Khmer Rouge (anti-communist thread)
Dänk 1010011010
Cambodia and the stories I heard about the atrocities committed by Pol
Pot and the communist Khmer Rouge.
This particular thread is for discussing the crimes of the Khmer
Rouge, as well as other Communist dictatorships.
The Khmer Rouge killed almost everyone with an education - including
those who could read and write - yet relied on written documents to
carry out its governmental duties. Pol Pot himself had studied in
France, yet ordered the executions of all Cambodians who spoke French.
The excerpts from the following article describe the KR's approach to
(re-)education, and I'm hoping that some of you will notice the
similarities to attempts by American leftists to control the media and
the educational process:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
http://www.yale.edu/cgp/literacyandeducation.html
"The notion that reading and writing were entirely forbidden under the
Khmer Rouge is inaccurate. Not only did the Khmer Rouge produce
thousands of pages of written documents, but they also intended to
develop an educational system to teach literacy. This is consistent
with the fact that Democratic Kampuchea was a communist-inspired
regime that looked to the policies of communist revolutions elsewhere
for models of reorganizing society. When exploring the Khmer Rouge
educational strategy, it is necessary to understand that the
destruction of the educational system was against all Marxist
traditions and rules. In general, education is of primary importance
within Marxist theory; together with the revolution within the
economic field and political organization, cultural and educational
revolutions are the center of practical policy of communist regimes in
building new society. Thus, it is clear that the Khmer Rouge were
not, in principle, afraid of the ability of common people to read and
write."
"It was, therefore, what and how one read, rather than the ability to
read and write, that made certain kinds of people suspect. As with
every other aspect of daily life, the Party Center wanted to be in
complete control of how, when and what people wrote, read, and
thought."
"In order for the Party to pursue its ideological objectives of first
'wiping the slate clean' and then 'writing on the slate,' it had to
maintain control over the population both physically and mentally."
"One of the purposes of [the KR-controlled] schools was to teach the
population the 'correct' way to read and write. The correct way to
read was to read as a 'peasant'. ... That is, one should read in an
uncritical and passive way, taking things at face value and not
questioning the meaning or source of the text."
"There were also reasons for the Party to be wary of using written
propaganda. If written propaganda had been widely distributed during
the regime's early stages, 'new people' would have had the role of
disseminating its message to the base people, who were, in many cases,
illiterate. This would have posed a threat to the Party's authority.
It was therefore necessary to assert firm control over printed
materials and the way they were received before large scale efforts to
produce and disseminate written propaganda could take place. The
Khmer Rouge accomplished this first by eliminating all those who read
'incorrectly,' and second by educating the population on how to read
'correctly,' beginning with children and base people."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
5295 Dead, 428 since 1/20/09
> In several other threads I've been discussing my recent trip to Cambodia
> and the stories I heard about the atrocities committed by Pol Pot and
> the communist Khmer Rouge.
>
> This particular thread is for discussing the crimes of the Khmer Rouge,
> as well as other Communist dictatorships.
>
> The Khmer Rouge killed almost everyone with an education - including
> those who could read and write - yet relied on written documents to
> carry out its governmental duties. Pol Pot himself had studied in
> France, yet ordered the executions of all Cambodians who spoke French.
Right. I'm calling bullshit on you again.
Cambodia was a French colony from 1863 to 1953, and French was the
offical language of the place for all that time. Twenty years later, a
large percentage of the population, educated or not, spoke French.
Anarcissie
<90ca4ce1-e519-43b5...@13g2000prl.google
groups.com>,
D�nk 1010011010 <dan...@rocketmail.com> wrote:
> In several other threads I've been discussing my recent trip to
> Cambodia and the stories I heard about the atrocities committed by Pol
> Pot and the communist Khmer Rouge.
You don't seem to have anything new to say, so
why bother? Probably, every single person who
bothers to read stuff in these newsgroups has
heard dozens, if not hundreds, of Khmer Rouge
atrocity stories, and has come to whatever
conclusion they're going to come to many years
ago. The present exercise seems pretty
vacuous, even as trolling.
James A. Donald
On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:08:34 -0800 (PST), Dänk
1010011010
> The Khmer Rouge killed almost everyone with an
> education - including those who could read and write -
> yet relied on written documents to carry out its
> governmental duties. Pol Pot himself had studied in
> France, yet ordered the executions of all Cambodians
> who spoke French.
