--- Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:
--- Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote: I wish that people would stop making generalizations about some allegedly big segment of the "left" that has crazy opinions. It's a version of the straw-man argument. Instead, simply present your viewpoint and argue its validity (or argue against the specifics of some specific viewpoint).
---
OK, my position is that "the left," by which I mean self-identified leftists living mostly in Western countries, often has a tendency to see things through the lens of an anti-imperialist framework inherited I suppose from Lenin and then modified through the 20th-century. In this view, in conflicts between groups of people, the participants are divided into "oppressor" and "oppressed" groups (or it is an "interimperialist" struggle), with the "oppressor" group -- which usually means which of the two groups happens to be stronger -- being at fault, any violence generated by the "oppressed" group being merely an epiphenomenon, an understandable reaction to the violence of the "oppressor."
For example, in the case of the British bombers, we have people assuming that they must have been motivated by the Iraq War, because, since they are Muslims (weak group vs. stronger group), they are in the "oppressed" class and their violence must therefore be an epiphenomenon upon the violence of the "oppressor."
Just about any article in Z Magazine on any conflict going on in the world will provide illustration of this, with the partial exceptions of Taiwan and Tibet (since people haven't decided yet whether China is an oppressor or an oppressed country). Turkey/the Kurds is all the fault of the Turks, India/Kashmir is all the fault of India, Israel/Palestine is all Israel's fault, Russia is 100% to blame for Chechnya, etc.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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