As usual on such occasions, I haven’t had much to say about the horrific events in Norway. It’s generally better, in such circumstances, to pause for reflection, and certainly some who rushed to judgement have gone badly wrong in doing so, here as on previous occasions. This is not the time for judgement, but that time will come.
@Jack Strocchi
The use of “plead guilty” was rhetorical Jack. Of course it’s not a crime to be a cold warrior. That’s a political characterisation. It is however, incompatible with being a socialist (i.e. someone who believes that the working class should become a class for itself, remaking production and therewith the nature of class society to serve working people on a world scale in order to lay the foundation for material abundance, the dissolution of class society and their states). It’s orthodox socialist politics that the work of liberating the working class is the task of the working class itself rather than the bourgeoisie/imperialists. That’s why socialists defend unions and bona fide organisations of the workingclass against attack by the bosses, don’t cross picket lines, don’t take sides in imperialist wars, don’t join the police or become prison officers or judges or ministers in capitalist governments and so forth. This is primer level socialism Jack.
@Tim Macknay
The formulation is wrong here. Socialists were not “on the side of Stalin”. They were on the side of the workers of the world, asserting the political independence of the workers from the boss class and its agencies. They knew that Stalin’s regime was a consequence of abandonment of that very principle, which is why for example, Stalin handed over communists for internment in the US during WW2, endorsed the A-bombing of Japan etc …
Indeed you wouldn’t, which is why you are ill-placed to evaluate what “sensible” socialists should do, or even why they should do it. Sensible socialists understand their paradigm, and either embrace it with adequate warrant, or abandon it and become something else. Whatever Orwell once was, he clearly chose the latter course in the years before his death, becoming a Cold War liberal.
I like the way having been quoted by the shooter, the editor of QuadRant, Buttscuttle, is now vigorously trying to distance himself. Problem with espousing their philosophy of nastyism, some hear the dog-whistles. But isn’t that the intention?
Someone at the Drum made the pithy observation that the dogwhistle can also be heard by wolves. Wish I’d thought of it.
@Freelander
It passed with only scant notice, as with so many of the rude extremes of American life in a kinetic media age. The bodies of those Norwegian children slaughtered by a terrorist had yet to be fully recovered, let alone buried, when Glenn Beck compared the victims to Nazis.
The summer camp where children of the Norwegian Labor Party went for soccer, swimming, political debates and lectures “sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth,” Beck said in his national radio broadcast.
No, Beck wasn’t justifying the killing of 68 people on Utoya Island. He was merely muddying the humanity of those young people executed by Anders Behring Breivik, the self-professed “Christian Knight” who has confessed to the attacks. But Beck’s Web site, The Blaze, was full of justifications for the mass murder of innocents, and provided a sampling of the troubled audience he caters to in this country.
Glenn Beck doesn’t dog whistle as he is catering for the ‘Hard of Thinking’. Some of his audience are now doing a sterling job in congress.
PrQ … is there any there any reasoreason why my response to Strocchi, J and Macknay, T is still in moderation 24h + after posting? Similarly is there any reason why my other post in Monday Message board, on a pure question on macro-economic questions is held up?
ooh yuck! on a pure question of macro-economics is held up?
@Fran:
Well they would say that, wouldn’t they? 😉
The milieu of vicious and malicious hatemongering from which Breivik emerged, pitiless and cruel (he used dum-dums so his child victims were mutilated as well as dead)is absolutely ubiquitous in the West. The dominance of the Right, economically, politically and in the MSM brainwashing apparatus, means that Rightist pathopsychology is also dominant and ruthlessly projected onto society as a form of pseudo-religion. And we know what that entails, every time we pick up a copy of ‘The Fundament’ (The Fundamental Orifice of the Nation). Hatred and vilification for all the Right’s enemies, from Moslems to Christine Nixon. And when these hatemongers are identified by one of their acolytes as his inspiration, they have the utterly cynical hypocrisy to plead innocence, deny their culpability and reject their progeny, then go on to spread yet more hatred. Not just the deranged depths of a Beck, spitting on the dead, mutilated, children and projecting his own pathopsychology on them, but The Fundament’s Augean rabble of hate-opinion writers, editorialists and pet correspondents and letter-writers, who already have turned to blaming ‘multiculturalists’ and Moslem immigration for the outrage. In fact beginning the process of blaming the victims, exculpating the monster and keeping the hate flowing. And in the Stygian darkness of the Rightwing blogs you have open admiration and support. The soul of the Rightist is that of a killer, one who tries to overcome his existential fear of death by pretending to be its master, and dealing it out to others, to inflate his death-worshipping ego. Whether Auschwitz, Einsatsgruppen, ‘shock and awe’, ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’, from Hiroshima to Fallujah, the Right’s lust to kill and destroy will never be slaked.