[lbo-talk] Cultural Change?

[Dennis Perrin]

> -"World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 contributed
> -mightily to the advent of fascism..."
>    - Samantha Power in yesterday's NYT Book Review

Has anyone read Power's book, "A Problem From Hell"? My wife's reading it as
part of a group, so I picked it up and thumbed through it, and it is, my
friends, an utter fraud. For a book about "American and the Age of
Genocide," there's very little about direct American contributions to global
misery and mass murder. A brief mention of East Timor, where Power says that
the US "looked away" once Indonesia began the slaughter, no mention of
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala or the Turkish anti-Kurd campaign in the
early-90s, but plenty about Saddam, Milosevic, et al. At best, Power
lambastes the US for inaction or short-term realpolitick. But you're not
gonna find much about US action against the world's poor, either directly or
through proxies, which is why Power's book is so lauded by the liberal
intelligensia. Even Nation eds like Marc Cooper praise the thing, and attack
those on his blog (like myself) who point out these glaring omissions as
"Red Guard" cadre, and so on. I'd call it a disgrace, but it's too commonly
done to warrant such a dramatic term.

DP