Yoshie, these apologetics of the inexcusable are twisting you into pretzel shapes.
(1) Doug doesn't have to apologize for America's crimes -- he has spent his whole adult life fighting them, fare more effectively than most people.
(2) In general anger, outrage, and action are more reasonable to expect of anyone by way opposition to a wicked system under which one lives than guilt and shame, which are demobilizing.
(3) Whatever the appropriate emotions are with respect to the crimes of any system, there is a difference between failing to display certain negative emotions and actively endorsing and justifying the wickedness of that system.
(4) With regard Doug or anyone's admiration for Chomsky, surely you jest.
(a) Even if Chomsky had some sort of indefensible blindness to some or all aspects of the wickedness of the US or any system, which is ludicrous since when is that transitive? One is not permitted to admire people with whom one has deep moral disagreements for fear of catching their blindness?
(b) It is one thing to admire, or to defend, a writer who admires something about a system that one despises and another thing to actively defend a wicked system.
(c) I do admit, btw, that the charge that Chomsky is immorally patriotic about the US is rather novel. it is more usual to accuse him of being a Pol Pot apologist or a Holocaust denier than a US national chauvinist.
Leaving Doug and Chomsky and his admirers out of it, Yoshie, I find your apologetics for Iran bizarre. This is a cruel and oppressive theocracy where women are treated like chattel, gays are killed, dissidents hounded, the law is barbaric and archaic when it is enforced, and people --mainly women -- are stoned for adultery or slowly strangled. In Iran, you or I would suffer one of these fates or something similar on a dozen grounds. There is not much to admire about the regime.
An appalling regime may have some positive aspects, and a sensible perspective does not require that one say that a hateful system that is unacceptably awful must be so in every respect. However, it is possible to acknowledge the positive aspects of a vile order without becoming an apologist. I've said, myself, that Stalin's Russia had real achievements. But I don't a good word to say about the gulag, mass murder, systematic torture, political repression, guilt by association, ideological censorship, one party dictatorship, and other essential features of Stalinism.
Necessary changes being made, yes, I say the same about the US, although I don't feel obliged to hedge a condemnation of Stalin's Russia or fundamentalist Iran with a parallel one of the loathesome regime under which we live.
--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/27/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Apr 27, 2007, at 1:38 PM, Lenin's Tomb wrote:
> >
> > > On 4/27/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> wrote:
> > >> [hanging people from a crane so they take 10
> minutes to choke to
> > >> death...lovely]
> > >
> > > It's atrocious. But, if I may add to that
> obvious assertion one
> > > further: death from electrocution can take as
> long (say if the heart
> > > is still beating five minutes after the first
> shock has been
> > > administered, they'll go ahead and have another
> go), and being fried
> > > isn't necessarily easier on the senses. I don't
> know if lethal
> > > injection is any better come to that, what with
> the prolonged
> > > armageddon of lungs collapsing and heart
> stopping. And the US has
> > > repeatedly scored way higher than Iran in the
> global executions stake.
> >
> > No disagreement from me on the horrors of the U.S.
> love for capital
> > punishment (or the penchant to criminalize and
> incarcerate). What
> > annoys me are the repeated assertions coming from
> some quarters that
> > having an avowedly anti-imperialist government
> with a populist who
> > mouths ineffectual populist rhetoric makes a
> society somehow good or
> > admirable.
>
> But you have no problem with people who admire
> America, such as Noam
> Chomsky, despite what its government does in the
> world as well as at
> home, nor do I hear you going on about how guilty,
> ashamed,
> embarrassed, etc. you feel living here. You seem to
> take America in
> stride, while you can't say the same about Iran.
> You have a problem
> of blindness that comes from nationalism, it seems
> to me.
>
> As for Iran, compared to the state of affairs before
> the Iranian
> revolution, the country today is over all much
> better, and probably
> most Iranians think so, even taking death penalty
> into account, just
> as the Chinese, despite their country's death
> penalty, do (neither
> people, like the Americans, may not be all that
> opposed to capital
> punishment either, as Emadeddine Baghi's professed
> trouble lining up
> even reformists behind his campaign testifies in
> Iran -- anti-death
> penalty reformers in all three countries have a long
> way to go).
> --
> Yoshie
> ___________________________________
>
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