More stuff to worry about
What I worry about
A beautiful post by Yoani Sanchez, the great Cuban dissident blogger.
Fellow travellers for dictatorship and authoritarianism
A beautiful post by Yoani Sanchez, the great Cuban dissident blogger.
Fellow travellers for dictatorship and authoritarianism
Andrew Coates: The Cairo conference, the Muslim Brotherhood and the British left. Nick Cohen: Liberal capitalism and travel writers whitewashing dictators.
The acceptable face of English fascism
Francis Sedgemore neatly sums up Patrick Moore.
Antisemitism Watch
The Soupy One on London BDS and its promotion of Press TV Holocaust denialism. And here's a nice piece doing the rounds on Tumblr: How to criticise Israel without being antisemitic.
Kick the Tories out - or kick the Tories in?
David Osler reviews Ian Bone.
While Hugo Chavez dies...
Read this short post on Venezuelan fuel dependency on the Great Satan, by Greg Weeks.
Alternative futures past
James Conohan on the Crimean People's Republic.
We need to talk about Gaza
A thoughtful Zionist, Marc Goldberg, responds to a British blogger's account of the Gaza conflict.
For the pointy heads
Angelus Novus links to a ten part set of "critical notes on Moishe Postone" at reificationofpersonsandpersonificationofthings.
Deconstructing strivers versus shirkers
Owen Jones on George Osborne's class war, and Sarah AB on workfare.
Comments
Do you have a contact email for Love Detective? I have something to send him.
For example, Stefan Grigat's hawkish article on Iran may have been deficient or tendentious in terms of its interpretation of Iranian history and politics, and Yassamine Mather's response takes him to task for it. Yet she specifically avoids addressing his central charge regarding the antisemitism of the Iranian regime by pointing out that in practice Iran and Israel are trading partners. As if certain national regimes would not do business with other national regimes they openly despise.
As for the Susan Witt-Stahl piece, she is right to criticize some aspects of the antigermans' deployment of Adorno. But she falls short in some regards. Antisemitism and fascism are outgrowths of perverse mutations of capitalism, to be sure, but are for that very reason also related to anticapitalist responses. So the dichotomy she suggests is somewhat misleading.
Arguably, both antisemitism and fascism are the direct results of previous revolutions that failed to overcome fascism. Benjamin once wrote that "Every failed revolution gives rise to a fascism." Antisemitism grew first out of the Great French Revolution of 1789, in which Jews were given equal rights under the law, and then accelerated after the revolutionary events of 1848 (the case of Wagner is exemplary here, as both a onetime revolutionary and eventual antisemite). Fascism is unimaginable without the failure of the Bolshevik Revolution. Not merely in the sense that if Marxist parties had been successful, the Nazis could have never attained power, but in the more profound sense that Nazism developed as a putative "third way" solution to the dilemma of socialism or barbarism.
Neither the antigermans nor their critics seem to grasp the gravity of this last point.
RW-All good points. Longer reply at some point early in 2013 when I have computer time again!
Let it go, man, let it go. The Noughties are over.
Simon Reynolds should've mentioned you in _Retromania_.