[Peace-discuss] Being and nothingness among American murderers

[E. Wayne Johnson]

"Our hands are tied..."

(if only they were...)


C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> Actually, there is at least one Sartrean notion that's appropriate to 
> the Obamans.  Jean-Paul spoke of what he called "bourgeois bad faith": 
> "a paradoxical internal duality of consciousness in which 
> consciousness thinks of itself as a thing at the same time that it 
> gives covert recognition to its freedom." Le fond de l'affaire is that 
> claims that one is not free to act are usually bogus.  "We were never 
> freer than under the Occupation," he wrote, scandalously.
>
> Try that on those defenders of Obama who keep saying their man would 
> like to do the right thing, but just can't.
>
> Sartre, in an interview with the NYRB when he was 70, said, 
> "Naturally, in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, 
> large and small, for one reason or another, but at the heart of it 
> all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical 
> enough."  Seems right.  --CGE
>
>
> E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
>> under-score.
>>
>> The cognitive dissonance does certainly threaten to wash the victims 
>> over the
>> cliff of existential despair... a likely fitting end point to 
>> relativism...
>>
>> I think they Were All Bozos on that Bus.  How many empty seats?
>>
>> "The Naked Lunch" might be out of print or out of vogue or something. Or
>> maybe they are fighting back by dropping pirated and bootleg copies of
>> "Nausea:"
>>
>> C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>> As the administration rapidly expands its illegal war in Pakistan, 
>>> its propaganda cover slips like a bad toupee.
>>>
>>> The US has to pretend we're killing "terrorists" in AfPak (there's 
>>> no Congressional authorization for anything else) when in fact we're 
>>> fighting
>>> the resistance to US control of the entire Middle East.
>>>
>>> The word this week was "existential." Tangling her syntax in a way that
>>> might interest a psychoanalyst, SecState Clinton told a House 
>>> committee, "I
>>> think that we can not underscore [underestimate?] the seriousness of 
>>> the
>>> existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan." (Maybe she meant
>>> "underscore enough.")
>>>
>>> "Existential threat" is a term of art from Israeli propaganda: the 
>>> nuclear-armed Israeli government insists that its existence is 
>>> constantly
>>> threatened by non-nuclear states and of course Gazan schoolchildren 
>>> (and in
>>> a sense it is).
>>>
>>> But the memo on "existential" has clearly gone around in the Obama 
>>> administration: "US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has warned 
>>> Pakistan that
>>> the Taleban poses an 'existential threat to the democratic 
>>> government of
>>> the country'" [BBC]; "Gen. David Petraeus warned Congress Friday 
>>> that the
>>> United States faces a 'tough road" ahead ... what has been missing 
>>> still is
>>> “the kind of whole-of-government approach that would result from a 
>>> complete
>>> commitment by the Pakistani senior leaders ... that will be 
>>> necessary to
>>> face up what is again an existential threat to Pakistan” [Politico].
>>>
>>> But perhaps the American officials simply mean that the sneaky 
>>> Taliban are
>>> about to distribute the works of J.-P. Sartre to unsuspecting 
>>> Pakistanis.
>>> That would make more sense than what they're actually saying.  --CGE 
>>> _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss 
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>>>
>>>
>>
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>
>