Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> People,
> including leftists, do not fight for the lives and rights of people,
> cultures, countries they do not love and cherish.
I agree with your post up to here -- or with only a slight epistemological qualification [Note]. But (fortunately) people (ordinary people by the billions and not just leftists) will indeed fight (and die) for the "lives and rights of people" whom they neither love nor cherish nor even give particular thought to. Moreover, What, in fact, is rather more difficult, is to get people to fight _to destoy_ the lives of others, even unknown others, even others not particularly liked.
What is difficult is to get people collectively to fight for anything at all, including their own collective (selfish) interests. It is within such collective struggle that the sort of propaganda Yoshie has produced over the last year can become effective. [Note: I use propaganda in the classical and positive sense, not as a slur.] A paragraph in a post from Julio Huato to Pen-L yesterday makes an essential point:
Julio Huato wrote:
>
> But, to paraphrase Zinoviev, you cannot educate the masses with your
> agitation and you cannot agitate the masses with your propaganda.
> It's like two parallel lines. They go on without touching each other.
Yoshie's writing on Islam & Iran is, without an active u.s. movement, scholarship, not propaganda, because it has no audience -- and above all it has no agiational teeth whatever! Agitation appeals to the direct experience of its readers/listeners, and its power depends on its capacity to explain that experience better than they themselves could.
Carrol
There has to be a limit on what people are expected to know (or what even the most knowledgeable person should expect of her/himself). For example, the left is constantly harassed by those (mostly leftists themselves) who wish to impose on everyone fairly useless (or even counter-productive) degrees of knowledge re 9/11, "Peak Oil," and Global Warming. The demand on the first is counter-productive; on the second, distracting, and on the third tends to generate a false belief that Knowledge will Makey You Free. While mere knowledge will pass the world over to the pricks who run the Oil Conpanies.