[lbo-talk] Platypus: what we are, what we do, and why

Richard Seymour leninstombblog at googlemail.com
Fri Apr 9 10:22:12 PDT 2010


On 09/04/2010 17:52, Bhaskar Sunkara wrote:
> I was mostly responding to a comment from James Heartfield speaks of
> conservative "paranoid delusions" and adds: "Once you buy into the
> exaggerated and absurd fears of the worldwide terrorist conspiracy it gets
> very hard to abstract yourself from the outright assault on people's rights
> that follows."
>

And are the fears being progenerated to justify the war on Afghanistan not in fact exaggerated and absurd, and do they not feed into the attacks on civil and human rights that we have witnessed under the rubric of the 'war on terror'?

What Christopher Cutrone is doing here has nothing to do with analysis and facing difficult questions. It is pseudopolitical spectacle manoeuvring. His attacks on the Left ("so-called Left" if you prefer), particularly the latest on Tariq Ali, are concerned with depicting anti-imperialists and the Left in general as apologists for "Islamist terrorism". This is what all the red herrings are about, esp. the deliberate confusion of matters by inserting not only the Taliban but also Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran on top of it all into this narrative of "conspiracy". This is what the smearing of Tariq Ali is about.

-- Richard Seymour Writer and blogger Email: leninstombblog at googlemail.com Website: http://www.leninology.blogspot.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/leninology Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Seymour_(writer) Book: http://www.versobooks.com/books/nopqrs/s-titles/seymour_r_the_liberal_defense_of_murder.shtml



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