[lbo-talk] churchill's essay

info at pulpculture.org info at pulpculture.org
Thu May 18 10:51:23 PDT 2006


At 11:04 AM 5/18/2006, Thomas Wheeler wrote:
>From: <info at pulpculture.org>
>>Where's Churchill's original piece, the one about 'Little Eichmanns"? I
>>thought I'd read it here, but maybe it was the Marxism list.
>
>Original piece written the day after the attack:
>http://www.darknightpress.org/index.php?i=news&c=recent&view=9
>"Some People Push Back" On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
>
>And here's the expanded and fully annotated version:
>http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=352&page=1
>The Ghosts of 9-1-1: Reflections on History, Justice and Roosting Chickens

Thanks. I was pretty sure that he'd finally acknowledged -- in spite of the disingenuous press release when the controversy hit the fan -- that he really did mean that everyone including janitors are culpable in one way or another. He lays it out in the second piece and in a footnote says that, yes, he too should would have been just as guilty as anyone else on one of the planes and, thus, deserving of the same fate as those on the plane.

He engages in the kind of thinking Doug has criticizes here: the all or nothing, you're the oppressed or you're an oppressor thinking. I have been criticizing that at the blog on a number of levels, which Carrol called a 'pissing match' and which I've been calling the "more oppresseder than thou" sweepstakes, arguing that it emanates from a (naive) standpoint epistemology.

Incidentally, I was reading Judith Butler's _Gender Trouble_ over the weekend and she takes as one point of her analysis a criticism of the existentialism Jaspar's engaged in. She moves on to a critique of radical French feminism as well -- in its attempts to locate women's standpoint 'outside of history'. but, hey, blahbeddy blah blah blah.She moves between each of these two positions, forging an alternative approach to try to understand the dynamics of power as not simply about power v. powerlessness.



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