To think that South Americans would be anti-(USof) American just because of hundreds of years of brutal exploitation!  The nerve!  The gall!  And after we did that whole “Open Door Policy” thing, too.  Whatever that was.  I’m sure it was good, though.  After all, America did it!

Ooh ! Don’t forget Ayn Rand!!!

It didn’t bother him then and it doesn’t seem to bother him now.

Why would it BOTHER him? Wingnuts got some serious cognitive dissonance going on (this is a truthism on the order of “water is wet”).

On the one hand, they will, without exception cite the reason why affirmative action and any other discussion of societal racism are bad policy is because “I never owned slaves. That was in the past, and has nothing to do with me.” By this logic, Americans bear no responsibility for the actual colonial policies, and so long as the book is well written, is just an interesting historical study, like a book about Hannibal and the Alps and why he just dicked around Northern Italy for years rather than just sacking Rome.

on the other extreme, they also adhere to “my country right or wrong” which, if they actually mean, means any accusation of the country being wrong should be met with resounding indifference.

and on the third hand, if you actually believe America is the land of the free and the home of the whopper, even acknowledging criticism is based on fact and is well founded, you’re still able to say “it’s also pretty cool, too.” Getting angry, “being bothered by it” means not only do you acknowledge the truth of the claim, but you have no real counterpoints as to why that should be disregarded as condemnatory. My mother may be fat, but who exactly does my getting in a rage over “she sits AROUND the house” reflect on?

And on yet another hand, this proves their attempt at religious rhetoric is a pile of lies. If they cannot accept loving ones country while condemning the crimes, they know, absolutely, they never actually meant the bit of wankery that is “love the sinner hate the sin.”

If you love America, even scathing criticism of policies pursued for decades is water off a ducks back, no more damning than “wow, we should maybe do something to make this up to them. and certainly discontinue any ongoing conduct of this sort.”

So I guess what I’m trying to ask is Paul: Why do you hate America?

We Marxists are so tiresome; what with our contention that the powerful of the world might happen to be exploiting the less powerful. I realize that is crazy talk.

“So I guess what I’m trying to ask is Paul: Why do you hate America?”

I’m not Paul. but I’ll play.  I hate America the same way that I hate other nation-states, and for the same reasons.  I think that the organization of the world in to configturations that are structurally similar to competing organized crime families is very undesirable, no matter the flag displayed or membership rituals observed.  Given these assumptions we can talk about whether or not the US is the best vehicle for eliminating nation-state based bourgousies, but the goal is certainly not to maintain one political monopoly over the another (just like gangs).  I realize that these are not popularly appealing ideas, but any truly “Left” vision of IR doesn’t bind itself to the nation-state as an analytic or normative given.  Maybe we are idiots and the war of each against all as organized through the currently powerful nation-state structures is all that is possible forever, but enough with the “America is good/bad” please—it just isn’t a productive question.

>Wait, wait, I didn’t get the memo: when did we go from LGBTQ to LGBQT?

honestly people who aren’t heterosupremacists are fucking terrible at being effective politically sometimes

i’ve seen the acronym as long as LGBTQQI before (the second q is for questioning, no idea what the i is for)

Sometimes even LGBTQ/LGBQT campus offices aren’t internally consistent. (Calls itself the LGBTQ resource office, but has “LGBQT Resource Office” in the sidebar.) It’s not my term to police, if anyone has a problem with the positions of the Q and the T above I’ll change it.

And I is for intersexed.

I is Intersexed if it means the same thing as in other variations (I hadn’t seen questioning included before). And intersexed is definitely a separate category from the others—theirs is a difference that begins with obvious anatomical anomaly. Yet politically, they would very much benefit from the same laws that would protect the others.

In 2012, I hope I can find a yard sign that says “Four More Ayers! Four More Ayers!”

honestly people who aren’t heterosupremacists are fucking terrible at being effective politically sometimes

Bloody bigot.  It’s not the heterosupremacy, but the sexual phobia that makes them politcally effective.

The rest of us are just too busy fucking around…

Has anyone here actually read the book? I understand that this blog post is supposed to be cute, but I find it a wee bit disturbing that we seem to be (implicitly) equating Galeano to the likes of Ayn Rand in terms of zaniness.