This was not the result of any conscious intent to kill
all educated people, rather the Khmer Rouge tended to be
automatically suspicious of anyone with an education,
especially anyone foreign educated, and so killed them
for slacking, for being part of vast conspiracies to
wreck the work, for being CIA agents, and so on and so
forth. When things went wrong, they would find some
people to blame and kill them, and it frequently wound
up being educated people, frequently educated members of
the Khmer Rouge.
Educated people in the Khmer Rouge were in the same
situation as Jewish Bolsheviks. The Old Bolsheviks were
overwhelmingly Jewish, and the Khmer Rouge
overwhelmingly highly educated. The old Bolsheviks were
intensely suspicious of Jews, and the Khmer Rouge
intensely suspicious of highly educated people. As a
result the Jews purged each other and the educated
people purged each other.
One observes the same phenomenon among today's American
left. Consider the recent attempt to frame a bunch of
Duke University athletes for being rich white American
males therefore rapists. Who hated them for being rich
white males? Answer: The faculty of Duke University,
also rich mostly rich white American males.
The Khmer Rouge had practices like one way porterage -
they would grab a bunch of people to carry stuff, then
kill them at the destination because they did not want
to supervise them further, and did not want them to run
around loose. Educated people tended to get picked for
such jobs. Again, this was not a consciously policy of
extermination, rather it was more like the recent
financial crisis in the US where no money down loans
somehow tended to preferentially favor blacks and
hispanics, and disfavor whites and asians.
Dänk 1010011010
wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:08:34 -0800, Dänk 1010011010 wrote:
> > The Khmer Rouge killed almost everyone with an education - including
> > those who could read and write - yet relied on written documents to
> > carry out its governmental duties. Pol Pot himself had studied in
> > France, yet ordered the executions of all Cambodians who spoke French.
>
> Right. I'm calling bullshit on you again.
>
> Cambodia was a French colony from 1863 to 1953, and French was the
> offical language of the place for all that time. Twenty years later, a
> large percentage of the population, educated or not, spoke French.
All the sources I've seen say that the Khmer Rouge killed those who
spoke French. Remember that Pol Pot wanted to destroy all traces of
Cambodia's colonial past and create a new utopian communist
civilization that would begin in 'Year Zero' (1975). Anyone educated
in the old pre-revolutionary ways (except members of the Khmer Rouge)
was killed. The irony here is that Pol Pot himself was well-educated,
spoke French, studied abroad, and even chose the French word
'rouge' (red) to describe his movement.
Here is one source that describes the execution of French-speaking
Cambodians:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/khmeryears/camps.html
"Khmer Rouge cadres would look for any excuse to kill new people. If
you spoke French, you would die. If you were educated, you would
die. If you wore glasses, you would die. If you practiced Buddhism,
you would die. Families with connections to previous Cambodian
governments were especially susceptible to ill treatment; while former
soldiers and civil servants were usually summarily executed, their
families were often forced to work themselves to death. Those who
managed to survive for a time would eventually be charged as associate
enemies of the state and sent to the killing fields."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[Note: The term 'new people' refers to the city residents who were
evacuated to the countryside, as opposed to 'old people' who were the
illiterate peasants with little or no exposure to Western education or
foreign customs, and were thus seen as ideologically pure and spared
from execution.]
James A. Donald
<de...@dead.com> wrote:
> Right. I'm calling bullshit on you again.
>
> Cambodia was a French colony from 1863 to 1953, and French was the
> offical language of the place for all that time. Twenty years later, a
> large percentage of the population, educated or not, spoke French.
What Pol Pot ordered in so many words is unclear. What is clear is
that those who survived, hid their ability to speak French.
It does not appear to be literally true that Pol Pot ordered the
execution of everyone who spoke French, but it is certainly true that
during communist rule, anyone who spoke french was apt to be killed,
Dänk 1010011010
> Educated people in the Khmer Rouge were in the same
> situation as Jewish Bolsheviks. The Old Bolsheviks were
> overwhelmingly Jewish, and the Khmer Rouge
> overwhelmingly highly educated. The old Bolsheviks were
> intensely suspicious of Jews, and the Khmer Rouge
> intensely suspicious of highly educated people. As a
> result the Jews purged each other and the educated
> people purged each other.
>
> One observes the same phenomenon among today's American
> left. Consider the recent attempt to frame a bunch of
> Duke University athletes for being rich white American
> males therefore rapists. Who hated them for being rich
> white males? Answer: The faculty of Duke University,
> also rich mostly rich white American males.
