Re: <nettime> German 'Open Letter" and 'Irregular Ukraine linklist'

[podinski <podinski@mailbox.org>]

Hi Michael et al,

thx for your posts...

At least i can say the conversation on UKR and the new Europa+Eurasian
crisis has been successfully upgraded...

I did post Herman's and Habermas article together to demonstrate that i
am very interested to take into account multiple viewpoints, and am not
trying to promote any one-dimensional ideological thinking !

And can hopefully add more east european perspectives to the mix soon.

...

And Felix, that Tooze article is a really fascinating read... but might
have to come back for comments on it later...

Also Brian's framing opens up the field for dialogue alot more....

What was interesting to me about the Open Letter, was that i read alot
of the blustery bashing of it first ... ( including the distracting line
from Kluge about the positives of DE surrender, which isnt in the letter
), and when i finally got around to reading the actual collective
statement it was by comparison to its detractors very reserved, calm,
and reasonable ... and worried !

and one could say feminist in its caring approach.

and understandably uncertain in how to proceed.

ciao for now.

podinski



 


>  Date: Tue, 17 May 2022 16:25:16 -0400
> From: Michael Benson <kinpix2001@gmail.com>
> To: nettime-l@kein.org
> Subject: <nettime> German 'Open Letter" and 'Irregular Ukraine
> 	linklist'
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAF3eCHGErZum6i+g1RX=KY2B4X0M8V53BUdo=GQSotK7zDFuEg@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> I'm not interested in hashing out (increasingly weirdly irrelevant)
> distinctions between left, right and center, though I'm allergic to
> interpretations of leftism as fundamentally pacifist, when the roots of
> 'the' left (because there were many, as Ted recently pointed out) lie at
> least in part in armed opposition to fascism. Recall the message Woody
> Guthrie taped to his guitar. And one reason that letter to the
> Bundezkanzler is so flawed is that I imagine all those 200,000 people who
> signed it also see themselves as opponents of fascism, and not advocates of
> appeasement. "Even the legitimate resistance against an aggressor is at
> some point in an intolerable disproportion." Really?
>
> For these reasons and regarding recent Nettime exchanges, I'm in agreement
> that we're "looking for another possible politics" (Podinsky) and also that
> "the western lefts... need to rethink their relationship to the state and,
> in particular, to the use of force." (Byfield.) Not an entirely new
> phenomenon, and certainly blatantly clear during those terrible years when
> Bosnia was being hammered while NATO countries sat by and watched as the
> atrocities mounted. (In fact they did worse than watch: they imposed an
> arms embargo, which had the effect of denying the side without arms the
> right to defend itself. One Bosnian-American artist who I know, who bears
> the mental scars of trying to defend Sarajevo with antique light weapons as
> heavy metal rained down all around, wrote to me at the beginning of the
> Russian invasion of Ukraine "If we'd had 1% of the support the Ukrainians
> are getting, we could have pushed them back.")
>
> Podinsky, with respect I would note that Daniel Herman's analysis and
> Haberman's are quite different. They don't represent the same or even a
> similar view. Habermas's analysis is nuanced and in keeping with the facts
> as we know them or think we know them. It's far more sophisticated than
> that Scholz letter. Whereas actually I find a lot of Herman's argumentation
> to be quite contestable, despite all those links. But I don't propose to
> get into a blow by blow about this, even though the larger thrust of his
> argument boils down to leaving the Ukrainians to deal with their giant
> predatory neighbor more or less alone. (Sarajevo again.)
>
> Rather I would just make an observation. If we deplore abuse of mass media
> to sell war and the tools of war; and the corruption and profiteering of
> the arms industry; and the enemy-projection and self-perpetuation of a
> grotesquely money grubbing national security state; and racism,
> imperialism, the subjugation of other nations and on and on; and if we
> actively work to highlight those mechanisms and work to fight against them
> in the context of the USA, NATO, etc.... If we do all that, then what good
> are we if we refuse to recognize when these phenomena occur elsewhere?
> Because if we see it only where we've been conditioned to see it, and
> ignore it elsewhere despite ample evidence, we're not analysts or political
> scientists but ideologues.
>
> Best wishes,
> Michael
>
>
>
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: