From: Laurie Colson <lauriecolson-AT-yahoo.com>
Date: 08 Feb 2010 00:16:01 UTC   (04:16:01 PM in author's locale)
To: Situationist <situationist-AT-lists.nothingness.org>

I did a double take on the Sarte being quoted as advising arabs to murder frenchman to be free. I thought he was cool before the radical conversion. In Being and Nothingness, the moral standpoint most severly criticised was the spirit of seriousness, or idealism, leading people to think that there were inherent values in things and discoverable by men. In the end maybe he is a literary and not philosophical giant. His 
writing is highly personal and individual in flavour. You can see the world thru his eyes by end of Being and Nothingness, the struggle felt as worthwhile, if only to learn how it feels to  be so splendidly desparately romantic. Disappointing that after this vision he seems to present us with a not very attractive way out, to become Marxists. An essentially literary metaphysics. Eccentric Marxist, Sarte.  At least it could be said of Debord, he knew how to party... if I knew it was going  to be this kind of party,       I would have stuck my dick in the mashed potatoes.
2/5/10, JEAN PARR <jeanparr-AT-btinternet.com> wroFrom: JEAN PARR <jeanparr-AT-btinternet.com>
Subject: Re: Orientalism- Nuff Said...
To: "Situationist" <situationist-AT-lists.nothingness.org>
Date: Friday, February 5, 2010, 1:05 AM


Well yes some good did come out of Europes guilt trip look at how Chirac was reluctant to get into bed with Blair and Bush over the Iraq invasion, not willing to preside amongst other things over the looting of Mesopotamian artefacts and the trashing of Iraqi history.
I cant believe this country, the UK can go about its car wash culture knowing that its fucked some other country up big time. Im so angry about it that in my head I no longer count myself as a British subject. In my head my passport is not to protect me abroad but to allow me to flee at the earliest opportunity. 
We have an inquiry into the way the run up to war was handled running here and the press is treating it like a shooting gallery
What we need here is an earthquake to wake everyone up out of the deep sleep. Decades of Spectacle and no one can tell what is real anymore

Jean

--- On Thu, 4/2/10, Laurie Colson <lauriecolson-AT-yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Laurie Colson <lauriecolson-AT-yahoo.com>
> Subject: Orientalism- Nuff Said...
> To: "To:" <situationist-AT-lists.nothingness.org>
> Date: Thursday, 4 February, 2010, 20:05
>
> I know this is a long review to post, I got to thinking I
> was being an 'orientalist', and then found this, and thought
> it looked like an interesting insight into Edward Said.
> There is situationist content, I believe.
>  
> The New Criterion
> Books
> January 2008
> Enough Said
> by David Pryce-Jones
> On Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's
> Orientalism by Ibn Warraq.
> In the aftermath of World War II, a tide of nationalism
> swept over Asia and Africa. It was
> understandable. Europeans had just devastated their own
> continent. Bystanders if not participants in
> the Holocaust, they could no longer claim any moral
> authority to be ruling over others. Furthermore
> their political classes had almost invariably maintained
> that they were preparing their empires for
> ultimate independence. For the likes of Nasser, Nkrumah,
> Sukarno, Ben Bella and Boumedienne in
> Algeria, Nehru and Gandhi, and Ho Chi Minh, the time for
> self-rule had arrived. The Third World
> duly took shape on the international stage. One central
> element was systematic resentment against
> the West, a resentment ably attacked by Ibn Warraq in his
> Defending the West.[1]
> Third World leaders were mostly military men ready and
> willing to resort to violence. To mobilize
> the masses in support, they denigrated the previous
> European administrations as so many
> embodiments of the white man and his manifest faults.
> “Imperialist,” “colonialist,” “racist” served
> as
> so many collective curse-words. It is doubtful that they
> really believed the sloganeering and
> stereotyping so useful to them. As soon as they themselves
> were securely in power, they hurried to
> westernize their countries as best they could, evidently
> wanting similar universities and hospitals and
> armies, sports, and even pop music. So far-reaching has
> imitation been that some of the new
> nationalist rulers incorporated second-hand the fascism,
> Communism, and anti-Semitism that had
> wrecked Europe.
> The British responded to Third World nationalism in a
> welcoming phrase about “the winds of
> change,” as though those mobilizing enmity towards them
> had simply blown in with the weather.
> Only the French made determined efforts to resist, and then
> in vain. Defenders of empire had always
> been few and far between. Treasurers resented the
> expense—research shows that the imperial
> powers all had to pay out immense and unaffordable sums on
> maintaining possessions abroad, and
> the money would have been better spent at home. The
> calculations are uncertain, but it appears that
> Britain alone may possibly have enjoyed some small
> financial benefit from empire. Military staffs
> resented the posting abroad of troops needed in the
> European theater. Empire-builders such as Lord
> Cromer, Lord Curzon, and Alfred Milner, or Jules Ferry and
> Marshal Lyautey in France, could only
> advance arguments about responsibility for others and a
> mission civilisatrice. Hard-headed
> colleagues listened to these abstractions with skepticism.
> Intellectuals in Europe went much further, pleading guilty
> to all the accusations levelled against
> them by Third World nationalists. They and their
> predecessors had always been constant and
> enthusiastic critics of empire, and now were thrilled to
> have their diatribes against their own
> countries thrown back at them, as it were by clever
> students and disciples. Violence committed by
> the ruled against the rulers won their applause. This
> attitude of opposition starts with the delight so
> the ruled against the rulers won their applause. This
> attitude of opposition starts with the delight so
> widely expressed in Britain over the loss of the American
> colonies—even the conservative-minded
> Edmund Burke supported the colonists. Innumerable
> nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers
> treated whatever reflected badly on the imperial power as a
> ru

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