nimh wrote:
No, it goes a little bit deeper than that I'm afraid. To be brutally honest, you remind me of the people who'd gloss over budding news of Mao's budding misdeeds (not necessarily talking Zimbabwe here), because the real and acute danger to the world surely was McCarthyism.
Now there's no doubt about McCarthy's evilness, and my father's American mentor, a great mind, ended up doing exactly the same I'm sure. But basically, I'm coming away with the impression that looking into the bright flames of the damage done by neoconservatism has affected your ability to discern proportions somewhat. You also seem to have come away with the view that the danger is so big that you don't need to abide by any rules of politeness when it comes to fighting it, in whomsoever you happen to see it shine through here.
To be frank, it's exasperating. And since you never hesitate to expound at length in the sternest and most scathing terms about what all is wrong about how the world views of your opponents here are shuttered, distorted and short-sighted, I'm sure you'll appreciate someone providing a modicum of the same service to you.
Well, ok, let's say there was once a time, now dimly remembered, where I may have been fond of you.
I don't mind your frankness, and I am little moved to have less affinity for you even given the opinions held and expressed above. I just think you are wrong as regards both the political dynamics of these times and of the role of 'manners' in a community such as this, right now.
There is always a danger in thinking one's time pivotal or in imagining that forces and persons that mark our time to be uniquely dangerous. That's commonly the territory of the paranoic, after all. One can be considered, even by one's friends, a mouth-frothing fruitcake. I'll risk that. However much I read, I'll never know enough. Whatever thesis I hold, some part of it is bound to be wrong. Whichever strategy I use, some other is surely to be more effective. That's the way of things.
I know there is a fire in Zimbabwe. Another in Darfur. Another with AIDS in Africa and Asia. Another with avian flu. Another with the stripping of the oceans and global warming. Lots of fires. Lots of potential fires. But smack in the center of every one of them - that is, the possible solutions or mitigations of global dilemmas - sits the US, doing almost nothing or making matters worse through obstruction and division and profit-mongering militarism.
A few weeks past, after reading some horrifying account of US military behavior, you said something like "I'm coming to think of the US as the real enemy." I applauded the epiphany silently. As you and I understand, it isn't 'the US', but rather a degraded and pathological version of what it has been and could be.
If I've got this seriously wrong, well good deal. The only negative consequence will be a few days quicker to the grave and a few friends less happy to see me arrive at their door.
