Yeah, as with the dead, raped, tortured, and brutally exploited slaves. I believe these are categorized as "externalities" in the bourgeois econ biz, n'est-ce pas?
The analogy to the Jews should have been, and probably was, obvious to Jacoby, one of two Jewish reactionaries who have a regular column in Boston papers (Don Feder of the Boston Herald is the other). (Any Jewish reactionary, racist of color, or anti-feminist woman who can boot up a word processor should be able to find a job in These United States.) I had drafted a letter to the Globe using the Jewish history analogy, but someone else beat me to print--I would guess hundreds of other letter writers had the same idea. But, as was also made clear in an earlier post on this thread re the mythic McDonald's coffee lawsuit, mere facts, logic, recognition of obvious analogies, rational coherence, etc., are not particularly relevant to rightists’ arguments.
Every so often, Jacoby will switch gears and write about his relatives who were killed in the Holocaust, and bemoan the horror of (other countries’) fascism. I think this is supposed to give him a free pass on his own racist propagandizing--I write "I think" because it all seems to operate on that alogical, sub-rational level to which rightists seem wonderfully attuned. Just as citing two (I infer) Black writers is supposed to, I guess.
BTW, Jacoby's screed was not the only bit of in-your-face racist blather passed along by the “liberal” Globe during Black History Month. Harvard professor Howard Mansfield, the noted homophobe and incompetent translator of de Tocqueville (per Caleb Cain in the 1/14/01 NYT Book Review), got an above-the-fold photo and a front page “news” article blaming grade inflation at Harvard on—-affirmative action policies in the 60s and 70s. Soon after the story appeared, some other Harvard profs rebutted him with data and such, and a story appeared later, inside, in the Globe’s City/Region section--“balanced” by one on feminist theologian Mary Daly, who was merely kicked out of her tenured position by Boston College administrators. (Harvard’s president had no comment on Mansfield.) Defender of intellectual standards Mansfield dismissed all rebuttals as counter to his own “observations” and “recollections,” thereby ending the argument.
----Original Message Follows---- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: Reparations Conference Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 01:38:05 -0000
And Czarism and the pogroms were good for the Jews, because otherwise we'd be in Russia suffering under the aftermath of the aftermath of the revolution against Czarism and the pogroms. For that matter, Hitler was good for the Jews, because otherwise we would be suffering under staggering tax burden in socialist welfare states. Course, this only applies to the ones that got out . . . .
--jks
>
>BTW, the latest right-wing line against reparations: No reparations are
>owed because slavery was good for Blacks. The following was written by
>reactionary columnist Jeff Jacoby in the February 5 Boston Globe. He quotes
>an economist, so it must be true:
>‘Blacks have benefited from slavery, because we have far greater freedom
>and far higher incomes than we could ever find in Africa.’...
>
>
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