When will Yoshie read the book, and determine that Bettina was three -- three years old -- when Herbert began playing "choo-choo with her? Of course it would be paranoia to talk about power differences betwen an adult male and a three year old female child. Right?
MRzine seems to be under archaic control, very much in tune with the social conservatism of David Horowitz et. al. As I've said, a solid wall of male solidarity, sympathy for Herbert, and none for Bettina. I remember joking with Harry Magdoff about MR's attributing the war in Vietnam to tungsten! These theories have very little to do with real life.
Jesse Lemisch
... the paranoia about child sexual abuse exists across the
> political spectrum, and on the Left it is motivated by noble
> sentiments about the importance of recognizing relations of power* --
> adults and minors, parents and children, men and women, etc. -- and
> sentiments of automatic sympathy toward those who are structurally put
> in a position of less social power at least in one power relation
> (though A who has less social power in one relation than B may have
> more power than B in another relation -- e.g., Bettina is a woman,
> Herbert is a man, so Bettina has less power than Herbert, but Bettina
> is alive, and Herbert is dead, and the living have more power than the
> dead).
>
> It's always easy to see other people's paranoia, but seldom do people
> recognize their own.
>
> Moreover, even some who see the problem of lack of evidence may think,
> what if evidence, which doesn't exist yet, later surfaces? Let's err
> on the side of zealous prosecution in case it will.
>
> Paranoid styles are difficult to combat.
>
> * The same noble sentiments motivate the tendency to believe all
> accusations against governments even without corroborating evidence
> that exists among both conspiracy theorists and those who are
> concerned about human rights, though conspiracy theorists tend to
> focus on their own government and human rights activists tend to focus
> on foreign governments. The government has more power than
> individuals (besides it is always in the wrong in the eye of
> instinctive anti-statists, which almost all Americans are), so all
> charges made by individuals against the government must be always
> right, or at least "there may be something to it"!
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk