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thanks for your interventions in this thread, mr mephisto
they are an impressive effort.
side notes against the american right:
the ideology about the u.n. owes its shape to the history of american right politics--that this politics requires a fetishism of the Nation is obvious, that this fetishism would be looped through fear of the un--which is itself set up and dedicated to the defense of the nation-state---is a function of the role that john birch society ideology plays in that ideology.
which operates best in a space of fewest facts.
the bircher view runs dangerously close to those fine propositions outlined in the "protocols of the elders of zion"
in this argument, the un is the rootless internationalist conspiracy that is positioned against the interest of those who fancy themselves rooted in blood and soil.
if you listen to really far right radio, you find this paranoia being mapped onto an "international socialist conspiracy that wants to reduce 'real americans' to slavery by taking away 'our' guns."
the step from there to the world jewish conspiracy idiocy is but small.
1. the american right has shifted in ways that allow its core ideology to assimilate whackjob stuff on the order of the birchers is alarming in itself.
2. if there is a force that operates to undermine the notion of the nation-state, it is capitalism, not the un. but because capitalism is an unqualified good in the dreamland of conservative ideology, the anxieties generated by globalization need be channelled somewhere else.
whence the hostility to the un.
it is basic sublimation---a crude reasing of freud built into the shaping of ideology.
the sad thing is that it seems persuasive to some folk.
3. much of the material posted by conservatives above amounts to straight repetition of various elements that have been floated in conservativeland during the period when the bush administration felt it had to justify its illegal and immoral war in iraq by discrediting the un because and only because the unsc did not find the administrations shabby and false case for going outside the sanctions regime compelling.
straight repetition.
for all the emphasis on the freedom of the indivdual you read and hear from conservatives, the degree of groupthink on matters like the un can only really make you laugh.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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