Holy cow, are we really supposed to talk and think like this? The poststructrualist disease, right? Which boils down to, 'It's all too complex!', LOL. In any case, it doesn't matter what N & H, Murray et al, say anyway, because 'univocality' is clearly manifest!
Never has a theoretical work been so quickly consigned to the dustbin as has 'Empire'. Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen must have read it and said, 'fuck this network shit, lets give them a dose of good ole colonialism! - let's get the caudron stirring, and be quick with it!'. Colonialism, which, BTW, is a term increasingly floating up into mainstream usage as of late. As in this Sundays' SF Chronicle ("The new American colonialism": http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/02/23/IN200988.DTL)
or with the Clinton Democrat, Chris Matthews, on his MSNBC "Hardball" nattering pundit show, where he called the Iraq occupation plans just that, "colonialism". Matthews went even further when he noted that Ariel Sharon had told both a visiting Congressional delegation and Bushs' Undersecretary of State Bolton (a far-right AEI ideologue) that, after Iraq, Syria and Iran were next up for "WMD disarmament" (which, girls and boys, we should all know by now is a code word for attack, invasion and occupation). Matthews exclaimed, "In all my experience, I've never seen such a thing!". He meant that he's never seen a circumstance where the leader of a foreign power appeared to be dictating the course of US foriegn policy, and in such a brazen manner. IOW, Matthews was pointing a knowing finger at Likud, whom he referred to by the code word 'neocons'.
In actuality, what is happening is that the Bush camarilla has adopted the longtime Likud strategy for domination of the Middle East as its own roadmap for the colonial conquest of that region, which it sees as a strategic pivot for US global domination, with Iraq the "tactical pivot", just like that ex-LaRouchie neocon Murawiec said. Now it is a _US_ strategy, and not merely an Israeli regional strategy.
And many mainstreamers are becoming wise to this, and some are even talking about it. They're smarter than leftists, who are still mired in 'oil'.
Like Yoshie said, we have name the rose, we have to talk about US imperialism. But not only that: we now have to talk about a troglydite subspecies of imperialism, colonialism! Yes, I know it seems all so surreal in our presumably 'postmodern' times - or is this a retrogression to 'premodernism'? Yes, maybe that is what's been happening since the poststructuralist Seventies. So, lefties, it's time to pop! our philistine heads from out of our asses and face the music....as for 'anti-americanism', Hardt should direct his criticisms at the European bourgeosie, who are pushing this attitude for obvious reasons, and not at the European antiwar masses.
Also from this Sundays' SF Chronicle: "Pyrrhic Victories in the Middle East", by David Biale, Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. Biale makes what should be the obvious connection between Israeli colonialism and the neocolonial project of the United States in the Middle East. Biale's right.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/02/23/IN56794.DTL
I told you so about Sharon, Likud. Now kiss my ass, lol.
-Brad Mayer
>
>I can't write/speak for MH, but the US is not imperialist either;
>that's reifying networks/classes that contingently capture Gov.
>institutions to advance their agenda and foist the costs on those
>who are insufficiently organized to prevent them from carrying
>through on their strategies. If 'Anti-Americanism' doesn't refer,
>'US imperialism' doesn't either; the synecdoche/mereology of the
>social dynamics are too complex for such habituated idioms, which is
>precisely what puts people in the streets. Who is the 'Our' in NION
>etc. ? Monolithicity and univocality ain't happenin' anymore
>'within' the Westphalian discourse.......
>
>Ian
According to your argument (such as it is), pretty soon, we will have no term for any complex phenomenon, like capitalism. In any case, it explains nothing about Hardt's preference for the empty term "Anti-Americanism." - -- Yoshie