Date: Sun, 04 Apr 1999 10:36:28 -0700
From: "Marlene R. Atleo" <maratleo-AT-island.net>
Subject: Re: Kosovo, Bombs and Imperialism


Hi Tim & al
Glad we weren't the only ones deconstructing the "tomahawks"..although ours
was at the supper table of a First Nations household....
>"Tomahawk cruise missile", a phrase repeated so often that >nobody had
stopped to think about the implications, and >contradictions, of
appropriating the sign of an earlier opponent's >"savagery" (which is
itself the sign of an earlier projection -- in the >discourse of "scalping"
especially). 

and I must agree that theory is critical because it allows us to distance
ourselves just enough to possibly catch a glimps into what might be going
on...it becomes unbearable and immobilizing otherwise.....that is what
theory is for/about at some level...so that we can try to understand what
is happening to initiate some sort of action....

while recognizing of course that for some the "distancing" of theory may be
so great that the real world doesn't impinge at all...
>ideology constructs us as subjects through the deployment of >"common
sense" -- 
as an adult educator it is precisely this "common sense" that is often the
focus of my classroom praxis..that my students examine for interests and
hidden agendas.....how can I as an educator ensure that I am not as much
the problem as a potential means to a solution...it makes me wonder when
the likes of 
>Ella Shohat says that postcolonial studies is
>actually post-anticolonial nationalism (after the independence struggle,
>the disillusion with the failures of the postcolonial state).  

and understand how to participate with de-colonizing states in the initial
struggle, which of necessity needs to be allowed a nationalist phase.....to
consolidate identity before it can move on to a postcolonial phase....

Certainly the ""good" national liberation struggles we have canonized ",
such as the American Revolution would likely bring bombing these days....
what is  a ""good" or "just" war in this case (Lawrence
Phillips......(especially when Laura Secord has been commodified and is
better known for "her" corporate line of opera cremes (cholcolates) than
for her role as a "Canadian" in the War of 1812)...  

And then there is the US (I am situated on the West Coast of British
Columbia, Canada)....promoting democratic ideology based on Deweian
instrumental pragmatism...and I have to ask.....what are the interests
here......whose moral high ground.....the smokescreen of mythology raised
by the vestiges of Empire that is NATO has got to be in it for
something.....propelled by centeries of empire-think....

then the "conspiracy" of Danny Butt's post from New Zealand, (wich I seem
to recall considers itself the first democracy) makes just a little
sense.....the Vestiges of Empire Alliance - NATO is working still to
consolidate interests because the conceptual framework of empire in which
the nation state is a product of capital interests must feed its ravinous
needs for resources to maintain that materializing momentum....

the story line changes but the plot remains the same....
real people again are merely fodder in the light of history....


********************************************************
Marlene Atleo, BHE, MA PhD  (cand) Educational Studies, UBC
***********************************************************
Education is an act of love, and thus an act of courage.  It cannot fear
the analysis of reality, or, under pain of revealing itself as a farce,
avoid creative [critical] discussion. Paulo Friere (1973.p.38)


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