In fact, if Marx or Engels were president, given their views on India and Scotland and the Mexican-American War, and given their belief in the abiding awesomeness of Western European civilization and general contempt for non-Western European societies, I think they would be all for the Afghan War. They would think Obama was a wuss who should be spreading capitalism (the prerequisite for socialism) more vigorously, destroying backward, rural Afghan society and bringing it into the modern age. You know, like the Soviets were doing (minus the spreading capitalism part).
..........
At this point, after several years of on-list back and forth re: Afghanistan -- in which Mr. Doss repeatedly assumes the persona of the weary realist and almost everyone else expresses varying degrees of outrage and/or dismay in reply -- I hope no one will take the bait and actually think there's a genuine discussion to be had.
In fact, what we're witnessing is an example of something Mark Fisher calls "Grey Vampirsm":
Without a project, anyone - academic or otherwise - is in danger of falling prey to the lure of the Troll or Grey Vampire subjectivities. Detached from projects, academic skills become pathologies. The only aim becomes to demonstrate how much you have read (never enough - the debt is always infinite) or how much you have thought (always far more than anyone who makes a determinate claim, whom both Trolls and GVs regard as too hasty, too crassly populist, too intemperate, whatever...).
[...]
full at --
<http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011182.html>
In the present case, Doss' objective isn't so much to show how much he has read but how much closer to a hard headed, *common sense* view he is than anyone who raises moral (or even tactical) challenges to Washington's almost ten year old Afghan fiasco.
The grey vampirism informing the typical Dossian reply on Afghanistan is a more interesting -- and, I insist, productive -- area of investigation than the same old, same old back and forth.
Surely, someone will accuse me of 'pathologizing' what very well might be a truly held opinion. My reply is that in the 21st century -- cast aloft as we are by multiple streams in flux -- contending, genuinely held political POVs often resemble competing symptoms.
.d.