Leo is a graduate of the Stalinist school of falsification.)
Plainly there is no point in debating Leo, since he never replies to what you say, only what he thinks it is that you would say if you were the fantasy opponent in his head.
Depressing to think that Leo is a teacher. Don't parents know who they are entrusting their children's education to?
In message <97.b9feeb5.2710ab43 at aol.com>, LeoCasey at aol.com writes
>I was preparing yet another reply to Jim Heartfield on the Rwandan genocide,
>noting how touching it was that he was deeply concerned for everyone's lives
>and rights, both the victims and the perpetrators of genocide, when the fall
>of Slobbo intervened. We now have all had a chance to see the weeping and
>gnashing of teeth from certain quarters over the political end of a... war
>criminal and serial ethnic cleanser. It all brought me to a stop.
>
>There is something incredibly, bizarrely surreal about these discussions, and
>I am beginning to think that by engaging in them, as if there was a serious,
>thoughtful position (in defense of Slobbo, in excuse of Rwandan genocide, and
>so on) we are debating, we give them a credence we should not.
>
>We have just passed a century in which the name of socialism has been utterly
>debased and disgraced, put in worldwide disrepute, by its connection to the
>likes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, just to name some of the more notorious.
>But the notion that some folks have to reconstruct a movement of the left is
>to connect it to the defense not only of a war criminal and mass murderer,
>but to break a new frontier, and link to an open racist and practitioner of
>ethnic cleansing, a 'hygienic' name for genocide.
>
>If I had to write a script for a more perverse, insane position, for a better
>way to completely bury any notion of socialism among people of genuinely
>progressive convictions and open minds, I couldn't have done any better. The
>Stalinists used to say that "Trotskyists support revolution ... everywhere
>but where it exists." Now that Stalinists have fallen from power, left, right
>and center, the remnants of the remnants of Trotskyism have embraced them.
>They now support revolution ... everywhere but where it overthrows bloody,
>racist dictators.
>
>Is there no end to this parody? What is the repetition of history the fourth,
>and fifth, and sixth time? Farce seems so inadequate a term.
>
>Leo Casey
>United Federation of Teachers
>260 Park Avenue South
>New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
>
>Power concedes nothing without a demand.
>It never has, and it never will.
>If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
>Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
>want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
>lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
>-- Frederick Douglass --
>
>
>
>
>
-- James Heartfield
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