Thank you! The intent of this thread was not only to discuss the
crimes of communism, but also to get people to notice the similarities
between communist ideology and that of the U.S. Democrat party and
leftism in general.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"Those who are most sensitive about 'politically incorrect'
terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant,
abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of
whom do not even belong to any 'oppressed' group but come from
privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its
stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment
with
comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual, white
males from middle-class families."
-- Industrial Society and Its Future
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dan Clore
>>> The Khmer Rouge killed almost everyone with an education -
>>> including those who could read and write - yet relied on written
>>> documents to carry out its governmental duties. Pol Pot himself
>>> had studied in France, yet ordered the executions of all
>>> Cambodians who spoke French.
>> Right. I'm calling bullshit on you again.
>>
>> Cambodia was a French colony from 1863 to 1953, and French was the
>> offical language of the place for all that time. Twenty years
>> later, a large percentage of the population, educated or not, spoke
>> French.
>
> All the sources I've seen say that the Khmer Rouge killed those who
> spoke French. Remember that Pol Pot wanted to destroy all traces of
> Cambodia's colonial past and create a new utopian communist
> civilization that would begin in 'Year Zero' (1975). Anyone educated
> in the old pre-revolutionary ways (except members of the Khmer
> Rouge) was killed. The irony here is that Pol Pot himself was
> well-educated, spoke French, studied abroad, and even chose the
> French word 'rouge' (red) to describe his movement.
I think it was Sihanouk who labeled them "Khmer Rouge", not the Khmer
Rouge themselves.
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord We�rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
James A. Donald
<dan...@rocketmail.com> wrote:
> All the sources I've seen say that the Khmer Rouge killed those who
> spoke French. Remember that Pol Pot wanted to destroy all traces of
> Cambodia's colonial past and create a new utopian communist
> civilization that would begin in 'Year Zero' (1975). Anyone educated
> in the old pre-revolutionary ways (except members of the Khmer Rouge)
> was killed.
Being a member of the Khmer Rouge did not make one safe, it may well
have made one less safe.
It is not clear that killing French speakers was conscious official
policy, and I doubt that it was official policy, was knowingly
intended. It was, however, frequent actual practice, the effect,
whether intended or unintended, of a conscious official policy of
eradicating the oppressive and imperialist past.
In our society, we have a similar policy of erasing the past. The
writings of dead white males are deemed inherently dangerous,
subversive, and corrupting. Knowledge of their writings is viewed as
suspicious. Such knowledge will not get you executed, but may well
adversely affect your career.
5306 Dead, 439 since 1/20/09
<jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
>On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:58:48 -0800 (PST), D�nk 1010011010
Looks like we actually agree on something. I adamantly oppose taking
books out of libraries because they aren't politically correct.
Doesn't matter if it's Mark Twain or Adolf Hitler.
A lot of old cartoons had racial stereotypes in 'em, and they don't
show them on the cartoon shows. Which is fine--young children are
impressionable and you don't want to be sending that kind of message.
But don't make those old 'toons "unhappen". They're part of our
history, and should be available to adults to view.
>
James A. Donald
> I think it was Sihanouk who labeled them "Khmer
> Rouge", not the Khmer Rouge themselves.
Communism is conspiratorial. Communist organizations
have no name at all, and far too many names.
Anarcissie
<942ad7fb-b5bd-49b9...@k19g2000pro.googl
egroups.com>,
D�nk 1010011010 <dan...@rocketmail.com> wrote:
> On Dec 24, 1:56�am, James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
> > Educated people in the Khmer Rouge were in the same
> > situation as Jewish Bolsheviks. �The Old Bolsheviks were
> > overwhelmingly Jewish, and the Khmer Rouge
> > overwhelmingly highly educated. �The old Bolsheviks were
> > intensely suspicious of Jews, and the Khmer Rouge
> > intensely suspicious of highly educated people. �As a
> > result the Jews purged each other and the educated
> > people purged each other.
> >
> > One observes the same phenomenon among today's American
> > left. �Consider the recent attempt to frame a bunch of
> > Duke University athletes for being rich white American
> > males therefore rapists. Who hated them for being rich
> > white males? Answer: The faculty of Duke University,
> > also rich mostly rich white American males.
>
> Thank you! The intent of this thread was not only to discuss the
> crimes of communism, but also to get people to notice the similarities
> between communist ideology and that of the U.S. Democrat party and
> leftism in general.
Why stop with the Democrats?
5306 Dead, 439 since 1/20/09
In article
<942ad7fb-b5bd-49b9...@k19g2000pro.googl
egroups.com>,
Dänk 1010011010 <dan...@rocketmail.com> wrote:
He's a bircher. He sees commies everywhere that it's politically
convenient for him to see commies.
