>So?
>
>Carrol quotes Rudyard Kipling.
To argue that anyone who thinks there's a role for the UN in Iraq is a patronizing white imperialist. Even if that someone is the Communist Workers Party of Iraq, apparently.
Ok, so Carrol gets on my nerves sometimes. He embodies a cantankerousness, certainty, rigidity, and hostility to introspection and subjectivity that are characteristic of a lot of the older left. It's a style of thought and a temperament that haven't served us well. UN in Iraq = White Man's Burden. No nuance, no doubt, perfect equivalence. All we need to understand how to act today is to recall the antiwar movement of the 1960s, or a quote from Mao from the 1930s. History is a thing that happens, and agency isn't an important issue. Neither is trying to persuade people of the rightness of your cause. Etc. I doubt he'd have very kind things to say about the Working Families Party either, since you try to lobby the unpersuaded and endorse Democrats. I see a left that's kind of fucked - everywhere, and especially the U.S. - and it makes me want to rethink a lot of things from scratch. That's the spirit that Zizek admires in the Lenin of 1914, and I think it's worthy of emulating, even if there isn't all that much of relevance in his texts. Cde Cox doesn't seem to feel such an impulse. And on a couple of occasions, he's accused listmembers of being agents. So all this ticks me off. But in the interests of greater saintliness, which is a status that the ex-Catholic in me hasn't ceased to aspire to, I should turn the other cheek.
Doug