Re: <nettime> nettime-l Digest, Vol 174, Issue 40

See also this, today from Yair Rosenberg who is probably not that progressive, but still:

Douglas Macgregor is a retired U.S. Army colonel who has become Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s go-to foreign policy expert. In recent appearances on the channel, he has argued that the U.S. should not sanction Russia and that Vladimir Putin should be allowed to annex as much of Ukraine as he wants, which is why many today considerMacgregor to be less a neutral observer than a Russia apologist. What they may not know is that he’s also a longtime purveyor of anti-Semitic ideas.

“We have a huge problem with a class of so-called elites, the people who are wealthy, very wealthy in many cases and they are, as the Russians used to call certain individuals many, many years ago, rootless cosmopolitans,” he told the Serbian American Voters Alliance in an October 2021 speech uncovered by Matt Gertz at MediaMatters.

For those understandably unfamiliar with this terminology, “rootless cosmopolitans” is an anti-Semitic euphemism for Jews that was popularizedunder Stalin in the Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler also repeatedly referred to Jews as disloyal cosmopolitans, lamenting in his manifesto Mein Kampfthat “it is no longer princes or their courtesans who contend and bargain about state frontiers, but the inexorable cosmopolitan Jew who is fighting for his own dominion over the nations.” In other words, there is exactly one type of person who uses this sort of language in everyday conversation.

In case his audience missed the point, though, Macgregor added: “They live above all of this, they have no connection to the country. There is nothing there that holds them in place, and they are largely responsible, in my judgment, for the condition that we are in today.”

On Mar 17, 2022, at 4:00 PM, Ted Byfield <tedbyfield@gmail.com> wrote:

This is my favorite debate strategy: when you don’t have a substantive argument, just say your interlocutors are incapable of understanding the truth. It works for Macgregor’s fanboys on Fox, no reason it shouldn’t work on nettime.

Cheers,
Ted

On Mar 17, 2022, 18:26 -0400, Stefan Heidenreich <mail@stefanheidenreich.de>, wrote:

it's a double bind + cognitive dissonance problem:

for most western intellectuals, after years of fighting for the right
causes (which I also supported and keep supporting) it is very difficult
to realize that one has been gaslighted as useful idiot for the
military-industrial complex.

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