> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Charles Jannuzi
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: RE: al-Qaeda and Taliban
Charles, you have been in this thread for several days.
Charles 3/19/02:
"As for the perps profile, Berlet's sources belong in a Woody Allen parody of thought after 9-11, but I doubt if Manhattan is ready yet. I think Hakki and I are getting pretty close."
Some of my comments are directed at you, some at Hakki, some at both of you. It's a thread.
Charles: Q: Chip Berlet, are you a Marxist?
I use a cultural Marxist approach along with social movement theory and Critical Race Theory and related theories of oppression. I am a member of the Marxist Section of the American Sociological Association, where the cultural Marxists see themselves as using a class/race/gender analysis where race and gender are not seen as subsets of class but equal elements in creating oppression.
Charles:
"But you don't respond to my point just made in the last post about how much conspiracism is used by people who are 'moderate' or 'mainstream'. Look at how conspiricism (e.g., Iraqi diplomats having clandestine meetings with Atta in Prague, so alleges the leader of the CIA), disguising what really happened, feeds the Bush regime."
Conspiracism is not the same as actual conspiracies. It's a term that has been around for decades. It refers to a worldview in which history is seen as driven by conspiracies instead of using a systemic or institututional analysis such as Marxism or Power Structure Research such as used by Mills, Domhoff, or Sklar. Carrol Cox has written about this as well. Since I am apparently not supposed to cite any of my work or the work of others when addressing you, I can only claim that there are many books and articles on the subject. You have misunderstood the use of the term. Conspiracies happen all the time, but the broad contours of history are not shaped by conspiracies. History is shaped by contention over power involving class, race, and gender.
Charles:
"For many moderate and fundamentalist Muslims, Wahabbism is the ultimate conspiracy between the west (first the British and now the US) and the House of Saud. OBL's rejection of Saudi Wahabbism motivates him, not a desire to perpetuate it."
OBL rejects Saudi Wahabbism because he thinks it has sold out to the west. We agree on that. Most Islamic Fundamentalists reject Wahabbism. We agree on that. I have written about this, but since you think my work is stupid, I presume you never bothered to read it. OBL practices a form of Ultra-Wahabbism that rejects the SA version as impure. OBL seeks "true" Wahabbism (filtered through Salafism) to first set up religious ethno-nationalist Islamic theocracies, and then fuse them into a restored Caliphate. This is what the schools you cite teach. There are dozens of articles that have discussed this for several years--before the bombing. Some of this is discussed in the University of Chicago Fundamentalisms Project series of volumes. Some of this is discussed in the articles I posted on the PRA web page which you claim are stupid and a parody. But I am not supposed to cite anything, so the conversation is reduced to unsupported opinions. I do not see this as useful.
Charles:
"Recycle, reissue, repackage. And what you'll do is what you always do, no doubt. You'll take your finite set of largely related preconceptions, match it with a limited set of historical and sociological data, cite a bunch of amenable 'scholars' and pass it off as 'explanatory' analysis."
So, Charles, you want to argue that the above is not a nasty personal attack?
-Chip Berlet