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James Petras M.I.A.
By Max Ajl · In Spring 2011
Book Review: War Crimes in Gaza and the Zionist Fifth Column in America
by James Petras
James Petras has been cloned. Petras I is still reliable, if a bit
creaky in his old age. He digs for information in Chapare, Chiapas, and
elsewhere in the Latin American countryside, interviewing militants from
the Venezuelan National Peasant Front Ezequiel Zamora, rural organizers
from the Brazilian Landless Worker’s Movements, syndicalists in Uruguay,
and slum-dwellers in Argentine villas de miseria. He pores through
primary resources in Portuguese and Spanish, clattering out endless
reams of political journalism on the struggle of the dispossessed in
Latin American, situating their struggles within the political economy
of global imperialism. Petras I’s analysis may be a little theoretically
fuzzy, but he gets his hands dirty and deals with facts.
Then there’s another Petras. Petras II is slightly off the rails. Still
kind of coherent, he deploys Marxist sociological analysis in the
pursuit of a highly idiosyncratic series of theses: that an interwoven
complex of institutions called the Zionist Power Configuration has taken
over the American government, that the ongoing aggression against Iraq
emerged not out of Texaco, but out of Tel Aviv, and that the Iranian
Green Movement was a bunch of Gucci revolutionaries from the posh
neighborhoods of North Tehran. Both are busy, but especially the latter,
who has been churning out pamphlets accusing Israel of allying with an
American Fifth Column at the rate of one a year for the past half decade.
full: http://jacobinmag.com/spring-2011/james-petras-m-i-a/
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