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I am having a hard time deciding whether Jean Bricmont’s article on today’s Counterpunch is more meretricious than the one that appeared yesterday by Diana Johnstone. Both attempt to depict Libya as a second Kosovo with a looming “humanitarian intervention”. Bricmont’s article is slightly ahead in this horse race since it starts off with a cheap smear against unnamed “Trotkyist” [sic] groups:
The whole gang is back: The parties of the European Left (grouping the “moderate” European communist parties), the “Green” José Bové, now allied with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who has never seen a US-NATO war he didn’t like, various Trotkyist groups and of course Bernard-Henry Lévy and Bernard Kouchner, all calling for some sort of “humanitarian intervention” in Libya or accusing the Latin American left, whose positions are far more sensible, of acting as “useful idiots” for the “Libyan tyrant.”
My first reaction after reading this glob of rhetorical spit was to post a query on the Marxism listserv as to which Trotskyists are for a US-NATO war on Libya. Whatever the foibles of this tendency on the left, it is not known for backing imperialist interventions. After parsing Bricmont’s prose carefully, I finally figured out what he was trying to say. There are some groups and individuals who are for no-fly zones, etc. (Cohn-Bendit) or there are some groups that accuse the Latin American left (that’s his term, not mine, for the proclamations of Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez, and Fidel Castro—I see the left as being a lot broader) of acting as “useful idiots” for the “Libyan tyrant”. That’s a pretty nifty use of the connective “or”. I imagine that Bricmont must have learned it from whatever is the equivalent of Time Magazine in Belgium.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/a-reply-to-jean-bricmont/
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