Friday, March 11, 2005
WWIV and GWFH as they relate to TWAT
Every now and then comes along a good solid essay that about sums it up. Tom Englehardt has such a one here. Its the clearest, most accessible and least polemical critique I've seen recently of the collective hallucination that is the TWAT. For those of you that follow these events closely it will probably be a repetition. However, I think its worth passing on to anyone, if there is anyone left, who may be on the fence or may be sympathetic to the liberal critique, but has found that the unending tide of propaganda has muddied the waters of thought.
I will now shamelessly and slothfully re-blog from Steve Clemon's site to provide you with a representative sample:
A thorough critique of the contemporary right's world-historical fantasies has been needed for quite a while and this essay is a good start. One day, hopefully soon, one may hope that when the wingers prattle on about being on the "right side of history" everyone's moronized-German-Philosophy-bullshit-detector goes blinking red.
Vulgar Hegelianism, the Moriarty of the Enlightenment and Liberal Democracies, being the granddaddy of all modern totalitarianisms of the Right, the Left and our current pseudo-fascist American.
posted by Scats : 3/11/2005 06:59:00 PM
I will now shamelessly and slothfully re-blog from Steve Clemon's site to provide you with a representative sample:
"World War IV" does many other useful things as well. It moves the goalposts into the future, way off there in an endless generational struggle. In other words, it conveniently excuses much that might otherwise seem baleful or ridiculous in the present. And of course it disarms critics -- for who wants to stand in the path of a necessary global war against your own annihilation? As an image, it (and GWOT) undergird what, in the Cold War, was called the national security state and now has morphed into an even more all-encompassing homeland security state. The two terms make sense of soaring Pentagon budgets, offshore mini-gulags, and so much else. It becomes possible to write, as Earl Tilford, former director of research at the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute, did: "This is World War IV. Forget the sleazy sickness of Abu Ghraib. Stop mouthing meaningless slogans like, ‘Bush lied, soldiers died.' Steel yourselves for a long, bloody fight. This is a war we must not lose."
A thorough critique of the contemporary right's world-historical fantasies has been needed for quite a while and this essay is a good start. One day, hopefully soon, one may hope that when the wingers prattle on about being on the "right side of history" everyone's moronized-German-Philosophy-bullshit-detector goes blinking red.
Vulgar Hegelianism, the Moriarty of the Enlightenment and Liberal Democracies, being the granddaddy of all modern totalitarianisms of the Right, the Left and our current pseudo-fascist American.
posted by Scats : 3/11/2005 06:59:00 PM
