[lbo-talk] Marc Cooper's flipping out over Churchill

[philion at stolaf.edu]

Nathan writes:
"The point is that Churchill could have made a general comment about that
theoretical issue, but the minute you refer to RECENTLY MURDERED people as
deserving their deaths because of that theoretical analysis, you are an
idiot.  Timing matters, which a lot of folks on the left at the time
refused to admit.   And still do apparently."

You do realise that you're talking to someone who actually criticised
Churchill for that in the days following his remarks? However, I didn't do
it from the lazy man's easy way out approach that Cooper follows, calling
Churchill "hateful" and screaming him down. I laid out why I thought that
this approach, which, sorry Nathan--ain't a whole helluva lot different
from Marcuse even with the timing taken into account *if* you actually
read what Churchill wrote--is not capable of moving beyond the Horowitz
model of critique.

"How about blaming anybody but the murderers in the days after the attacks.
Whatever dispassionate sociological analysis of the causation of terrorism
in the world may be useful, the folks who committed the murders were a few
dozen individuals on orders from a nasty Islamic terrorist group.  They are
the ones to blame.  THe only question is how to prevent similar attacks in
the future, which may include analysis of those causal factors but it's not
about "blame."

If detectives in this country followed your advice, they'd solve a whole
lot fewer murders.