Chomsky/Hitchens/Milosevic/Bush

[Ian Livingston]

Is the p-list a hotbed of revolutionary ideology?  And for what do we
then revolt?  or are we just against the State?  That last is easy.
It's much likelier to effect some change, though, if there is some
aspiration involved.  I may be out of the party line, as it seems to
me that OBA most evidently endorses an enlightened anarchy of some
sort.  The evils of the State are as ineluctable as the soul-lessness
of the mass, and the goodness of the individual is captive under the
pressure of group identities, or more correctly, ethnocentrism.
Chomsky is just another example of the individual who has surrendered
his soul to a group.  What is it really, to kill someone who doesn't
agree with what your group "knows" to be the "real" truth?  Isn't that
what has kept Sunnis and Shiites at each other for a thousand years,
and "Christians" out slaying the world for Jesus, and republicans (the
statesmen, not the political party) purging their own, and c.?  There
is no way to correct the way others think, nor, really to control how
they act.  Seems to me the best we can do is to help some folks we
meet along the way to work toward developing an attitude of gracious
helpfulness so that maybe some bright folks with good ideas can
outlast the iconoclastic thinking of groups.  That's right, I think
Chomsky is just an icon, utterly dismissable, a mere distraction.  The
murderers of the international banking cartels and the international
military industrial societal complex as they arm and incite foreign
conflict and enmity are the great threat, and how can we stop them?
Only, I suggest, by evolving beyond the need to impress our will upon
others, by not buying what they have to sell and by not taking jobs
that necessarily support them.  Don't carry debt, don't buy insurance,
don't shop at Slaveworld....  Just don't buy in.  Wish it were so
easy.

Well, fact of the matter is, it is all really so complex it seems
beyond my simple anger and disappointment.  As an individual who has
watched the struggles of the last 40 years (the years I was able to
think about what was happening in the world,) it seems to me that if
I'm not at ease with my just paranoia, I have to do something about
it.  I can bitch or I can change, but no one can make me a part of
their group.  The choice is mine.

Or is it just Sunday afternoon?

"Be cool, but care."  -- M. Sphere.

-i

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 12:41 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> John, believe me, I understand your anger.  It's totally disgusting for someone like Chomsky to distort an atrocity so it will fit his ideology.  On the flip side, it's painful when NATO, Bush-Cheney, Clinton or Obama pretend a decent motivation where one doesn't exist.  Militarism disguised as reverence for human rights.  Invading Iraq because we care about democracy, invading Afghanistan because we care about women's rights.  That some good may come from such military adventures doesn't make the pretense less palatable.  The best we can hope for is to put our emotions aside to see the broader picture as much as possible (and when I say "we/our," I don't mean "you/your").
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
>>From: Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com>
>>Sent: Mar 22, 2009 1:31 PM
>>To: pynchon-l at waste.org, pynchon-l-digest at waste.org
>>Subject: Re: Chomsky/Hitchens/Milosevic/Bush
>>
>>
>>>Would decrying the firebombing of Dresden make one a Nazi apologist?
>>
>>>Laura
>>
>>C'mon, Laura, how is that conparable, or even relevant? Nobody firebombed anybody in the Balkans. And decrying the firebombing of Dresden, whether you're you, me, or Kurt Vonnegut, is still not a 100% uncontroversial stance.
>>
>>But denying, say, that Jews were gassed, would make you a Nazi apologist, and such people exist. As do deniers of Serb genocide.
>>
>>It is so frustrating to find all this equivocating on the p-list, of all places. The Serbs were the aggressors, they committed 99% of the atrocities, they laid siege to Sarajevo for 4 years, snipers in the hills refining their techinique for shooting out children's knees, they rocket bombed marketplaces where people were queuing for bread, etc. That people on this list can sit around hmm-ing and ha-ing about it is shocking and disgraceful.
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