Monday, April 11, 2005
- William & João Respond.
[William, João, & Gejo: "Rough Comparison Between Post-Lenin USSR and Post-Lewinsky USA: Soviet Union & United States of America", April 4; Agustin: "The Trouble with American Studies", April 7]
. Agustin. On March 21, following the presentation of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, our self-styled "anarcho-syndicalist" and "communist" colleagues made a number of comments that struck me as disgraceful. Children? They are "fuck--g children". Marriage? It's like "rape, and a concentration camp." And get this: American women were "thrown out" of factories when soldiers came back from the war in 1945!
. William & João. Well, as anyone who has read about post-WW2 history will know, "At the end of World War Two, those women who had found alternate employment from the normal for women, lost their jobs." (1)
. A. Then, on April 4, the panel presenting Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere handed out a comparison between Neoconservatives and ... Stalinism. That these guys know as much about history as I know about nuclear fusion is beside the point. After all, they can read Anne Appelbaum's Gulag: A History (New York: Random House, 2003), where the number of victims is estimated at well over 18 million (between 1929 and 1953.)
. W & J. Actually, we have read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's, The Gulag Archipelago, the book that brought the notion of gulag to the Western World. It may be interesting to point out that Solzhenitsyn was a major supporter of fascism both in Spain and Portugal, bemoaning the liberation of Portugal's colonies in 1974.
. A. Is it about the sour taste of (electoral) defeat? In a sense, yes. My liberal friends are very fond of democracy -- only when they win. When they lose, America is not such a democratic nation after all.
. W & J. True, your "liberal" friends ARE very fond of democracy. Defining democracy as "everyone being able to vote and to having their vote count", as opposed to both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections, in which people where prevented from voting and voting results were manipulated by companies that provided the voting machines (not to mention that the head of a company [Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc.] vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."] (2) If the Diebold election episode isn't enough to convince you, perhaps you would like to know that "it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error." The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are, according to [Dr. Steven F.] Freeman, "250,000,000 to one." That's 250 MILLION to ONE. (3)
. A. Interesting. But the problem, I'm afraid, runs deeper than that. I am beginning to suspect that the so-called "post-modern" culture is making destructive inroads into the minds of some of my younger colleagues.
. W & J. Possibly true. The culture that is provided by media outlets nowadays truly does tend to promote ignorance. Worth noting is the fact that this culture is provided by 5 major corporations that are owned by major contributors to the Republican Party. The "filth" in entertainment that people over at Fox News complain about all the time is spewed out constantly by Fox TV. Interesting.
. A. If every opinion is a "construction" that can be "deconstructed", then there is little room for moral absolutes.
. W & J. We would define our philosophical edifice as being the result of reason. Reason breeds principles. But if you want to frame this according to "moral absolutes", then we'll say that we uphold an absolute respect for "justice" and "life", which means that everyone is entitled to the pursuit of happiness within the framework of (international) law. For us, everything is based on principle, not on number or convenience. The relativism lies with the people that want the rule of law when it prevents gay marriage but will brush legislation aside when detaining and interrogating random human beings (In another transcript [from the trials of the Guantanamo detainees], the unidentified president of a U.S. military tribunal bursts out: "I don't care about international law. I don't want to hear the words 'international law' again. We are not concerned with international law." (4) The relativism lies with people who define as "less tragic" the death of some thousand innocent people from Iraq and Afghanistan as compared to millions in Russia. Our "moral absolute" defines both situations as equally tragic.
. A. Everything is relative. Anything compares with anything. Neo-conservatives, a group of brilliant, hard-working, honest intellectuals are thus compared to history's bloodiest mass-murderer. The death of one terrorist who plots to massacre thousands of civilians equals the destruction of eigtheen million innocent citizens. Et voilà!
. W & J. Neocons can be either brilliant or honest. They can't be both. If they are honest, then Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice truly did believe the WMDs justification, the "ties to Al-Qaeda" rationale and the proposition that it would take less troops and less money to occupy Iraq than to liberate it. That means they're not brilliant, they're incompetent at best, retarded at worst. If they truly are brilliant, then all of this is an intricate manipulative plot to justify a war with a profit motivation. Does this strike you as honest? Taking into account the track record of these people during the Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, as well as their ties to oil and energy industries, we're more inclined to believe the "brilliant" hypothesis. Intellectuals? Probably not. Engineers of destruction? Sounds about right.
. A. The fact that neo-conservatives were instrumental in promoting democracy in Afghanistan and Irak --with revolutionary ripple effects around the world, from Lebanon to Kyrgyzstan-- leaves my liberal colleagues completely indifferent.
