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I'm afraid we're going to see a lot of crap recently, since everybody is forced to write about the refugee crisis and Syria finally. I just read a piece on Common Dreams that made me so sick I had to call into work. A few things that struck me about this latest Prashad "piece" - title has a ring to it, that's the first & last nice thing I can say about it. -pandering: "But it is the picture of Aylan Kurdi that has unsettled our ethics" "our ethics" - this may be a revelation to the public but I should think he's seen far worst out of Syria a short article that mentions Aylan Kurdi no less than 10 times!!! "He breaks our heart. But he will do little to change our politics." In the case of Vijay, the answer clearly is no, He still won't support effective action to stop the violence, as we shall see. *"*Capital is allowed be borderless. That freedom does not apply to labour – to people. Migration is forbidden." Good Marxist point, made here to muddy the waters since Aylan didn't drown because his father was looking for a better job. "When it breaks states, as it did in Libya, the West takes no responsibility for the broken lives of the people in those zones." And I thought that as a matter of principle Marxists hold that internal factors generally dominate, and as a matter of history, the Libyan people, who were the only "boots on the ground" had a lot to do with overthrowing Qaddafi, Apparently not. But then I thought the Libyan state was broken long before NATO got involved. "It sees this as the limit of its humanitarianism. It calls this humanitarian interventionism or, in the language of the UN, “responsibility to protect” (R2P). " Ok, I'll grant that "humanitarian intervention" has been a fraud perhaps 10 times out of 10, but certainly the world needs to do something to stop the barrel-bombs from falling. And I think we should consider Libya a success story BTW, because the proper comparison for Libya today is not some idealized "Libya" of Qaddafi propaganda and anti-imperialist fantasies. It is Syria today! I don't see any reason sans the NATO actions or an independent thuwar victory, to believe that Qaddafi wouldn't be barrel-bombing Benghazi and Misrata still today and Syrians wouldn't fleeing to Libya now because it is safer. And in defense of NATO, let me say that their job, by UN mandate, was to see that Qaddafi couldn't deliver the kind of "Death from Above" that Assad has been allowed to deliver for 4 years. In that they did a very good job with a minimum [<100] civilian casualties and very little infrastructure damage. They had no mandate to put boots on the ground or organize a new Libyan state and only an imperialist minded "Marxist" would demand they do anything like that. Libya will work out her problems over time. the 1st 10 year after the French revolution were messy too. Okay he rejects the Libyan model and apparently any intervention by force, humanitarian or otherwise. But there are now a quarter million dead, give or take a little boy drowned on the beach. So what's Prashad's bottom line? What's his path to a solution? "a politics that calls for a drawdown of the violence in Syria" If I keep reading this crap, I won't make it in to work tomorrow either. Clay Claiborne, Director Vietnam: American Holocaust <http://VietnamAmericanHolocaust.com> Linux Beach Productions Venice, CA 90291 (310) 581-1536 Read my blogs at the Linux Beach <http://claysbeach.blogspot.com/> <http://wlcentral.org/user/2965/track> On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 12:39 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > ***************************************************************** > > Really quite sad to see Vijay Prashad writing an article that sounds so > much like the one that WSWS.org wrote today. Regime change? Is American > imperialism to blame for the war in Syria? Were the protests in April 2011 > orchestrated by Samantha Power in order to effect "regime change"? I just > disposed of some other nonsense on CounterPunch written by someone far less > erudite and respected than Vijay Prishad. There is something fundamentally > flawed in the logic of our "anti-imperialist" left that it cannot bring > itself to identify Bashar al-Assad as the cause of this misery, alongside > ISIS. As someone put it, the refugees are dealing with two different brands > of fascism, one wearing neckties and the other wearing beards. > > > http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/regime-change-refugees-on-the-shores-of-europe/ > _________________________________________________________ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/clayclai%40gmail.com > _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