*Anarcissie*
wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Dec 2009 22:21:39 -0500, Anarcissie wrote:
>
> In article
> egroups.com>,
> Dänk 1010011010 <dank...@rocketmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Dec 24, 1:56 am, James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
> > > Educated people in the Khmer Rouge were in the same
> > > situation as Jewish Bolsheviks. The Old Bolsheviks were
> > > overwhelmingly Jewish, and the Khmer Rouge
> > > overwhelmingly highly educated. The old Bolsheviks were
> > > intensely suspicious of Jews, and the Khmer Rouge
> > > intensely suspicious of highly educated people. As a
> > > result the Jews purged each other and the educated
> > > people purged each other.
>
> > > One observes the same phenomenon among today's American
> > > left. Consider the recent attempt to frame a bunch of
> > > Duke University athletes for being rich white American
> > > males therefore rapists. Who hated them for being rich
> > > white males? Answer: The faculty of Duke University,
> > > also rich mostly rich white American males.
>
> > Thank you! The intent of this thread was not only to discuss the
> > crimes of communism, but also to get people to notice the similarities
> > between communist ideology and that of the U.S. Democrat party and
> > leftism in general.
> >Why stop with the Democrats?
>
> He's a bircher. He sees commies everywhere that it's politically
> convenient for him to see commies.
Well, it's a coherent, um, philosophy, or rather I
would say religion. If you believe that you have
the One True Faith, then all other people and ideas
are clearly the spawn of Satan, regardless of how
disparate they appear to be. Pol Pot, the
Democrats, the faculty of Duke -- the population
of Tasmania, people who play ping-pong, the
Saturnian ant men, elves and fairies, Hollywood,
Bollywood, whatever. Oh, and don't forget the
"postmodernists"....
Here's "All The Devils, All Together, All At Once"
Nov. 11, 2001,
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.politics.theory/msg/1b23c0eabc506219
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Sartre, Fanon, Foucault, Derrida,
Heidegger, Bin Laden, Pol Pot, Hardt, Negri, & the kitchen sink....
Postmodern Jihad
What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left.
by Waller R. Newell
MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about Osama bin Laden's Islamic
fundamentalism; less about the contribution of European Marxist
postmodernism to bin Laden's thinking. In fact, the ideology
by which al Qaeda justifies its acts of terror owes as much
to baleful trends in Western thought as it does to a perversion
of Muslim beliefs. Osama's doctrine of terror is partly a
Western export.
To see this, it is necessary to revisit the intellectual brew
that produced the ideology of Third World socialism in the
1960s. A key figure here is the German philosopher Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976), who not only helped shape several
generations of European leftists and founded postmodernism,
but also was a leading supporter of the Nazis. Heidegger argued
for the primacy of "peoples" in contrast with the alienating
individualism of "modernity." In order to escape the yoke of
Western capitalism and the "idle chatter" of constitutional
democracy, the "people" would have to return to its primordial
destiny through an act of violent revolutionary "resolve."
Heidegger saw in the Nazis just this return to the blood-and-soil
heritage of the authentic German people. Paradoxically, the
Nazis embraced technology at its most advanced to shatter the
iron cage of modernity and bring back the purity of the distant
past. And they embraced terror and violence to push beyond
the modern present--hence the term "postmodern"--and vault
the people back before modernity, with its individual liberties
and market economy, to the imagined collective austerity of
the feudal age.
This vision of the postmodernist revolution went straight from
Heidegger into the French postwar Left, especially the works
of Jean-Paul Sartre, eager apologist for Stalinism and the
Cultural Revolution in China. Sartre's protégé, the Algerian
writer Frantz Fanon, crystallized the Third World variant of
postmodernist revolution in "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961).
From there, it entered the world of Middle Eastern radicals.
Many of the leaders of the Shiite revolution in Iran that
deposed the modernizing shah and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini
to power in 1979 had studied Fanon's brand of Marxism. Ali
Shari'at, the Sorbonne-educated Iranian sociologist of religion
considered by many the intellectual father of the Shiite
revolution, translated "The Wretched of the Earth" and Sartre's
"Being and Nothingness into Persian." The Iranian revolution
was a synthesis of Islamic fundamentalism and European Third
World socialism.