. W & J. Supporting democracy would mean not supporting dictatorial rule to start with. The George W. Bush administration's support for the Taliban up until 9/11 and the arms sales to Iraq by both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations (that allowed the gassing of Kurds during Saddam's al-Anfal Campaign from 1986 to 1989) demolish the argument that neocons have tried to promote democracy anywhere. If you add the cases of Nicaragua's Contras, the Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor in 1991 under Suharto's occupation and the convenient overlook of totalitarian and brutal regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan or Chile (to name a few), it's pretty obvious that democracy is not even a faint concern for these people. There is a whiff of ethno-centrism here, not to mention the "ripple effects" logical Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle ("Oaks are trees. Pines as trees. Therefore, pines are oaks." – "We invaded Iraq, a country in the middle East. Lebanon, a country in the Middle East, is in turmoil. Therefore, Lebanon is in turmoil because we invaded Iraq.")
. A. There is a whiff of ethno-centrism here, as if democracy in regions far from our civilized world should not be a concern to us.
. W & J. Coming from someone who dubs people from non-westernized civilizations "savages who don't even have toilet paper" (in class discussion, March 21st), that's a really valid insult.
. A. But let's tell it like it is: anti-democracy liberals are reactionaries; neo-cons are revolutionaries.
. W & J. After all we have said, your point has by now been rendered moot.
. A. To sum up: the "fuck--g children" episode and the comparison "Stalin-Neocons" do worry me, because I have developed a sincere affection for UvA's American Studies Program. The risk is that the program becomes irrelevant. If the competition reads Huntington instead of Freud, my guess is that students will choose the competition.
. W & J. To sum up: the "fucking chil--en" episode doesn't really worry us, because we truly do believe in free speech. The comparison "Stalin-Neocons", that started off as an attempt to create a passionate discussion, has actually grown into a frighteningly valid point: "lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering [of Conservative leaders meeting in Washington] that [Supreme Court Justice] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, 'upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.' Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said. The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." (5)
(1) See "Women and World War Two"
(2) Julie Carr Smyth: "Voting Machine Controversy", Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 28, 2003.
(3) "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy", BuzzFlash.com, November 11, 2004.
(4) Pete Yost & Matt Kelley: "Records Give Voice to Guantanamo Detainees", Associated Press, April 9, 2005.
(5) Danda Milbank: "And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty", Washington Post, April 9, 2005.
[William, João, & Gejo: "Rough Comparison Between Post-Lenin USSR and Post-Lewinsky USA: Soviet Union & United States of America", April 4; Agustin: "The Trouble with American Studies", April 7]
. Agustin. On March 21, following the presentation of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, our self-styled "anarcho-syndicalist" and "communist" colleagues made a number of comments that struck me as disgraceful. Children? They are "fuck--g children". Marriage? It's like "rape, and a concentration camp." And get this: American women were "thrown out" of factories when soldiers came back from the war in 1945!
. William & João. Well, as anyone who has read about post-WW2 history will know, "At the end of World War Two, those women who had found alternate employment from the normal for women, lost their jobs." (1)
. A. Then, on April 4, the panel presenting Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere handed out a comparison between Neoconservatives and ... Stalinism. That these guys know as much about history as I know about nuclear fusion is beside the point. After all, they can read Anne Appelbaum's Gulag: A History (New York: Random House, 2003), where the number of victims is estimated at well over 18 million (between 1929 and 1953.)
. W & J. Actually, we have read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's, The Gulag Archipelago, the book that brought the notion of gulag to the Western World. It may be interesting to point out that Solzhenitsyn was a major supporter of fascism both in Spain and Portugal, bemoaning the liberation of Portugal's colonies in 1974.
. A. Is it about the sour taste of (electoral) defeat? In a sense, yes. My liberal friends are very fond of democracy -- only when they win. When they lose, America is not such a democratic nation after all.
. W & J. True, your "liberal" friends ARE very fond of democracy. Defining democracy as "everyone being able to vote and to having their vote count", as opposed to both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections, in which people where prevented from voting and voting results were manipulated by companies that provided the voting machines (not to mention that the head of a company [Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc.] vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."] (2) If the Diebold election episode isn't enough to convince you, perhaps you would like to know that "it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error." The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are, according to [Dr. Steven F.] Freeman, "250,000,000 to one." That's 250 MILLION to ONE. (3)
. A. Interesting. But the problem, I'm afraid, runs deeper than that. I am beginning to suspect that the so-called "post-modern" culture is making destructive inroads into the minds of some of my younger colleagues.
. W & J. Possibly true. The culture that is provided by media outlets nowadays truly does tend to promote ignorance. Worth noting is the fact that this culture is provided by 5 major corporations that are owned by major contributors to the Republican Party. The "filth" in entertainment that people over at Fox News complain about all the time is spewed out constantly by Fox TV. Interesting.
