Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> I was on a panel the other night with Hamid Dabashi, author of a new
> book on Iranian film. On the subway afterwards, he said that Titanic
> was enormously popular in Iran. It was a taste of freedom, and a fuck
> you to the ruling clergy. Dabashi, who is quite against the war,
> nonetheless had some tough words for the anti-Americans in the
> audience; he liked the title of that WSWS piece from a few weeks ago
> - - "Anti-Americanism, the Anti-Imperialism of Fools."
>
> Doug
>
Doug please! where oh where is this great tide of anti-americanism you keep fretting about? All those left-libs (throughout the west at least) who usually indulge in the sort of cultural anti-americanism you decry, have "all become americans now" -- in case you havent heard. They're on your side. Sure hack French academics and Canadian 'cultural-content' mediocrities often like to strike faux-radical poses by denouncincing Coca-Cola and Euro-Disney, but when the shit really hits the fan and the lower orders get a might bit too menacing they definetely know what side of the fence they're on -- yours! In fact here in Canada the flakey-liberal-Waffle sorts who usually indulge in that sort of anti-americanism ("american culture is invading canada and the world" . . . "were a colony of the US' . . . blah . . . blah. . . etc. etc.) have been for weeks filling the airwaves with all sorts of blather about how 9-11/Arab-terrorism etc. represents some form of pure unfathomable, unexplainable evil. Also witness how the attack on a principled anti-racist feminist like Sunera Thobani was met with silence or even further attack by the usual "NAFTA-is-the-Americanization-of-Canada" crowd. And why oh why would you take seriously that outburst of sectarian bad temper that was passing itself off as an arguement in the WSWS article. Again, a hysterical screed tilting at non-existent enemies, and in part at least, to score petty sectarian points against other leftist-- something I am surprised you didnt pick up on given your apparent fascination with the politics of weird trotskyist sects.
So for christ sakes stop feeling so fuckin' sorry for youselves -- all of ya. -pradeep
PS
> . He (Dabashi) also argued that a Chomskyesque critique of
> U.S. imperialism that sees it as the root of most evil in the world
> denies any agency to people elsewhere (either in resistance or in
> repression). He didn't say this, but he might have: Latin American
> landowners are very happy to have the U.S. to support repressive
> governments on their behalf, and South Korean capitalists are happy
> to have the IMF help them break unions, but there's a kind of
> critique that sees only Washington and Wall Street's dirty hands
> behind both.
>
Right. Why this tendency for liberals to repeatedly project stupid caricatures of Chomky's positions (or even to ouright lie)? Does it -- like when they're imagining themselves the victims of an overwhelming conspiracy of rampant anti-americanism -- make them feel smarter or more sophisticated to contrast themselves to such absurd straw-man positions? Everything claimed by Habadashi above (or even earlier by Zizek- like the nature of ideology under late capitalism) has also been pointed out by Chomsky, often in a far more sophisticated and nuanced manner. Laziness and self flattery - two great signifiers of the liberal intelligentsia. -p