I suppose I could call myself Q

Holy crap, I didn’t know John de Lancie commented here!

</stupid joke>

I haven’t read that book but have read many essays by Galeano (he’s a regular contributor to Harper’s, wrote an intro for a Charles Bowden book, et. al) and can attest that he is an excellent writer. I’ve never read his novels or longer non-fiction, but I know that they are well-reviewed. Regardless of how he may describe himself politically, his arguments are nuanced and convincing and he is not remotely dogmatic. I hope Obama reads the book. I hope a lot of people do. Understanding our role in South American history is an important precursor to understanding who we are as a nation.

Breaking Dawn has been on Amazon’s bestseller list since before it came out.  (Amazon counts pre-orders as well.)  And it hasn’t budged off of the top five, as far as I can tell.  *headdesk*

Considering that the #1 bestseller last night was (and still is) Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, from another hack with a talk show, I can only hope that Americans balance out their reading so much.

Margo:

Has anyone here actually read the book? I understand that this blog post is supposed to be cute, but I find it a wee bit disturbing that we seem to be (implicitly) equating Galeano to the likes of Ayn Rand in terms of zaniness.

Can’t disagree—and I have read the book.  It’s a thorough and deep primer on what the first world has done to the third in colonialism, and why the Monroe Doctrine is only the modern outgrowth of it.

I like telling folk to read Open Veins and Orson Scott Card’s (yes, Card!) Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbusside-by-side or one after the other.  Card had this moment in ‘95 where he got pretty loony liberal and wrote this novel as almost an indictment of European & Christian exceptionalist attitudes (and the American outgrowth of both).  As far as I understand, his research is fairly solid - it provides a narrative that Galleano doesn’t and connects at a more personal level.

Eduardo Galeano is awesome. I haven’t read Open Veins, but I’ve read a lot of his essays, poems, and parables. He also is the author of my favorite quote about idealism. I’m paraphrasing from memory, but it’s something like: Utopia is like the horizon. Every time you take a step toward it, it recedes another step into the distance. So what is utopia good for? It keeps you walking.

Just for fun, here’s Los Fabulosos Cadillacs doing Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHjw8aewWHs

Perhaps I’m under-caffeinated, but if it’s a well written, well researched book, I hope Obama reads it.  It certainly is a most pointed gift, but we’d do a lot better by our Latin American neighbors if we actually bothered to understand the impact of our policies on them. 

Of course, I highly doubt that’ll be the wingnut reaction to it.

Obviously that is because the Twilght books are conservative books.  After all, they valorize a blood sucking parasite.

It’s a good book, and certainly there was exploitation of Latin America by the United States.

Though really, if it hadn’t been the United States doing the exploiting, Britain or France would have stepped right in anyway (see: the French in Mexico during our Civil War).

I didn’t take the post as comparing the two books, except to say that they are both on the bestseller list.

Holy crap, I didn’t know John de Lancie commented here!

He doesn’t, but I play Q on Livejournal…

< / continuation of stupid joke>

He heard this sort of anti-American rubbish from his spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright for 20 years.

“WRIGHT!!  AYERS!!!  WRIGHT!!!!  AYERS!!!!

Those polls are gonna start moving any second now….”

Clearly, this is very good news for John McCain.

bad Jim: Wait, wait, I didn’t get the memo: when did we go from LGBTQ to LGBQT?

In these parts LGBTIQ (lesbian, gay, bi, transgendered, intersex and the Q doubles for both queer and questioning) is currently replacing LGBT.

I’ve confirmed with my LGBTIQ Seattle Local 147 and I’m allowed to call it leg butt eye queue. Seriously, I asked.

Here it is:

Ventana sobre la utopía

Ella está en el horizonte -dice Fernando Birri-. Me acerco dos pasos, ella se aleja dos pasos. Camino diez pasos y el horizonte se corre diez pasos más allá. Por mucho que yo camine, nunca la alcanzaré. ¿Para que sirve la utopía? Para eso sirve: para caminar.

A window on utopia

She’s in the horizon - says Fernando Birri. I get two steps closer, and she gets two steps further away. I walk 10 steps, and she runs 10 steps further. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. So what is utopia for? This is what it’s for: To walk.