In the postmodernist leftism of these revolutionaries, the
"people" supplanted Marx's proletariat as the agent of
revolution. Following Heidegger and Fanon, leaders like Lin
Piao, ideologist of the Red Guards in China, and Pol Pot,
student of leftist philosophy in France before becoming a
founder of the Khmer Rouge, justified revolution as a therapeutic
act by which non-Western peoples would regain the dignity they
had lost to colonial oppressors and to American-style materialism,
selfishness, and immorality. A purifying violence would purge
the people of egoism and hedonism and draw them back into a
primitive collective of self-sacrifice.
MANY ELEMENTS in the ideology of al Qaeda--set forth most
clearly in Osama bin Laden's 1996 "Declaration of War Against
America"--derive from this same mix. Indeed, in Arab intellectual
circles today, bin Laden is already being likened to an earlier
icon of Third World revolution who renounced a life of privilege
to head for the mountains and fight the American oppressor,
Che Guevara. According to Cairo journalist Issandr Elamsani,
Arab leftist intellectuals still see the world very much in
1960s terms. "They are all ex-Sorbonne, old Marxists," he
says, "who look at everything through a postcolonial prism."
Just as Heidegger wanted the German people to return to a
foggy, medieval, blood-and-soil collectivism purged of the
corruptions of modernity, and just as Pol Pot wanted Cambodia
to return to the Year Zero, so does Osama dream of returning
his world to the imagined purity of seventh-century Islam.
And just as Fanon argued that revolution can never accomplish
its goals through negotiation or peaceful reform, so does
Osama regard terror as good in itself, a therapeutic act,
quite apart from any concrete aim. The willingness to kill is
proof of one's purity.
According to journalist Robert Worth, writing in the New York
Times on the intellectual roots of Islamic terror, bin Laden
is poorly educated in Islamic theology. A wealthy playboy in
his youth, he fell under the influence of radical Arab
intellectuals of the 1960s who blended calls for Marxist
revolution with calls for a pure Islamic state.
Many of these men were imprisoned and executed for their
attacks on Arab regimes; Sayyid Qutb, for example, a major
figure in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, was executed in
Egypt in 1965. But their ideas lived on. Qutb's intellectual
progeny included Fathi Yakan, who likened the coming Islamic
revolution to the French and Russian revolutions, Abdullah
Azzam, a Palestinian activist killed in a car bombing in 1989,
and Safar Al-Hawali, a Saudi fundamentalist frequently jailed
by the Saudi government. As such men dreamed of a pure Islamic
state, European revolutionary ideology was seldom far from
their minds. Wrote Fathi Yakan, "The groundwork for the French
Revolution was laid by Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu;
the Communist Revolution realized plans set by Marx, Engels
and Lenin....The same holds true for us as well."
The influence of Qutb's "Signposts on the Road" (1964) is
clearly traceable in pronouncements by Islamic Jihad, the
group that would justify its assassination of Egyptian president
Anwar Sadat in 1981 as a step toward ending American domination
of Egypt and ushering in a pure Islamic order. In the 1990s,
Islamic Jihad would merge with al Qaeda, and Osama's "Declaration
of War Against America" in turn would show an obvious debt to
the Islamic Jihad manifesto "The Neglected Duty."
It can be argued, then, that the birthplace of Osama's brand
of terrorism was Paris 1968, when, amid the student riots and
radical teach-ins, the influence of Sartre, Fanon, and the
new postmodernist Marxist champions of the "people's destiny"
was at its peak. By the mid '70s, according to Claire Sterling's
"The Terror Network," "practically every terrorist and guerrilla
force to speak of was represented in Paris. . . . The Palestinians
especially were there in force." This was the heyday of Yasser
Arafat's terrorist organization Al Fatah, whose 1968 tract
"The Revolution and Violence" has been called "a selective
precis of 'The Wretched of the Earth.'"
While Al Fatah occasionally still used the old-fashioned
Leninist language of class struggle, the increasingly radical
groups that succeeded it perfected the melding of Islamism
and Third World socialism. Their tracts blended Heidegger and
Fanon with calls to revive a strict Islamic social order. "We
declare," says the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah in its
"Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World"
(1985), "that we are a nation that fears only God" and will
not accept "humiliation from America and its allies and the
Zionist entity that has usurped the sacred Islamic land." The
aim of violent struggle is "giving all our people the opportunity
to determine their fate." But that fate must follow the
prescribed course: "We do not hide our commitment to the rule
of Islam, . . . which alone guarantees justice and dignity
for all and prevents any new imperialist attempt to infiltrate
our country. . . . This Islamic resistance must . . . with
God's help receive from all Muslims in all parts of the world
utter support."
