File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2001/bhaskar.0109, message 23


Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 08:22:32 +1000
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: Re: BHA: Stop the rush to war


Of course Critical Realism has much to say about what has happened in New 
York and what will happen this week. But in a sense the move to analysis - 
to spin the cool web of language- seems a betrayal of the suffering we have 
seen. However analyze is precisely what we must do if we are to have any 
hope of preventing more tragedies, for, as is all too obvious, reason and 
rationality are not in control now.  When George Bush - Vietnam war dodger 
extraordinary - climbs upon a heap of rubble clinging onto a worker to 
promise his nation vengeance and when the working class cheer as if they 
were hailing a touch down or a medal at the Games then we know that the 
blood dimmed tide is about to be loosed.

Moreover a range of organisations including Friends of the Earth and the 
Sierra Club have just announced that they are calling off all participation 
in the protests planned for Washington this month.  Just as before WW1 
loyalty to the nation and the leader is again being placed before the 
interests of humanity.

However I am inclined to think that it is indeed our fate to live through 
history being repeated as farce.  For Bush, who has nothing to offer us, 
but the cunning of a rat that lurks in shit houses, is now being presented 
as the warrior for Good who will lead the assault against the citadel of 
Evil.  In reality (sic) what we will see is the American Army deploy its 
massive fire power against a people (The Afghanis) who are the day to day 
victims of the monster that the Frankensteins of the military industrial 
complex in the USA largely created.

There is much more to be said here.  The process of detotalisation at 3L is 
almost absolute in the propaganda of the West. Similarly the elimination of 
the 'universal' of the concrete universal denies the common core humanity 
that all of us share. But above all it is the taboo that is being placed 
over explanatory critique that is perhaps the most damaging.  To ask 'why?' 
now in the USA  and to insist on outlining the totality within which the 
bombings of the WTC can actually be understood, is to be very brave indeed.

But anything else is just another 'trahaison des clercs'.

regards

Gary



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