Fátima Lasay on Sat, 3 Jan 2004 10:02:32 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> christmas/chomsky/baghdad digest |
>Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 01:30:53 -0600 >From: Dan Wang <danwang@mindspring.com> >Subject: Re: <nettime> christmas/chomsky/baghdad digest > >Fátima, > >Americans are soft. We are the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, >and great-great grandchildren of immigrants, settlers, runaway outlaws. We >don't know what it means to struggle, because our immigrant ancestors did >all the struggling for us. So we could have a better life. So we could be >soft. Dan, Yes, but I don't think that people are "soft" because the struggle has been fought for them or because they are living comfortable lives and thus cannot risk losing comfort; people become "soft" because they have been indoctrinated, educated, represented and governed to become "soft." Yours has been the only self-reflective and contemplative reaction to this issue I have received so far, and honestly I am touched at how you are able to shape an emotion as powerful as what you feel now into something positive and proactive. How many people after 9-11 wanted to destroy Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden - not because they contemplated on the situation but because (corporate) government and media told them so? My objection to intellectualism (without activism and culturalism) is that this imbalance reduces considerably the contemplation and concentration of effort and focus to remove the roots of imperialism. Many even still have high hopes in the political system that the election of a new US president will significantly change the course of things. There is nothing completely wrong with this but this must be seen as only a diversion - one of many means by which people are rendered "soft" - because debates and elections feign "(supposedly) democratic processes that work where they are (supposedly) allowed to work." How could American nationalism have been brought by discourse and deliberate misreadings of history to be so refulgent as to bring "democracy" to Iraq and at once limit and endanger the rights and mobility of the American people? Even the most egalitarian ideology can be re-fashioned and re-shaped to suit the seizure of corporate America on moral and cultural capital, installing systems that protect its own interests against demands of the populace whilst promising "a better world." In the introductory texts I wrote on Walden Bello's "future in the balance", I mention the crucial need for a triadic balance of the activist, intellectual and cultural worker. I also mentioned: "Periods of crisis in human history would be marked by historically conjured barriers between manual and mental labor, in that fissure between the worker's movement and the intellectuals living in a deceptively bi-polar world..." Chomsky shot to fame because he is intellectually provocative - his "career" began when he left activism and focused on writing. Yes, there is momentum there, but it is an illusion because it is out of a triadic balance. Chomsky and more Chomsky only make it difficult/elusive to fight American imperialism at the deepest ideological/cultural level but it lends the feeling of "edged mass anti imperialist movement" because his ideas are moralist rhetorics, appealing - but is it truly empowering and liberating? A delusion of empowerment is created by tilting balances between populist movement and intellectualism. But if one looks closely, this is a bi-polar concept of the world, one that lends itself easily to divisionism. The Philippine-American War in 1898 to 1902 headlined the earliest debates in the US on American foreign policy - on the anti-imperialist side, "Lady Liberty" symbolized public opinion that simultaneously supported the Filipino cause for independence and criticized corporate globalization: “Do I represent the idea of popular government…or am I simply a trademark for goods of American trust manufacturers?” On the pro-imperialist side the stand was: McKinley: “Can we leave these people…to chaos after we have destroyed the only government they had? It is the duty of American government to provide them a better one…” Did all those pro- anti- debates and elections (if I'm not mistaken McKinley was assassinated?) significantly change things for the better today? Only some 30 years ago, in the Vietnam war, the American people knew what it meant to struggle and fight American imperialism. American imperialism in Vietnam lasted 28 long years (imperialism beginning in 1954; armed invasion began in 1963). American imperialism was defeated in Vietnam - but only in Vietnam - not in America. US military pull-out of Vietnam might have actually pre-empted the (possible ultimate) defeat of American imperialism in America. If the US had stayed longer in Vietnam, it is possible the American working/middle class would've staged a revolution and completely defeated the American imperialist agenda. Then the defeat of American imperialism would not have merely been reactionary, it would have been both ideological and deep within the grass-roots culture of America. If this were the case, perhaps the American middle class would have refused to go to war in Iraq. Through activism we have deposed two oppressive regimes in the Philippines the past two decades, peacefully, but conditions have not fundamentally changed. Why? Because the world is a difficult and delicate balance of intellectualism, activism and culturalism - and our efforts here in Asia (or in the Arab world), to build a culture of peace, will never significantly take place, until the west has found a way to free themselves. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net