These 1980s calls to revolution could have been uttered last
week by Osama bin Laden. Indeed, the chief doctrinal difference
between the radicals of several decades ago and Osama only
confirms the influence of postmodernist socialism on the
latter: Whereas Qutb and other early Islamists looked mainly
inward, concentrating on revolution in Muslim countries, Osama
directs his struggle primarily outward, against American
hegemony. While for the early revolutionaries, toppling their
own tainted regimes was the principal path to the purified
Islamic state, for Osama, the chief goal is bringing America
to its knees.
THE RELATIONSHIP between postmodernist European leftism and
Islamic radicalism is a two-way street: Not only have Islamists
drawn on the legacy of the European Left, but European Marxists
have taken heart from Islamic terrorists who seemed close to
achieving the longed-for revolution against American hegemony.
Consider Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, two leading
avatars of postmodernism. Foucault was sent by the Italian
daily Corriere della Sera to observe the Iranian revolution
and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Like Sartre, who had
rhapsodized over the Algerian revolution, Foucault was
enthralled, pronouncing Khomeini "a kind of mystic saint."
The Frenchman welcomed "Islamic government" as a new form of
"political spirituality" that could inspire Western radicals
to combat capitalist hegemony.
Heavily influenced by Heidegger and Sartre, Foucault was
typical of postmodernist socialists in having neither concrete
political aims nor the slightest interest in tangible economic
grievances as motives for revolution. To him, the appeal of
revolution was aesthetic and voyeuristic: "a violence, an
intensity, an utterly remarkable passion." For Foucault as
for Fanon, Hezbollah, and the rest down to Osama, the purpose
of violence is not to relieve poverty or adjust borders.
Violence is an end in itself. Foucault exalts it as "the
craving, the taste, the capacity, the possibility of an absolute
sacrifice." In this, he is at one with Osama's followers, who
claim to love death while the Americans "love Coca-Cola."
Derrida, meanwhile, reacted to the collapse of the Soviet
Union by calling for a "new international." Whereas the old
international was made up of the economically oppressed, the
new one would be a grab bag of the culturally alienated, "the
dispossessed and the marginalized": students, feminists,
environmentalists, gays, aboriginals, all uniting to combat
American-led globalization. Islamic fundamentalists were
obvious candidates for inclusion.
And so it is that in the latest leftist potboiler, "Empire,"
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri depict the American-dominated
global order as today's version of the bourgeoisie. Rising up
against it is Derrida's "new international." Hardt and Negri
identify Islamist terrorism as a spearhead of "the postmodern
revolution" against "the new imperial order." Why? Because of
"its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony."
"Empire" is currently flavor of the month among American
postmodernists. It is almost eerily appropriate that the book
should be the joint production of an actual terrorist, currently
in jail, and a professor of literature at Duke, the university
that led postmodernism's conquest of American academia. In
professorial hands, postmodernism is reduced to a parlor game
in which we "deconstruct" great works of the past and impose
our own meaning on them without regard for the authors'
intentions or the truth or falsity of our interpretations.
This has damaged liberal education in America. Still, it
doesn't kill people--unlike the deadly postmodernism out there
in the world. Heirs to Heidegger and his leftist devotees,
the terrorists don't limit themselves to deconstructing texts.
They want to deconstruct the West, through acts like those we
witnessed on September 11.
What the terrorists have in common with our armchair nihilists
is a belief in the primacy of the radical will, unrestrained
by traditional moral teachings such as the requirements of
prudence, fairness, and reason. The terrorists seek to put
this belief into action, shattering tradition through acts of
violent revolutionary resolve. That is how al Qaeda can ignore
mainstream Islam, which prohibits the deliberate killing of
noncombatants, and slaughter innocents in the name of creating
a new world, the latest in a long line of grimly punitive
collectivist utopias.
Waller R. Newell is professor of political science and
philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Anarcissie
<5sb5j5ta25icir3gu...@4ax.com>,
"5306 Dead, 439 since 1/20/09"
It is the history of Black people, women, the poor, and
so on -- anyone out of power -- which has been erased.
As usual, the common mythology turns everything on
its head.
James A. Donald
wrote:
> It is the history of Black people, women, the poor, and
> so on -- anyone out of power -- which has been erased.
Bullshit.
You are obviously not reading old books, nor watching old movies.
You want to read a book by a colored man in a white ruled world? I
recommend "The Hikayat Abdullah"
<http://www.archive.org/details/translationsfrom00abdu>
You lot are the ones that burn such books.