Galeano, speaking generally because I haven’t read Open Veins, is not necessarily operating in the realm where he’s going to present policy prescriptions. But I don’t know if there is a better author to understand the general view of the mainstream Latin American left toward the United States (and Europe as well), their very rational skepticism and even suspicion about American-style capitalism and free trade, and the justified sense of grievance they have. Given that almost every country in Latin America has a leader right now who could be described as some variation of “left,” I think it would be good for Americans to read Galeano and understand where these people are coming from and why.

Man, the American Right’s undying obsession with red-baiting is really starting to reveal their demographic age.  While I realize that American fears of the Soviet culminated over a pretty big timeframe from the 1950s to the 1980s, it seems like the Republican Party really peaked with that theme during the Reagan Presidency, and that was the last time they were selling a message with a broad demographic appeal that reached all age cohorts (Reagan was the last Republican to have significant success among the 18-35 group).

The problem is, they never let go of that meme, even 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  And there is an entire generation that has grown up and come of age living in a world without that big red fear, a world in which there isn’t two competing superpowers (in terms of military capability) always being positioned as being on the brink of nuclear annhilation.  I caught the tail end of it in my youth, and the Berlin Wall came down when I was 14, the Kremlin fell two years later and the USSR was quickly dissolved.

Aside from some crappy Reagan Era films and television miniseries (remember Amerika?), I never grew up with this terrible fear of “OMG, what if those damn Ruskies take over???!!!?”  The “red scare” is even less effective with people born after me.

But here we are, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there’s this older demographic in America that is still deathly afraid of communism anywhere, or anything even remotely resembling a political ideology which proposes collective solutions.  I honestly don’t know a whole lot about Hugo Chavez or Raul Castro.  I know how the American media has presented both of these figures, I know they are both adherents of Marxist philosophy, and I know that when I was a kid, I was constantly told by every available source that Communism/Marxism/Socialism = Evil.

Anyway, I’m not trying to get into a big debate about communism here, more just pointing out that the geezers in the GOP seem to be stuck in the mid-1980s thinking when it comes to how they believe most Americans view socialist/Marxist/communist countries in Central and South America.

The problem is, they never let go of that meme, even 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  And there is an entire generation that has grown up and come of age living in a world without that big red fear, a world in which there isn’t two competing superpowers (in terms of military capability) always being positioned as being on the brink of nuclear annhilation.  I caught the tail end of it in my youth, and the Berlin Wall came down when I was 14, the Kremlin fell two years later and the USSR was quickly dissolved.

Yup. It looks especially ridiculous to me because I was a toddler when the Berlin Wall came down and only know the USSR from reading history. Talking about Communism has as much relevance to people my age as talking about absolute monarchy.

Galeano isn’t even a Communist in that mold. That’s how ridiculous this is. The first essay I ever read by him was about developing a “third way” for Latin America that was neither capitalistic in the American way nor communistic in the Russian way and about the inadequacies of both models for creating a just society that provided for its members.

I don’t really get how Ayn Rand comes into it other than my footnote, which was unrelated. No, the book is zany only inasmuch as it’s calculated to drive wingnuts insane.

Well, and I don’t know what the history is of needling (so to speak) diplomatic gifts. Something Obama needs to read it may be, but it’s not dissimilar to Obama presenting the Queen with an iPod, a Richard Rodgers songbook, and a draft copy of the Declaration of Independence.

My favorite reaction to the gifts he gave to the Queen was some wingnut over at NRO (I forget which one) responding “Richard Rogers? HAHA! Who the hell is he?”

*facepalm*

The longer acronyms make it harder to name a sandwich after you guys!

I was joking with Dad, who’s the head of our local Humanist society and marches in pride parades, even though I am theoretically straight, that LGBT would just be a Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato, with Guacamole.

After the joke, we stopped and said…‘damn. That actually sounds pretty good’. It is.

Anyway, I’m not trying to get into a big debate about communism here, more just pointing out that the geezers in the GOP seem to be stuck in the mid-1980s thinking when it comes to how they believe most Americans view socialist/Marxist/communist countries in Central and South America.

