>From: "Dennis" <dperrin13 at mediaone.net>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Subject: Re: "Hate America" Left
>Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 14:56:39 -0400
>
> > "Innocent" is becoming offensive regardless of its context; it's a mere
> > piece of jargon that replaces thinking. And "'innocent'" is just as bad.
> > Someone whose posts I have read recently has a signature quote by
> > [memory lapse: Trotsky or Russel] distinguishing stupidity from
> > ignorance. Craft fails to make that distinction, or to recognize just
> > how hard it is in a bourgeois democracy for the mass of workers to know
> > the truth. That is why somehow or other scattered leftists must come
> > together, utilizing whatever openings the capitalists provide us, to
> > form a strong and unified or coherent left, because only such a left can
> > provide a means for the mass of workers knowing even part of the truth.
> > Until such time, that mass is innocent (ignorant), not "innocent."
To thread-tie, this makes the same assumption of the ignorance of the masses that Doug was castegating in the other thread. I seriously don't think the masses are ignorant that the multinationals have sweatshops or the CIA interferes in foreign countries or even that the reason the US cares about West Asia is oil. Hell, I heard the last bit said openly and grinningly on Larry King!
I also think that in an age of mass literacy, public libraries and the internet, you're as ignorant as you want to be. I don't exempt myself in any way: the friend I dined with last night was appalled that I didn't know the CIA had funded thugs in Jamaica to support Seaga/defeat Manley. When I looked around, I found the information was everywhere!
>
>Whew, here I go agreeing with Carrol again, but I must concur: I thought
>that Craft's piece was garbage, filled with the misanthrophy often found on
>the feminist margins.
Ummmm... I guess "people-hater" is an advance on "man-hater" as epithets go.
Though I must say all my favorite misanthropes are from the patriarchal mainstream, not the feminist margins. Flaubert, for one, and Kabir for another. <smile>
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