The argument about PC is getting a bit contentious, and perhaps
unproductive, in that personal accusations are being tossed around, without
attention being paid to the issues under discussion.  Can I respectfully
request that accusations directed against the PERSON of the speaker be
dispensed with (not for myself, but for all others on the list).

It seems to me that one side is accusing the other being bourgeois liberals,
while the tendency is to return fire by using the PC label.  The whole point
of the discussion, I thought was to explore what PC was.



DP wrote:

<< As to US policy causing
thousands of deaths of the innocent, etc., why don't you
compare those numbers to the hundreds of thousands
slaughtered in third-world countries?  (There are, of course,
plenty of ignoramuses who will say the US caused all that
too.)  >>

As regards the first question, I don't think anyone here is saying that the
governments of Angola, Chile, Pakistan, Iran, Cuba, and Congo-Kinshasa
murder a lower number of their citizens on a per capita basis.  You are less
likely to be murdered by your government if you live in the US than if you
live in the Third World.

So that question, "why don't we compare . . . to the hundred of thousand
slaughtered in third world countries," seems irrelevant.

You say "(There are, of course, plenty of ignoramuses who will say the US
caused all that too.)  >>

The US did not cause "all that." Who says so?  But you will agree, will you
not, that simply in the case of Guatemala, the US is largely responsible for
the deaths of over 200,000 citizens in that country alone.  From 1944-1954,
for the first time in its history, Guatemala had a democratic government,
with a very high degree of press freedom, freedom to organize, and freedom
of assembly, and democratic elections.  When Arbenz, the democratically
elected president tried to nationalize the land "owned" by United Fruit, the
US sponsored a direct intervention.  The government was overthrown, and
military backing was given to a regime which is probably the most murderous
in Latin American History.  If you are familiar with that history, then let
us know (if not, read the book, "Bitter Fruit").

I think JB is correct in taking you to task, though he might do well to
choose some of his words, a bit more carefully.


JB wrote:

<<gee whiz.... and you have the chutzpah to say my understanding of history
is appalling!   as I say, your jingoistic stance is not unusual -- scratch a
liberal and you find a crazed nationalist, willing to ignore millions of
deaths directly attributed to American intervention -- Chile, El Salvador,
Viet Nam, Iraq & Iran, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Cuba, Panama,
Granada, various African countries.....>>

He is correct, and his recommendation that we read Chomsky is apropos.
Chomsky's most recent book on "Humanitarian Interventionism" in Kosovo is
another case in point.  Over 40,000 Kurds have died in Turkey over the past
seven years, with US military equipment being used as the prime tool.  I
visited the Kurdish regions of Turkey in mid eighties and I can say for a
fact that Kurds were (and are) treated far worse than the Kosovar Albanians
ever were by the Serbs, in terms of numbers killed, and the abridgment of
rights (even speaking, or teaching the Kurdish language has been for a long
time a "torturable offense" in Turkey-- I have seen crowds of Kurds in plain
daylight, at a bustop in Diyabakir, stop speaking Kurdish to each other, and
change to Turkish when a Turkish policeman walks by, or even when an
ordinary Turk comes near the crowd).  The US has military bases in Diyabikir
and throughout that region, and cares not a fig how many Kurds are shot down
in cold blood, tortured, or jailed, simply for teaching a Kurdish language
class.) The very LEAST the US should do is stop providing the weapons.


  <<you have to willfully embrace ignorance in
order to maintain the position you do, and in this sense -- & this sense
only
-- you're much more like Pound, whose blindness towards fascism caused him
to
willfully ignore its consequences, than I could ever be.>>

I am not sure if this is correct, but I wonder if you are aware such
things--please tell us if you are-- and if you are, how you can side with
the police, when protestors in Philadelphia and Washington and Seattle
protest the WTO, Excessive US military expenditure, moving factories to
countries where workers are paid 20 cents an hour ... and so on?   Please
explain.

<<But I'm glad we're
having this little discussion, I enjoy smoking you closet right-wingers out
into the open where anyone with even a smattering of recent history can see
what a dupe you are, and what tripe you're willing to swallow so you can
continue enjoy your *middle-class* consumerism without the appropriate guilt
feelings that nearly everything you eat or wear is drenched in blood. >>

I would echo this sentiment, though perhaps with a different emphasis.
Given that you admit to enjoying your "consumerism", what responsibility do
you think citizens of the world's superpower have in defying, countering,
pointing out, protesting, resisting or changing a system which does have so
much blood on its hands?  Be specific.  Do you think we should vote for
Gore, or Nader, or propagate an ideology which says, lets only increase our
military spending by ten billion next year?  Tell us what kind of reform you
believe in, if any?  (Unless you think that the best thing to do is simply
throw protesting youth in Jail).

<<I can only encourage you to continue to respond.  btw, I found your
concern about what one can say in Franco's Spain laughable in the light of
the capacities of the NSA (that's the National Security Agency) to monitor
every single telephone and electronic message of any american.  as for free
speech, as long as folks are uttering the banal propaganda idiocies that you
engage in, there's no need to censure you. >>

I agree that life in Franco's Spain, in Middle Eastern Terrorists States
(whether of the right or left) , or in China is worse than life in the US in
a whole host of areas. But that is not the point is it?  JB is right, that
self-censorship, corporate media censorship, oversight by the advertising
interests of the mainstream media (to keep the media pro-Big Business), an
unholy alliance between reporters and big business and politicians--- all
these factors render our much lauded freedom of speech virtually powerless
in the face of entrenched plutocrats.  Even in Costa Rica, where there is
more press freedom than in the US, they have the saying, "Freedom of the
press is for those who can afford to own one."  I HIGHLY RECOMMEND Chomsky's
  Manufacture of Consent, if you have not read it.

<<but I would be remiss if I didn't at least
point you in a driection in which you could rectify your woeful
misconceptions; I can recommend several books to add to your reading list:
*Manufacturing Consent* by Noam Chomsky, or *Killing Hope: US Military and
CIA interventions Since World War ll* by William Blum. >>

You might also want to read Howard Zinn, listen to a few Ralph Nader
speeches, go to www.freespeech.org and listen to Mumia Abu Jamals speeches
available on audio files.  HE is in jail for his poltical views, which are
extremely threatening to the powers that be.




<<I should warn you
though; reading these books will probably put you off your feed for a few
days.  the only anodyne to this loss of appetite is for you to dismiss the
authors as just more examples of *leftist ignoramuses* -- which one can do
if one has a predilection, as you seem to have, of coyly averting one's eyes
from the facts.>>

Yes.  Facts, especially the facts which are filtered out by the mainstream
media, and unfortunately by the vast majority of educators, who still want
to teach people that capitalism in its current form is essentially a perfect
system for all time, which can modified with a few small corrections.

Educators of ALL PEOPLE should have the guts, the intelligence, and the
gumption to search out radically different alternatives, to teach people to
think, and not to end up parroting the mainstream media perspectives about
scary radical demonstrators who beat up on poor defenseless policemen, and
try to keep politicoes like Bush from "exercising their free speech rights".

No matter how conservative you may be, you can not tell me that in all
justice, you would not like to see George W. Bush hit in the face with a
revolutionary pie, and kept from telling us once more (for the billionth
time), "I think the surplus belongs to the people, not to the government,"
when of course, what he really means is, the surplus belongs to the
plutocracy and not to the people.


---Wei




________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com