> The literary text which best captures the complex problematic of history and
> memory is not, I would contend, that of Melville, but rather Toni Morrison's
> _Beloved_. Morrison understands that history involves a dialectic of memory,
> a struggle and duality of presence and of loss.
The other really outstanding novel of the otherwise execrable decade of the 1980s was William Gibson's "Neuromancer" -- which is also centrally concerned with memory, loss and remembrance (in a very Information Age way, of course).
> politics [how could it be anything else?]. It is a politics of nihilism,
> which denies all ethical and moral judgments about means and ends, because
> against the evil of the "evil empire," all else pales. Ethnic cleansers and
> practitioners of genocide, military dictators, war criminals, anti-modern
> religious fundamentalists, whomever: so long as they are in opposition to the
> overriding evil, they can be supported.
You forget one thing, friend: whatever anyone says on this list, we're just a bunch of fairly marginalized progressives and chatmeisters, with very little power, influence or position in society. But the American Empire does indeed have oceans and oceans of blood on its hands. Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, etc. etc. ad horriblis. Throw in the past and present victims of neoliberalism, IMF sado-monetarism and Wall Street greed, and you have all the materials for the single most damning criminal indictment in human history. This doesn't excuse Stalinism, but even Stalinism was nothing but a Russianized version of the violence of unfettered market forces (as the gruesome fate of the post-Soviet countries amply demonstrates).
My only qualification on the Evil Empire thesis is that it's outdated; Japan and the EU are the paymasters and industrial metropoles of the world right now.
-- Dennis