Chomsky/Hitchens/Milosevic/Bush

[Bekah]

And Samantha Powers says pretty much the same thing about the Bosnia  
situation in her book,  "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of  
Genocide."  Good book.

Bekah



On Mar 21, 2009, at 2:09 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

>
> 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?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 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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>>
>
>