lbo-talk-digest-in-bread

kwalker2 at gte.net kwalker2 at gte.net
Fri Dec 7 00:49:39 PST 2001


At 03:09 AM 12/7/01 -0500, Mina Kumar wrote:
>I've never understood why exterminating people because you imagine that

hadn't gotten the impression that Peter wanted to exterminate anyone or any group. "fuck them" is hardly indicative of a genocidal impulse.


>they are trying to take over the world is somehow worse than exterminating
>them for any other reason. I've heard the same point made on the subject
>of Jews and Gypsies in the Holocaust (I think by Hitchens as well, but
>maybe mistaken.)
>
>There was a fine discussion of this in a review of the Journal of Genocide
>Studies in the TLS.

"if...nazism began as the erasure of peoples defined as antithetical or disruptive of the nation and its 'pure' reproduction/reassertion (began in a sense as a eugenics directed against those deemed as abnormal), then isn't this racism? didn't fascism consist of the slogan of 'work, family, nation', and hence the depiction of citizenship and the purpose of work (sacrifice, duty, etc) within a biologised, of at least ethnicised, version of the national family? but in another sense, weren't fascism and nazism marked by the fantasy of a harmonious nation where antagonism was relegated to the outside in the figure of the Jew (esp as the Jewish banker and as the influence of cosmopolitanism), the communist (marked as irredeemably foreign, modernist, etc), the disabled (as degenerative of the national family and its ability - duty - to work), the gypsies (as a-national), gays (as likewise degenerate, cosmopolitan and a-familial), and so forth...? isn't this racism? how is all this possible without racism? i.e.., it would seem to me that whilst it's not a commonplace to think of communists, gays, the disabled, and more recently, Jews, as a race, isn't this beside the point? weren't these people grouped together and targeted because of a definition of 'the German race' and an attempt to apply that concept to the real?" --Angela M. lbo-talk, Fri, 21 May 1999

the racializing marking of bodies can and does take many more forms than white leftists want to deal with.

------------------------------------------------------------------ Charles, Charles, Charles wrote;


>I thought that was what you were doing for me, but of course your stroking
>is like your swallowing, metaphorical only. However, nowhere did I assert
>a law in any scientific or structuarlist sense that I know of. Should we
>review that point with some examples?

feel free. you've not yet backed up any claim you've made, not the least of which the claim that you advanced to doug as a reason why he should chill. got those plane tickets to Kabul yet where I expect to see you having tea and reminding those who are angry at the US that US anti social pathology will go away eventually, so they shouldn't be angry?


>Thanks anyway for giving me your take on Durkheimian organicism. Again, I
>accept organicist metaphors as ways of describing a state, a people, a
>culture, etc. And that is about it for me.

it's not _my_ take.

metaphors are exactly what social theorists advance when they write about their object of investigation. such metaphors are not benign influences on what the properties they think they see.

i'm much more interested in hearing about biological reductionism among post-structuralists. tx.

kelley

------------------------------------------------------------------ Mina,

I fail to see how an argument made oct 9th by Seth is much different than the argument advanced by Brad Delong here not too long ago. Seth's retort to Brad recently, the post about the Northern Alliance, could have been advanced against Seth's own post of Oct 9th. information about the NA, rape, and chaotic repressive violence was available on Oct 9th. one concludes that stories of rape and chaotic violence are being advanced when it suits the argument. in this case, so the liberal, US as civilizing influence crowd can make fetishize small differences.

as best as i can tell, what you see as nuanced discourse, i see as hypocrisy. or something. i don't know what one calls a situation in which your own argument against someone else can be used against another position you took at another time and defended again recently.

kelley



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