I’d take a longer view.  Rabid anti-communism and fears of socialist thought becoming accepted in the US have been popular on and off since at least the turn of the last century.  And, yes, of course the Republican party is going to take this tack—the Republican party is the party of big business, of plutocrats, of Capitalists in the most specific sense.  They’re anti-communist in the same way that people like Henry Clay Frick were anti-communist.  Even in a country leaning much further to the left than the US does, groups like the Republican party would be rabidly anti-Marxist because of the interests they represent.

Of course it’s easiest now to keep the non-plutocrat rank and file in check by playing to their fears of Teh Russkies left over from the Cold War.  It’s an easy default for most people who are 40+.  And even people of a younger generation are likely to be generally unaware of what socialism actually is, all they know is that it’s short hand for “the bad guys”. This is why people like Jonah Goldberg have such currency and one of the overarching Teabag memes is that Obama is a “socialist”.  Because nowadays the only people likely to be familiar with what socialism actually is are either already committed leftists or 75+ years old.

It’s when Dems and people who generally skew liberal start getting freaked about “communists” that we have to really watch out.

Something Obama needs to read it may be, but it’s not dissimilar to Obama presenting the Queen with an iPod, a Richard Rodgers songbook, and a draft copy of the Declaration of Independence.

Totally agreed here. But Chavez has a long history of acting like a total ass, so this is just par for the course here. My defense of Galeano is more from the right-wingers, not for Chavez.

LGBT would just be a Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato, with Guacamole.

LGBTQI:

A salad with Lettuce, Guacamole (aka avocado), Bacon, Tomato, cheese (Queso), and jIcama.  F

unny that I’d have to hold the bacon, considering I’m a bisexual vegetarian…  Fakin’ Bacon sends a bad message about bisexuals’ role in the movement, too…  Alas.

It’s when Dems and people who generally skew liberal start getting freaked about “communists” that we have to really watch out.

Yup, ex. Robert Kennedy being buddies with McCarthy in the early ‘50s.

Chavez is basically a clown, to see the righties convinced he’s the next Stalin or whatever shows what bed-wetters they are. Chavez isn’t even a dictator yet, even though he seems to be under the delusion that he is.

Even though he’s an ass he is better than the right-wing oligarchs Venezuela had in before him, though. It seems to escape the wingnuts that it’s not like Venezuela was a liberal democratic paradise before Chavez came along.

Of course it’s easiest now to keep the non-plutocrat rank and file in check by playing to their fears of Teh Russkies left over from the Cold War.  It’s an easy default for most people who are 40+.  And even people of a younger generation are likely to be generally unaware of what socialism actually is, all they know is that it’s short hand for “the bad guys”. This is why people like Jonah Goldberg have such currency and one of the overarching Teabag memes is that Obama is a “socialist”.  Because nowadays the only people likely to be familiar with what socialism actually is are either already committed leftists or 75+ years old.

A friend made an interesting observation on the use of language as a weapon by the Right in recent years, and noticed that the word “liberal” doesn’t carry nearly the same level of negative stigma it did even just a few years ago.  I noticed a trend in recent years among a lot of people more frequently referring to themselves as “progressives” instead of “liberals”.  And while I have no problem with this word and often refer to myself as a “progressive”, I can’t help but think that it was due at least in part to the Right’s demonization of the word “liberal”.

Now, the word “liberal” is coming back into vogue, and a lot of folks who might have been more hesitant to refer to themselves as “liberal” five, ten, or twenty years ago are less afraid to apply the label to themselves, and the Right’s attempt to demonize people with the use of the word is proving less effective.

How often was Bill Clinton derided as a “socialist”?  Sure, it happened every once in awhile, but was it anywhere near as pervasive as him being derided as a “liberal” (when in fact he was a fairly centrist Democrat)?  The word “liberal” worked effectively in the 1990s as a weapon against the Clinton Administration, though I don’t think it would have the same resonance today against Obama.  Sure, he does get often derided as an evil liberal, but more frequently I see Obama being derided as an evil socialist… and I think that’s partly due to the fact that the word “liberal” doesn’t have the same effect as it did in the immediate years following the Reagan Era.  It’s lost the punch it once had.

