[lbo-talk] churchill's essay

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu May 18 11:16:44 PDT 2006


info at pulpculture.org wrote:


>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.

I cited someone's critique of Churchill here once (can't remember who and I'm too lazy to track it down now) - his analysis is almost entirely at the level of nations, not classes or castes or other groups. So, Americans oppressed Indians, and Americans support Israelis who oppress Palestinians. It's a pretty short distance from that to collective guilt.

Doug



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list