[Peace-discuss] New P4P sign suggestions

[Margaret E. Kosal]

mornin' Carl & peace-discuss list-folk -

At 00:11 2/28/2003 -0600, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>Margaret--
>
>The point of an "incubator story" is to engender hatred against an
>official enemy by encouraging sympathy for his victims.

The incubator story was manipulated PR.  It was false.
Intent matters; no one is disputing this.  I'm not sure why you keep 
relying on this?

>Such stories work
>best, of course, when there really are victims, and you don't have to lie
>about it too much.  So (perhaps) the Bush administration finds real
>victims (East Timorese, oppressed Iraqis) and gets them to write about
>their sufferings so that one reflects (what no one doubts) that it would
>be good to get rid of the official enemy.

How is what you are describing above any different than an Amnesty 
International report, a Pilger film or a Voices in the Wilderness talk 
?  Why did Amy Goodwin and Jeremy Scahill go to East Timor?  What was the 
purpose of Democracy NOW's "Drilling and Killing"?  To educate and engender 
passion for a cause.  Both you and I agree with those causes and 
intents.  Both you and I disagree with the intent of Bush/Blair et al. 
manipulating the suffering of Iraqi or Afghani people for their benefit.

You seem to be failing to separate the real experiences of torture victims 
and oppressed people from use of those experiences.  No one is pushing 
forward the idea that intent does *not* matter.

Quite the contrary, we are struggling to grapple with the more 
sophisticated issue of disentangling different uses of intent - 'the 
incubator story' from the Christian Science Monitor piece, Dubya citing 
'freeing women from burka's' in Afghanistan from the human rights abuses in 
Iraq.

(Now, if you dismiss every person who wants to consider the human rights 
concerns of Iraqi people as a tool of the US hegemonic corporate-military 
structure, then that attempt to disentangle the two is irrelevant .... but 
I really don't think that is your intent.)

I do not believe that you are so quickly are disregarding the direct 
experiences of those people who are suffering as it appears in your 
responses and that you really don't want to ignore the attempts to 
reconcile the dissonance that CSM piece, while smarmily labelling 
"cappucino cafes" anti-war protestors, highlights?  (Come on Carl, when it 
comes to snide comments toward groups, you're hardly above reproach.)

It is so much easier to just label anything that challenges as 
propaganda.  Differentiating is harder - particularly when, as you pointed 
out, truth can be used for propaganda.

Repeating over & over amongst ourselves the easy stuff -- which Carl, we 
all do fully cogitate -- serves a valuable purpose to create 
unity/community and establish our foundations, but I want to pursue more 
challenging aspects ... especially when we are intellectually wrangling on 
an email list over 6000 miles from where the Tigris and Euphrates converge.

Namaste,
Margaret

p.s. Glad you found Chomsky's response in the Guardian purposeful :-)