Charles Jannuzi wrote:
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> So you see how conspiricism pervades the US's way of dealing with the world,
> and always has? Most Americans, if they buy Bush's conspiratorial
> explanations of the world, have to be more ignorant than any of the clerical
> fascist Muslims they are so worried about. Most of the Muslims I've talked
> to post 9-11 (in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, one Iraqi) think 9-11 was
> horrible but that the US, as always, was mixing it up with the wrong crowd
> for its own ends and got badly burned.
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I agree with this -- which is one more major reason that leftists in general and marxists in particular should avoid analyses in terms of conspiracy. There is a sense in which _all_ class society, beginning even in those early structures in which an elite was not wholly separate from the "tribe," have been "conspiracies" of the few against the many. Certainly globalism is such a conspiracy. But such conspiracies require that some of their perpetrators _really_ believe that they are for the good of all. I take it that Bradford DeLong really believes what he writes.
And, while I admit this is hard to swallow, one really should not sell short the infinite sincere hypocrisy of the agents of U.S. imperialism, it is almost certain that some of those men and women in the Bush administration and the Senate really believe in the great conspiracy against American goodness. Most of them, I admit, must be quite conscious hypocrites in the ordinary sense, but all great assaults on the people require the sincere cooperation of some of the tools of that assault, high and low. I am told that even the weird people who write the WSJ comics -- excuse me, editorials -- really believe what they write.
And apparently some of the people on the AUT list believe that all "Leninists" are in a great conspiracy against human freedom.
We really don't need that kind of thinking on our side. It simply clutters our work with what are at best irrelevancies. Fortunately neither the Tribune nor the local Pantagraph, the two papers most read here, have revealed the existence of conspiracy theories of 911 so in writing a lealet opposing the Endless War and the war criminal Albright we don't have to waste space differentiating ourselves from the conspiracists.
Carrol
Carrol