And it all brings me back to my previous point, which is that many folks in the current conservative movement in America are really trapped in the mid-1980s in their perception of America, and where the American political pulse is.  They really believe that all Americans mythologize Ronnie Reagan as one of our nation’s greatest presidents the way they do - that most Americans view him as the greatest POTUS of the last 50 years.  And they desperately pine for a return to the center-right America that epitomized the Reagan Era, the 1984 Electoral Map in which 49 of the 50 states were red.

I really feel as if what we are witnessing now is a huge backlash against the political climate of 1968-2008, from Nixon to Reagan to Bush.  Sure we had Carter, but he was a temporary response to Watergate and proved ineffective at repairing our disasterous mid-1970s economy, and then we had Clinton, who has been the best Republican president we’ve had since Eisenhower.  But the tide seems to really be turning, and the Reagan worshipping cult that keeps getting smaller and smaller with every passing year is getting their asses handed to them by a record which has decimated the American middle class, and they keep getting nuttier and nuttier with the shit they throw at the wall in hopes of having something stick.

They don’t attack Obama by calling him a liberal, because most people’s response is, “So?”  Instead, they go whip out the socialist card, hoping that will prove more effective, though that seems to be far less fruitful than they hoped as well.  The typical response is either, “Do you even know what socialism is, you twit?” to, “would it really be that bad if America was little more socialist, like Canada and Europe where people have access to healthcare?”

I always thought the word “progressive” was not a reaction to the demonization of “liberal” from the right, but to create a counter to the idea of liberals as reformers who think that any problems with the way things are don’t arise from systematic oppressions but from individual flaws that can be patched over by passing a law or letting the queers hold hands on TV.  Progressive being a sort of catch-all or middle ground for people who aren’t ready to claim a place on the Left, but still take a holistic or systematic approach that traditional liberals don’t. 

I remember wincing, in my lefty firebrand days, when some well meaning person gave me a button that said “Jesus Was A Liberal”.  As if being a liberal was such an awesomely revolutionary position in society.

Well, you know, from a wingnut perspective people who are oppressed and exploited don’t have any right to actually right books about the oppression and exploitation, unless they cast it in a favorable light of salvation.

On the other hand, I happen to trust this President to know or understand the difference between propaganda masquerading as scholarship, and a fresh perspective on historical events.

Jesus wasn’t a liberal - Jesus was a radical.

That said, I separate liberals and progressives according to a simple definition: liberals think that grouping with a certain party and certain people taking over means change.  Progressives are more in favor of systems of government and thinking that seek better ways of governing and delivering services, and that self-perpetuate and are less dependent on the specific people or party involved.

Has anyone here actually read the book? ...
Margo on 04/19 at 04:21 AM

Yes.

In the late 1980s. IIRC it was written in the ‘70s, or maybe even the late ‘60s.

I hope it has been updated since then. But really, the central analysis remains pertinent.

Stuff like this is why my first attempt at an Internet handle (before I got lazy and just went with my name) was “getyernewsfromhistory.” Because if you tune out the MSM buzz about the crises du jour and just get a soft-focused big picture sketch of the situations, and then remember “all this happened before and will again,” your knowledge of history will fill in the details pretty well most of the time.

Though really, if it hadn’t been the United States doing the exploiting, Britain or France would have stepped right in anyway (see: the French in Mexico during our Civil War).
Ben D.  on 04/19 at 07:25 AM

The overall trend was the other way round; Britain had Latin America pretty much locked up in their sphere of influence by the beginning of the 19th century. The Monroe Doctrine was welcomed, even, IIRC (and if Isaac Asimov didn’t lie to me on this!) developed and proposed, by the British, because their hegemony in the former Spanish/Portuguese colonies was informal, and the Doctrine prohibited European powers from establishing new formal protectorates or what have you in the Western Hemisphere. This suited the British fine as they already had informal ascendancy and for a rival European power to edge them out they’d need to countervail the British advantages with formal territorial claims. At the time it was proclaimed, the USA could hardly have enforced it, certainly not against Britain—but the British could cite it as grounds to oppose ventures by other Europeans.

