So, I take, Yoshie, that your answer is that instead of imposing bourgeois wealth and liberties on the unwilling masses in typical imperialist fashion, we can let the clerics impose Sharia law, stuff the women into chadors, authorize honor killings of raped women who disgrace their male relatives, beat clean-shaven men, hang the queers and stone the adulterers, and build a bomb. That way we can be good anti-imperialists. Of course we have our home-grown version of this approach right here in the good old USA with people who agree with just about all of that, some of the right there in Columbus, Ohio, my home town, except they go in for Jesus instead of Allah. But I guess they are benighted imperialist lackies, so their intolerant fanaticism doesn't get the benefit of your doubt. Cause somehow when they do in Tehran,w here Satrapti no longer lives for reasons she has to graphically explained, it's anti-imperialist and good, but in Columbus religious bigotry is imperialist and bad. What astounds and mystifies me is how you have become so assimilated to have adopted this full-blown Orientalism, you and your fantasies of Persian princesses, somehow imposed on the harsh realities of clerical tyranny in modern Iran via the Arabian Nights and Seventeenth Century Persian miniatures -- and somehow still manage to consider yourself a Marxist and a sex radical. My own combination of political liberalism, economic radicalism, and polymorphous perversity looks positively stable in comparison.
--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/21/07, ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> > > There's a lot to be said for
> > > bourgeois wealth and liberties, and not to
> concede that is dishonest.
> >
> > I disagree. A lot is already being said for
> bourgeois wealth and
> > liberties. One need neither concede that nor
> consider that.
>
> There would be a lot to be said for bourgeois wealth
> and liberties if
> one were a member of the bourgeoisie. But I am not,
> so all I have is
> proletarian wages and liberties. If anyone wants me
> to say a few
> words for bourgeois wealth and liberties, he ought
> to first make my
> net worth several billion euros at the very least
> (cf.
>
<http://www.forbes.com/2007/03/07/billionaires-worlds-richest_07billionaires_cz_lk_af_0308billie_land.html>),
> and then I shall invest them wisely, become a member
> of the
> bourgeoisie in good standing, enjoy bourgeois wealth
> for the first
> time, take my bourgeois liberties in style, and tell
> the lower orders
> that this is the best of all possible worlds . . .
> for me.
>
> On 10/21/07, ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> > On 21 Oct, 2007, at 10:23 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> > >
> > > So, in other words, the materialism of the West
> - which Satrapi
> > > denounces from Paris, the echt cosmopolitan
> city, and you denounce
> > > from Columbus, the echt middle-American city -
> has charms that trump
> > > the revolutionary appeal of building the new
> Islamic society. It's
> > > not like they're eating tree bark and beetles in
> Tehran, either. That
> > > sounds to me like desk-chair radicalism that
> barely pauses, if at
> > > all, to take note of its own contradictions.
> > >
> > > You relocated yourself from Japan - certainly
> not a poor country -
> > > more than ten years ago. Why? Is there some
> appeal to the American
> > > way of life that's caused you to stay here for a
> decade?
> >
> > It's been more than five years since you asked me
> why I was in the
> > USA... it seems I have failed to answer the
> question satisfactorily,
> > or perhaps there is no valid answer.
>
> The answer, of course, is that we are here to spread
> the blessings of
> civilization to people sitting in darkness in a
> country whose ruling
> class have outsourced its civilization and which
> therefore suffers
> from multiple deficits, especially political and
> cultural. To be
> sure, we have found our natives often devilish and
> childish at the
> same time, and yet we have it on good authority that
> "childrens do
> learn when standards are high and results are
> measured."
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> ___________________________________
>
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>
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