Hmm, I think you’ve got that backwords, but you’re right, I forgot the memo: “zionists”…

Right. Auschwitz is not about the Jews. (The “Protocols” too?) Just neo-conservatism is.

It should be possible for reasonable persons to discuss neoconservatism and neoconservatives without everybody (or anybody) pulling their razors out of their shoes or going for their shillelagh .

There’s quite a battle going on at Wikipedia about what the “Neoconservatism in the United States” article should say. To those interested in this general subject (and those who aren’t, should be) I suggest reading the article (as it stands at the moment) and the debate transcript as well. I have to give those Wiki people credit, at least for this particular imbroglio. They argue about everything, even the most hot-button issues, without losing their senses. Again I recommend this material. It’s a mine of information and insight, as well as a good example for all of us.

Pardon the pontification. It’s not my habit to do so. No offense intended (and I hope none taken).

All the best,

Right. It’s already 60 years since Auschwitz was shut, so give it a break. And over 80 years since the “Protocols” was debunked. No one is peddling those sorts of conspiracies these days. Right? Oh…

Phew! Some of my best friends will certainly be relieved.

One of the more significant differences between me and you is that I try to identify the limits of my knowledge, and try to avoid making confident assertions about things I have no evidence for.

Specifically, I definitely agree that there are, worldwide, great differences in human subjectivity.

The life as lived of a Afghan farmer, sudanese nomad, african child soldier or brazilian rainforest tribesman is radically different fom mine.

It’s just that, given that knowledge of and contacts with actual Iraqis, I know that the vast majority of them lives in a city, commutes to work at a salaried job, was taught in subjects called geography, history, etc while sitting at an individual desk in a class of 30 to 40 or so with a single teacher, reads newspapers, magazines and books, watches broadcast TV, plays with computer games, listens to CDs, has ‘colleagues’, ‘family’ and ‘friends’ and treats them differently, and so on. As it happens, their lives are probably more similar to mine than my grandfather’s was.

The british, the interim leaders, and saddam (in the early days) all spent the years from 1920 to ~1980 ‘modernising’, in the precise sense, the country, and that was a process that worked, in its own terms. (It’s certainly not something I would defend on moral grounds).

The exceptions are people like the Marsh Arabs, who are not the ones causing problems for the occupantion.

Have you ever actually met and talked to anyone from Iraq, ever looked at the actual statistics for literacy and urbanisation? Or are you just projecting some romaticised fantasy onto something you are as ignorant about as you are about the contents of my head?

soru

Surprisingly not so AFAICS; famously, Nick Cohen managed to be against every intervention up to and including Afghanistan, seeing Iraq in 2003 as the first genuine humanitarian intervention worthy of his support. Me neither.

But they are proud of their Jewish heritage (not that anything’s wrong with that) and Karl Marx definitely wouldn’t have approve that.

As to soru’s point about the Bush administration. Of the people he lists, I think quite clearly Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and Powell are not neoconservatives. Rice and Bush are in part, and I think their thinking about the Islamic World is largely that of the neoconservatives. Cheney shares some neoconservative ideas, but to a lesser degree. He’s really more of a Hobbesian, like Rumsfeld and Ashcroft. Powell is bascially a kind of centrist/Christian Democrat.

Ben P