Then, eventually, over time, but most dramatically between the Spanish-American War and WWII, the USA moved in to the role the British had played.

France’s imperial venture under puppet/crony Maximillian was an aberration, due to the fact that we were tied up in fighting the Civil War and that the British ruling class was equivocating between the two North American governments. Wanting France on their side in case they fully committed to the Confederacy, they gave Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon III—don’t ask what ever became of Napoleon II…) carte blanche. When the Union won, Maximilian was left high and dry; I believe Cinco de Mayo is the celebration of the final defeat of his forces.

It’s the other way around. Cinco de Mayo was a Mexican victory over the French, but it was early in the campaign. The French ultimately prevailed. It was like “We won the battle, but lost the war.” That’s why it’s not a big holiday at all in Mexico, more localized to the Puebla area where the battle occurred.

I always thought the word “progressive” was not a reaction to the demonization of “liberal” from the right, but to create a counter to the idea of liberals as reformers who think that any problems with the way things are don’t arise from systematic oppressions but from individual flaws that can be patched over by passing a law or letting the queers hold hands on TV.  Progressive being a sort of catch-all or middle ground for people who aren’t ready to claim a place on the Left, but still take a holistic or systematic approach that traditional liberals don’t.

I always thought “progressive” was a much more radical activist subset of those on the liberal side of the political spectrum without necessarily being Marxist-Leninist-Maoists. 

In my mind, progressives would do things like risk arrest to protest/disrupt institutions/events like the School of the Americas….

1)  Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch is terrible and racist, and completely blind to Colombus’s historical character.  Go read something like 1491.

2)  It’s not about socialism or capitalism.  It has always been about cheap labor conservatism with colorful moral papers and tied with plenty of purposeful hypocrisy.

3)  Mark, knowing real history alienates you from the rest of humanity.

I noticed a trend in recent years among a lot of people more frequently referring to themselves as “progressives” instead of “liberals”.  And while I have no problem with this word and often refer to myself as a “progressive”, I can’t help but think that it was due at least in part to the Right’s demonization of the word “liberal”.

I don’t like “progressive” because the turn-of-the century progressives were into things like eugenics, prohibition, and racist immigration restrictions. I’d rather not be tied to them.

LGBTQQI? Seriously? I thought the whole point of the term ‘queer’ was to be inclusive of ALL groups that are not heteronormative. When has it become a separate identity, and what is the difference?

(Also, on gaming forums QQ means ‘to whine, to complain without cause’, which obviously a lot of trolls would find funny about the acronym given their views on ‘PC language’.)

Go read something like 1491.

Oooh, I’ve been meaning to, but hesitated because these days it can sometimes be hard to tell where authors’ loyalties lie.  Do you mean to say it’s good, then?

well, after reading it, you’ll get a greater sense of how unlikely it was that bsg folks would have survived on planet earth 150k years ago with no tech.  The best thing about the book is to really press two notions:  the americas were not in a state of wilderness, even though it looked that way to europeans.  Secondly, there is a real need to perhaps consider that most european contact with american aborigines was in the context of Mad Max circumstances.

A world with no horses.

Then there is Guns, Germs, and Steel - germs being the critical first wave of invasion, depopulating and destabilizing the indigenous societies of the Americas.

Checking on Amazon this morning, I note a spate of one-star reviews of the book coming from otherwise virgin reviewers. I wonder if they all had their copies overnighted to them.

Dang, right wingers are fast readers.

I note a spate of one-star reviews of the book coming from otherwise virgin reviewers.

I’m sure that’s only because they can’t get it tagged “Gay” so it’ll be de-listed.

“Oooh, I’ve been meaning to, but hesitated because these days it can sometimes be hard to tell where authors’ loyalties lie.  Do you mean to say it’s good, then?”

“1491” was kickass, to me. I don’t know that there’s a strong place the author stands, except on some of the academic questions. Unless you have a strong view on when the Americas were first people, or Clovis, or on preColumbian population estimates.

There’s a lot of fascinating stuff in there, especially about the Indians as large-scale engineers of the environment.

“first peopled” I meant.

A popular lunch around our house is a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich topped off with a slice of Gouda cheese—a GBLT . . .