[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Anti-Empire Report, May 12, 2010

[C. G. Estabrook]

I think it would be a mistake to include either (a) there's nothing unique about 
the current political situation or (b) it's all because people are stupid. 
There certainly are parallels between anti-communism and anti-terrorism - but 
that's because they were both massive propaganda enterprises of the American 
ascendancy.

Chomsky's comments have certainly been misinterpreted.  He makes two points, 
both correct it seems to me: (a) the grievances motivating the teaparty movement 
are real; and (b) the Left in this country has allowed the Right to offer (mad 
and dangerous) interpretations of those grievances.

Simply ridiculing the teaparty movement - or dismissing it with contempt as 
simply low-class racism - is also mad and dangerous.  A flood of (quite 
legitimate) popular distress - dammed up by liberal indifference and denied a 
political spillway - will burst through in crazy and far more dangerous ways.

Of course the tea party movement is not a working class uprising. The 
teapartiers are, in classical terms, mainly petty bourgeois - but with 
substantial appeal to the working class, as the Nazis were.  The crucial point 
about them is that, while they amount to about 18% of the population (according 
to a NYT survey), 48% of the population sympathize with their attitudes and 
beliefs (as compared with 44% for Obama).

What the left should be doing is what it did in the 1930s, when there was also a 
very dangerous nativist movement, but it was countered by working class 
organizing - not contempt for the stupidity of the masses. --CGE


On 5/12/10 6:19 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
>> ... *Anti-Empire Report *May 12, 2010 William Blum www.killinghope.org
>> <http://www.killinghope.org/> *Terminally-dumb people have always been
>> with us of course. It can’t be that we’ve suddenly gone stupid.* ... If
>> you shake your head and roll your eyes at the nonsense coming out of the
>> Teabagger followers of Sarah “Africa is a country” Palin and other
>> intellectual giants like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh ... If you have
>> thoughts of moving abroad after the latest silly lies and fantasies like
>> “Obama the Marxist” and “Obama the antichrist” ... If you share Noam
>> Chomsky’s feeling: "I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime”
>> ... keep in mind that the right wing has long been at least as stupid and
>> as mean-spirited...

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