What follows is not so much about Lenin - it's not at all about him in fact - as it is about a post by the guy who blogs under that name at Lenin's Tomb. But I'll be calling him Lenin here since this is how he likes to be known as a blogger. A couple of weeks ago Lenin had some critical words to say about a short post of mine on the subject of Iraq. I don't intend to reply to all the points he made because I've been arguing about Iraq a lot, as Lenin has, and I don't think there's anything in what he says that I haven't already offered my view about. Anyone who's interested can familiarize themselves with his positions and with mine, and come to the conclusions they come to.
I just want to defend myself on one of Lenin's points, from section 5) of the post of his I'm referring to. Speaking of 'discursive practices... in the pro-War camp' which he thinks are 'egregious', Lenin highlights as the most egregious one the tendency he says I exemplify 'to abstract a situation from the mesh of geopolitical considerations in which it is embedded and reduce it to a stark moral question'. Well, I accept - and make no apology for - the stark moral question bit. Expending one's energies to the transparently obvious benefit of a semi-fascist dictatorship is not my idea of a progressive political stand. However, I don't think the criticism that 'I abstract [the] situation from the mesh of geopolitical considerations in which it is embedded' is well-grounded. For example (and I could give plenty others), in responses I wrote to Ken MacLeod, I set out my reasons for supporting the war not as abstracted from, but precisely against, the background of the geopolitical considerations laid out by Ken, and as I assess them. And that is the point, Lenin's real point. He doesn't agree with the way I assess them. He's allowed not to. (I'm generous that way.) But that I don't give the same weight he does to certain considerations in relation to other competing considerations doesn't show that I abstract from them.
See here (old site, 'Before the flood?', December 8) and here for my two responses to Ken McLeod that are relevant to the issue.