>Good Behind the News yesterday.
Thanks. I was a bit worried it was a bit cerebral and detached for the present moment. And I didn't think I managed to whip the four interviewees into a coherently structured narrative.
> But, jeez, Ellen Willis was
>exasperating. What gives? It's the military's job to kill, so we
>needn't get all "emotional" about the death toll of US foreign policy or
>the reasons for this. WTF?
>
>And why the harping on independent judgements? I could be fooled into
>believing she thought that switching Washington's rationales for war with
>more palatable ones of our own would magically swap the war fought for
>the war as scripted on the laptops of Western liberals. It's not so much
>that she supported the war in Kosovo that gets me, but her "independent"
>rationales put forward on the radio show were in and of themselves
>distressing, *especially* for someone writing for a book on the dynamics
>of power in a global order.
>
>George Orwell once said that a machine gun doesn't cease to be a machine
>gun because a "good" person pulls the trigger. Nor is a cruise missile
>any less lethal because a bleeding-heart sets it upon its mark, or claims
>to. There's a tenuous line between realism and power worship.
Well, she's said she doesn't like the peace movement because she's not for peace. And I'd better be careful, because she googled herself a couple of weeks ago and found some unkind things I'd said about her here.
I really like her earlier work - what she wrote in the Voice, what's collected in Beginning to See the Light. Lately, though, she's gone a bit around the bend with the humanitarian interventionism. I was stunned at least twice during the interview - the first time when I said that the liberal enlightenment depended in part upon a material base of imperialism; she dismissed that as "mechanistic." And the other time was when I'd said that the U.S. military was a pretty untrustworthy instrument of liberation, because it's one of the most violent and repressive mechanisms ever devised. That, she said, was "hyperbolic." Of course, neither "hyperbolic" nor "mechanistic" are arguments - they're dismissive epithets. I would have like to go at this more, but there were three other folks to interview too.
I agree with her that psychosexual factors are important in politics - but she needs to integrate them with a political economy perspective. And I agree that "fundamentalism" is a threat too - but the 82nd Airborne should never be confused with a progressive social force. To her that's naive.
Her Salon review of contra apologist Paul Berman's book is pretty alarming too. And here's a real shocker of a passage from her contribution to Implicating Empire:
<quote> Another clue to the psychopathology that drives the Islamist movement is its increasingly hysterical Jew-hatred, which has borrowed liberally from both Nazi and medieval Christian polemics. True to its characteristic evasions, the left has tended to dismiss Islamist anti-Semitism as a mere epiphenomenon of justified anger at Israel, which would presumably go away if justice were done. But is it not worth examining the strange mental processes that transmute a political grievance against Israel into a widespread delusion that the Jews masterminded the World Trade Center massacre? And what do we make of the execution of an American journalist who, before being beheaded, is forced to intone, "I am a Jew, my mother is a Jew, my father is a Jew"?
In any case, the war between Israel and the Arab and Islamic worlds has never been only about conflicting claims to a piece of land, the homelessness of the Palestinians, or the occupation of the West Bank; if it were, it would have been settled long ago. Rather, Islamist passion for Israel's obliteration has at its core revulsion at the perceived contamination of the holy land by an infidel nation; worse, a modern democracy; even worse, one populated by that quintessentially alien, bloodsucking tribe of rootless cosmopolitans, the Jews. just as the Europeans once handed their unwelcome Jewish refugee problem to the Arabs, their genocidal antiJewish rhetoric has migrated to the Middle East; but the emotions that give the rhetoric its power are strictly indigenous. They are unlikely to be assuaged by an Israeli-Palestinian settlement; they are far more likely to be inflamed.
And if the worst should happen, the world will once again be shocked. We still don't know-and don't want to know. </quote>
She denies being a Zionist, but this is pretty indistinguishable from Zionism. Forget that land grab - it's really all about old-fashioned anti-Semitism. And she seems to have forgotten about the role of religious lunatics within Israel.
Dug