Chomsky/Hitchens/Milosevic/Bush

[Joseph Tracy]

On Mar 21, 2009, at 5:08 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> First I have read and listened to a fair amount of Chomsky and I  
> think you are right  that he forced the Balkan wars into his all  
> purpose (and mostly correct) analysis of US as the world's biggest  
> imperial bully and falsified the picture in Bosnia. But everyone I  
> know with strong opinions on many complex topics occasionally gets  
> it wrong and that undermines their credibility, whereas people who  
> are full of it are always full of it and never seem to be  
> permanently discredited. Nato or the UN should have intervened  
> earlier and the US should have pushed in a democratic way for  
> that.  but 9 out of 10 imilitary interventions have shitty reasons  
> and shitty consequences. Hitchens wrote a great examination of  
> Kissinger and has been a blowhard ever since. He says this shit  
> about the left supporting fascists and ends up neck deep in  real  
> fascist gore.  According to Hitchens the world should now be  a  
> much more reasonable and peaceable place with great "Western"  
> economies now that we have killed over a million muslims. So what  
> happened?
>
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>
>
>
> On Mar 21, 2009, at 6:59 AM, Carvill John wrote:
>
>>
>> Not wantng to open up a whole cannery of worms, but.... Here's a  
>> very interesting article re. Christopher Hitchens, and his  
>> surprising support for the Iraq invasion. I disagree with him,and  
>> of course there is no comparison between Bosnia and Iraq, but he  
>> has a lot of sensible things to say about how politics makes for  
>> strange bedfellows, and how some on the Left find themselves  
>> supporting Fascists:
>>
>>
>> "It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't  
>> intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it  
>> might destabilise the region.'", he continues. "And I thought -  
>> destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the  
>> left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a  
>> good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco?"
>>
>> "It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative,  
>> status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic  
>> alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate  
>> into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism  
>> can easily mutate into National Socialism," he elaborates. "So you  
>> had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying  
>> 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the  
>> most reactionary force in the region."
>>
>>
>> http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=450
>>
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