. A. If every opinion is a "construction" that can be "deconstructed", then there is little room for moral absolutes.
. W & J. We would define our philosophical edifice as being the result of reason. Reason breeds principles. But if you want to frame this according to "moral absolutes", then we'll say that we uphold an absolute respect for "justice" and "life", which means that everyone is entitled to the pursuit of happiness within the framework of (international) law. For us, everything is based on principle, not on number or convenience. The relativism lies with the people that want the rule of law when it prevents gay marriage but will brush legislation aside when detaining and interrogating random human beings (In another transcript [from the trials of the Guantanamo detainees], the unidentified president of a U.S. military tribunal bursts out: "I don't care about international law. I don't want to hear the words 'international law' again. We are not concerned with international law." (4) The relativism lies with people who define as "less tragic" the death of some thousand innocent people from Iraq and Afghanistan as compared to millions in Russia. Our "moral absolute" defines both situations as equally tragic.
. A. Everything is relative. Anything compares with anything. Neo-conservatives, a group of brilliant, hard-working, honest intellectuals are thus compared to history's bloodiest mass-murderer. The death of one terrorist who plots to massacre thousands of civilians equals the destruction of eigtheen million innocent citizens. Et voilà!
. W & J. Neocons can be either brilliant or honest. They can't be both. If they are honest, then Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice truly did believe the WMDs justification, the "ties to Al-Qaeda" rationale and the proposition that it would take less troops and less money to occupy Iraq than to liberate it. That means they're not brilliant, they're incompetent at best, retarded at worst. If they truly are brilliant, then all of this is an intricate manipulative plot to justify a war with a profit motivation. Does this strike you as honest? Taking into account the track record of these people during the Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, as well as their ties to oil and energy industries, we're more inclined to believe the "brilliant" hypothesis. Intellectuals? Probably not. Engineers of destruction? Sounds about right.
. A. The fact that neo-conservatives were instrumental in promoting democracy in Afghanistan and Irak --with revolutionary ripple effects around the world, from Lebanon to Kyrgyzstan-- leaves my liberal colleagues completely indifferent.
. W & J. Supporting democracy would mean not supporting dictatorial rule to start with. The George W. Bush administration's support for the Taliban up until 9/11 and the arms sales to Iraq by both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations (that allowed the gassing of Kurds during Saddam's al-Anfal Campaign from 1986 to 1989) demolish the argument that neocons have tried to promote democracy anywhere. If you add the cases of Nicaragua's Contras, the Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor in 1991 under Suharto's occupation and the convenient overlook of totalitarian and brutal regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan or Chile (to name a few), it's pretty obvious that democracy is not even a faint concern for these people. There is a whiff of ethno-centrism here, not to mention the "ripple effects" logical Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle ("Oaks are trees. Pines as trees. Therefore, pines are oaks." – "We invaded Iraq, a country in the middle East. Lebanon, a country in the Middle East, is in turmoil. Therefore, Lebanon is in turmoil because we invaded Iraq.")
. A. There is a whiff of ethno-centrism here, as if democracy in regions far from our civilized world should not be a concern to us.
. W & J. Coming from someone who dubs people from non-westernized civilizations "savages who don't even have toilet paper" (in class discussion, March 21st), that's a really valid insult.
. A. But let's tell it like it is: anti-democracy liberals are reactionaries; neo-cons are revolutionaries.
. W & J. After all we have said, your point has by now been rendered moot.
. A. To sum up: the "fuck--g children" episode and the comparison "Stalin-Neocons" do worry me, because I have developed a sincere affection for UvA's American Studies Program. The risk is that the program becomes irrelevant. If the competition reads Huntington instead of Freud, my guess is that students will choose the competition.
. W & J. To sum up: the "fucking chil--en" episode doesn't really worry us, because we truly do believe in free speech. The comparison "Stalin-Neocons", that started off as an attempt to create a passionate discussion, has actually grown into a frighteningly valid point: "lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering [of Conservative leaders meeting in Washington] that [Supreme Court Justice] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, 'upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.' Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said. The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." (5)
(1) See "Women and World War Two"
(2) Julie Carr Smyth: "Voting Machine Controversy", Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 28, 2003.
(3) "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy", BuzzFlash.com, November 11, 2004.
(4) Pete Yost & Matt Kelley: "Records Give Voice to Guantanamo Detainees", Associated Press, April 9, 2005.
(5) Danda Milbank: "And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty", Washington Post, April 9, 2005.
# posted by Agustin @ 2:25 PM 
