tropes (was: The anti-imperialism of fools

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Wed Jun 19 08:16:47 PDT 2002


At 10:33 AM 6/19/2002 +0200, Tahir wrote:


>Tahir: Oh yeah, I forgot, popular prejudice in the West is really against
>the state of Israel. How could we have been so blind not to see that?

I do not think it is anti-semitism - although there is strong anti-semitic undercurrent in the discussions on the issue. I can see that, for example, in the discussion lists attached to the news on yahoo.com (which I monitor from time to time to get a sense of what public sentiments are).

I think it is more of the local-yokel-taking-on-the-evil-empire trope that is particularly popular in the American culture, which dove-tails with individualism, anti-government sentiments, anti-urbanism, and small-town mentality. Chechens, Pals, or Tibetans versus Russia, Israel, or China. Instead of taking a difficult intellectual task to learn the sufficient level of detail to understand the nature of the conflict, it is much easier to take a fast-food-for thought approach and fit the situation into a popular trope.

From the department of shameless self-promotion - I wrote about that in "Beneath the veil of market



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