"Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people."

"The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition. For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China. If it did, then the result would simply be what he called "generalized scarcity," by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor. It would mean a recycling of "the old filthy business"—or, in less tasteful translation, "the same old crap." Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people. It is not a program by which nations bereft of material resources, a flourishing civic culture, a democratic heritage, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions, and a skilled, educated work force might catapult themselves into the modern age." -Terry Eagleton

Allan Nairn responds to Obama's statement in Chile

"Well, there’s no change in U.S. policy. Obama visited the tomb of Archbishop Romero in Salvador, but the U.S. is like the killer who shoots his victim and then brings flowers to the funeral. It’s appropriate for a killer to ask forgiveness, as the Chilean journalist was saying, but that’s the last stage. That’s after the killer has been taken off the streets, tried and jailed. Chile has done that. Those who perpetrated the U.S.-backed coup in Chile in '73 and killed more—tortured and killed more than 3,000 civilian activists, the leading survivors have been put on trial and jailed by the Chilean government. General Contreras, for example, the old head DINA, the secret police, is serving a sentence of 289 years. Chile has done that. The U.S.—the U.S. has not. So, it's up to—it’s up to people to enforce that, because the U.S. is still acting in a lawless manner all over the world. And El Salvador is a good example, because it’s quite parallel to what the U.S. is doing today."

"There were four key facts about the Archbishop. In 1980, in February, the Archbishop wrote to then-President Carter asking him to stop supporting the Salvadoran military. Romero was attacking the U.S. support for this military, which had, at that time, for two decades, been helping the Salvadoran National Police, National Guard, Treasury Police and army to assassinate local activists. On March 23rd, Romero gave a sermon in which he attacked the chain of command. He told Salvadoran troops to disobey their superiors and refrain from killing civilians. The next day—he was assassinated. He was shot in the heart."

"...he was assassinated by the forces of Major d’Aubuisson, a political offshoot of the Salvadoran death squads, which were created and backed by the U.S., as I documented extensively years ago. At his funeral, six days later, 250,000 Salvadorans turned out. Snipers on the roofs fired into the crowd, killed 42 people—an amazingly precise parallel to what happened last Friday in Yemen.

As the Yemeni people were turning out against the U.S.-backed regime there, snipers on the roofs killed perhaps 52 people. We don’t yet know whether those Yemeni snipers were U.S.-trained, but we do know that the Green Berets are there training that armed force and the U.S. itself is sending missiles into Yemen. In Iraq, the U.S. adopted what they call the Salvador Option: backing the Interior Ministry death squads, which from ’04 to ’07 killed thousands. So, what the U.S. did in El Salvador is being reproduced today, and Obama is carrying it on."  -ALLAN NAIRN

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/24/as_obama_completes_first_latin_america

drawbacks

The drawbacks of intervention in Libya

"While humanitarian considerations are often invoked in defense of intervention, humanitarianism is far from the only issue on the table. Other reasons that have been adduced in favor of intervention in Libya include vindicating international norms, re-establishing the leadership of the US in the region, preventing spill-over of the refugee crisis into Europe, and the stabilization of world oil markets. The Libyan people are struggling to change their regime on their own terms and there is no reason to presume an overlap between these various logics of intervention and their interests." 


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Finkelstein on Political Apostasy

"Yet, an apostate is usually astute enough to understand that, in order to catch the public eye and reap the attendant benefits, merely registering this or that doubt about one's prior convictions, or nuanced disagreements with former comrades (which, after all, is how a reasoned change of heart would normally evolve), won't suffice.  For, incremental change, or fundamental change by accretion, doesn't get the buzz going: there must be a dramatic rupture with one's past.  Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.  A rite of passage for apostates peculiar to U.S. political culture is bashing Noam Chomsky.  It's the political equivalent of a bar mitzvah, a ritual signaling that one has "grown up" - i.e., grown out of one's "childish" past.  It's hard to pick up an article or book by ex-radicals - Gitlin's Letters to a Young Activist, Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism… - that doesn't include a hysterical attack on him.  Behind this venom there's also a transparent psychological factor at play.  Chomsky mirrors their idealistic past as well as sordid present, an obstinate reminder that they once had principles but no longer do, that they sold out but he didn't.  Hating to be reminded, they keep trying to shatter the glass.  He's the demon from the past that, after recantation, no amount of incantation can exorcise."  -Norman G. Finkelstein, from "Fraternally Yours, Chris"

Saturday Night ("Dialectical") Bingo

“To undertake to combine so many elements alien to one another is to harbor within oneself a great disturbing force. To reproduce so many passions is not to calm one’s own. A lamp which is hot enough to fuse whole peoples is hot enough to consume its very hearth …. The souls of our fathers still throb in us for the pains that have been forgotten, almost as the man who has been wounded feels an ache in a hand he has lost.” 

-Jules Michelet, from Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station

“Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provide it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power.”  -Herman Melville, from Billy Budd

“People remember. They’ll remember specific people who broke their balls. That’s the way people are, and they will be shitting for those people. You know, if you’re thinking about the world, how the world looks to the Negro [sic]—here’s how the world looks to the American Negro: he’s a convict rioting in a corrupt prison, and if they do kill Pat O’Brien, so what? The conditions are bad, and sloppy, and that’ll be the scene.”

-Lenny Bruce, The Essential Lenny Bruce

“Only when the ‘lower classes’ do not want the old way, and when the ‘upper classes’ cannot carry on in the old way—only then can revolution triumph.”  -Vladimir Lenin, from Left-Wing Communism

“…“sublation”—the maintenance-of-what-has-been-negated-in-its-very-negation (that is, the negation of the negation) .... the survival of the past as the sublated can simply be reduced to the modality of a memory, which, further, is merely the inverse of (that is, the same thing as) an anticipation …. so in each instant of time the past survives in the form of a memory of what has been—that is, as the whispered promise of the present. That is why the past is never opaque or an obstacle. It must always be digestible as it has been predigested. Rome lived happily in a world impregnated by Greece: “sublated” Greece survived as objective memories .... That is why the present can feed on the shades of the past, or project them before it .... The past is never anything more that the present and only recalls that law of interiority which is the destiny of the whole future of humanity.”  -Louis Althusser, Contradiction and Overdetermination

“[Great men] must be named heroes insofar as they have drawn their goals and vocations not only from the tranquil ordered streams of events sanctioned by the reigning system, but from a source whose content is hidden and has not yet attained actual existence, in the still subterranean internal spirit which knocks for admittance to the external world, and breaks its way in, because it is not the almond which suits this kernel.”  -Georg W. F. Hegel, via Althusser

"Your Co-Pay for this Visit is 25 Dollars"

Cassandra Bang's "Snarkipedia"

State as Private Property

Gangster State
by darkhousemedia

Video/Effects: Patricia Wells
Sound: Brian Routh
Voice: Michael Parenti
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"There is nothing more "private" than a state community which perceives the Excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance." 
-Slavoj Žižek,  First as Tragedy, Then as Farce