Category: Middle East
Rick Rozoff of Stop NATO on RT
Syrian opposition groups operate with complete impunity inside Turkey – which is a NATO member – with a green light from the Turkish government. Without arms and sponsorship from outside Syria, the opposition would never dare to take up arms against the Syrian army, Rozoff concludes.
Jason Ditz on RT: UN Syria Resolution Veto
Our Language Cops Are
a Bunch of Barney Fifes
I’ve touched slightly on the term ‘Israel-Firster’ – a shorthand that has an ugly neo-Nazi provenance, which is why I don’t use it…
As Justin Raimondo pointed out Monday, that etymology is false: the term was first used no later than 1953 by Alfred M. Lilienthal, a Jewish American. Not that that fact will change anything. I expect no correction from Sullivan, and I couldn’t care less about his source, Spencer Ackerman, whose views on intellectual honesty you can read for yourself.
But let’s assume that, for once, they weren’t bullshitting and the term was coined by an asshole. And? Does a sorry origin taint a word or phrase for all eternity, even if the term — as Sullivan effectively admits in the aforementioned post — is accurate and useful in certain cases?
Just for kicks, I searched Sullivan’s blog and Tablet magazine, where Ackerman acted out his latest “plate-glass window” fantasy, for “highbrow,” “middlebrow,” and “lowbrow.” It won’t surprise you to learn that the searches turned up plenty of hits. It may surprise you to learn where those words come from:
“Highbrow,” first used in the 1880s to describe intellectual or aesthetic superiority, and “lowbrow,” first used shortly after 1900 to mean someone or something neither “highly intellectual” or “aesthetically refined,” were derived from the phrenological terms “highbrowed” and “lowbrowed,” which were prominently featured in the nineteenth-century practice of determining racial types and intelligence by measuring cranial shapes and capacities. A familiar illustration of the period depicted the distinctions between the lowbrowed ape and the increasingly higher brows of the “Human Idiot,” the “Bushman,” the “Uncultivated,” the “Improved,” the “Civilized,” the “Enlightened,” and, finally, the “Caucasian,” with the highest brow of all.
– Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988)
Ugly, huh? You can find similar histories for several other commonly used terms (though “rule of thumb,” contrary to a popular myth, isn’t one of them). Will Sullivan and Tablet‘s writers ban the -brows? I doubt it, and really, why should they? If they found those adjectives useful before and had no intention of endorsing phrenology or “scientific racism,” then there’s no reason for us to presume evil motives now.
None of which is to say that some words aren’t overused or shouldn’t be used more carefully. But if “Israel-firster” is one of those terms, then “anti-Semite” is a thousand times more so. You have your work cut out for you, deputies.
No War, No Sanctions, No Intervention, No Assassinations
Clear, simple, to the point. A nice, simple set of values that all kinds of people should be able to get behind.
It’s the platform, manifesto, talking points, everything of No War on Iran: National Day of Action, February 4th.
A lot of anti-war activities get bogged down in lengthy laundry lists of talking points and arguments from the “top,” before they ever reach the larger numbers of people they’re supposed to recruit or inflluence. They end up having something for everyone to disagree with.
This thing leaves everyone free to make their own arguments and not have to answer for someone else’s stupid ideas. No war, no sanctions, no intervention, no assassinations. Anything else you want, bring yourself.
“Radical anarchist KN@PPSTER” and “sane policy advocate KN@PPSTER” are both down with the four points, for different but not really incompatible reasons.
From a policy standpoint, screwing with Iran is the silliest damn idea I’ve heard in a decade characterized by silly ideas.
The US has fought and lost two full-blown wars in Asia (and smaller ones in Asia and elsewhere) over the last ten years, draining its treasury and degrading its military (in both the moral and practical senses).
Launching a third major war, against an opponent three times as populous, with much greater regional support, and much more militarily advanced than either Iraq or Afghanistan … well, if you were looking for proof that the assorted War Colleges of the US armed forces have “special needs” classes, just check out the number of different crayon colors used in drafting that contingency plan.
From an anarchist standpoint, war (and preparation for war) is one of the primary instruments which the political class of every country, and their “transnational” partners, use to savage the freedoms and empty the pocketbooks of their subjects for their own benefit. 99% of the time, that’s its only purpose. The other 1% of the time is when one particular clique of the political class is in real existential danger from another clique or cliques, and wants their subjects to bail them out.
So, get back to me if the war you’re selling is revolutionary class struggle, productive (us) vs. political (them). Otherwise, I’m not buying. And this ain’t that.
But that’s all just me. I’m sure you have your own reasons. On February 4th, let’s set those other reasons aside and stand together for no war, no sanctions, no intervention, no assassinations.
[cross-posted from KN@PPSTER]
Fool-Throated
I yearn for the day when “I was a full-throated supporter of the Iraq War” is understood — by writer and reader alike — to be a more damning admission than “I took Ecstasy once in college.”