[lbo-talk] Quick Note

Joseph Catron jncatron at gmail.com
Thu Jul 7 01:42:38 PDT 2011


On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 6:43 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:

Barbarism remains the most probable world ahead.

Doesn't a meaningless scare word like "barbarism," recently used most often by white people in reference to brown people who don't remind them of themselves, and without any clear connotations beyond that, really demand some definition? I'm not trying to be difficult - I do get the Rosa Luxembourg reference, to say nothing of the term's Greek inception - but while her European readers doubtlessly knew what it meant in 1915, I'm not entirely clear on what it means today, or even what it meant to them. If anything, I would guess that most modern Westerners, who aren't the Rosa Luxembourg-reading types, have some romantic notion of it as a good thing, which is no less fair than casting it as a bad thing, whatever "it" is.

-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."



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