US Empire Better than alternative - Huh?
Responses
I appreciate all who wrote. As is usual with the free association path of
PEN-L threads the discussion has now taken us to new frontiers.
A few responses missed my original point however. Remember, I was asking
about pedagogy, the art and science of teaching. I was not asking about texts,
per se, but
approaches to handling the student (and of course, the class). There's the
issue of
what to say immediately in the short term, and how to approach this longer
term.
What did I say? I'm afraid that what I said to this particular student in
the short term was not pedagogically the correct path. Here's what I said in
a
paraphrase,
"Why that's an argument in favor of fascism! This kind of thinking, popular
in Nazi Germany in the early stages of the Third Reich, forgives all of the
crimes and eventual genocide of the regime, all while working to support it.
Democracy is gone, much like our Bill of Rights is now nearly in the toilet.
That
argument makes a great number of erroneous assumptions. . . where does that
argument come from? Not from the victims of US imperialism, I'm sure, the
mutilated corpses of the 100,000 men women and children in Iraq. . .how do
you know
all states yearn for domination? That's ignorant of history! Chou en lai said
something that is more to the key: "Countries want independence, nations want
liberation and the people want revolution." The history of the US is a
history
of domination and resistance to domination. . witness the slave revolts, the
creation of public schools by working class families tired of having their
kids waste away in factories, the civil rights movement, today's antiwar
sentiments. . . .. . .Have you ever stopped to think that the key issue is
not US
empire or nothing. . .it's socialism or barbarism" And socialism is, in
essence
democracy, radically defined. we'll be talking about that in class. . .
Me again. After more exchange I told him that "I'm not trying to shut you
down." . . .we talked after class and I told him that there are several
arguments one could make in favor of his position but that that would take us
into a
much longer discussion. . .and it looks like that's where we're heading. .
.The
class? Medical anthropology. We're following Virchow's dictum that "Medicine
is a social science, politics by other means. . ." and this lead inevitable
to a discussion of how we transform/overthrow biomedicine and the culture
that
is behind it. . .
I'll refer students to this list where they can learn from the best and
brightest inthe land!
Best,
Brian McKenna
**************
Start the year off right. Easy ways to stay in shape.
http://body.aol.com/fitness/winter-exercise?NCID=aolcmp00300000002489
