A dozen years ago I talked about hope to a roomful of working-class community college students in Washington, citing the German philosopher Ernst Bloch to the effect that without hope there is no action but without action there is no hope. A woman said in a clear voice that she agreed, because if she had not hoped she would not have struggled and if she had not struggled she would not have survived Pol Pot and the Cambodian genocide.
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That floored me. Sometimes hope is just that you will survive, or that you will escape. Then you can hope for more. I wish I knew her story, but that she was in North America, alive and well and confident enough to speak out, told me something of it. Even despotic regimes end, though it’s important to remember that not everyone and everything survives; you can be devastated for what won’t and hopeful for what will at the same time.In the United States we are probably headed for a very grim phase of uncertain duration.
Surviving Trump will be like surviving Pol Pot?
And a link to an article by Richard Gott, who it seems never really stopped working for the Guardian.
Traitors all.
“Surviving Trump will be like surviving Pol Pot?”
One can only hope so. Forcing a bunch of academics & scribblers to work on the land & reacquaint themselves with the values of the American people has exactly what downsides?
I flatly don’t believe it. What sort of survivor of Pol Pot would be listening to this tw@t? One that fought for the Vietnamese perhaps.
He is making it up.
Every time they open their mouths, these idiots prove their utter insanity…
@SMFS
Agreed.
I started suspecting it was bollocks at this point:
“I talked about hope to a roomful of working-class community college students”
Like any Grauniac has any time for the working class. The working class disgusts them.
Might be slightly more believable if she said “I was talking AT a roomful of working class students”.
“I understand the working classes, I did my postdoctoral thesis on them.”
“I talked about hope to a roomful of working-class community college students”
More like
I patronised a roomful of working-class community college students because they had to sit through some shit political indoctrination course otherwise they would fail
“In the United States we are probably headed for a very grim phase of uncertain duration.”
Means roughly:
‘I didn’t get my way, so it must be a CATASTROPHE, and I can’t stop fretting about it because I’m so virtuous politically, and it’s all about ME.’
I am also very, very sure that the author would have been a supporter of Pol Pot in the 1970s. Possibly a few years into the 1980s too. Chomsky was a notorious one.
SMFS & Cynic call it.
Why would someone who had survived Pol Pot be kissing leftist arse in the USA. Unless she is bedbug batshit crazy and didn’t get her bellyful of socialism the first time around.
Or she was working FOR Pol Pot.
Another made up crock of SJW shite.
Mr Ecks – “Why would someone who had survived Pol Pot be kissing leftist arse in the USA.”
A group of college students? A dozen years ago? So that would be 2004? Someone born in 1979 would have been 25 – I suppose that is old enough to be doing a post-graduate degree. But only just – and community colleges aren’t big on post-graduate degrees.
So if she is too old to be a student, is she a teacher? Of what? How many schools in America teach Cambodian? A dozen? Not many of them working class ones.
I’m surprised the writer didn’t denounce her for her selfishness in undermining a socialist regime.
This is what pisses me off about that “late stage capitalism” bullshit. We’ve seen late stage socialism, and it’s a pyramid of skulls and a pile of broken spectacles.
To understand this, I’m afraid you have to get inside the leftist head. If you were a leftist SJW, how would you prefer to see yourself? If Donald Trump is just another president holding views that differ from your own, you are just another nonentity posting pointless tweets. If however he is the new Fuhrer, you can be the new Nelson Mandela (or Che Guevara or Ann Frank, according to taste) facing martyrdom by standing bravely up against the evil Trumpenreich. No contest.
Tim
I think you might have to split the ‘Snowflakes’ category into more subdivisions else the sheer number of posts will swallow the blog whole!
As to the article itself – utter shit – and I’m in a generous mood….
Why would someone who had survived Pol Pot be kissing leftist arse in the USA.
I dunno. I recently wrote about some idiot who fled Idi Amin’s Uganda and sought refuge in Britain, whereupon she immediately took up “activism” in the cause of anti-colonialism.
‘Surviving Trump will be like surviving Pol Pot?’
Betcha the Libtards wish now that they hadn’t pushed all the gun control crap, and had a gun to protect themselves from Trumpism. Or Trumpenreich (good one, squawkbox).
Trumpism is the latest leftist strawman. Completely undefined, but to be feared instensely.
Tim Newman:
Wonderful.
Uni of Manchester?
Shamcellor Lemn Sissay–purple socks, far too short drainpipe pants and a Hadendowah haircut–presumably not dressed with cowshit in the classic style. He cuts a figure of dignity doesn’t he.
“I was in Broadway Market in Hackney the other day when I saw five young women, bright as summer, sharp as a pin, looking fantastic, synapses sparkling and they shouted ‘Chancellor, Chancellor!’. It turns out they were all newly graduated alumni. We took a selfie and I put it on my Facebook page” .
It could have been a day trip to the Smoke. Or could it be he doesn’t live in Manchester?
Purge, purge, purge. Purge NOW.
Ecks, Uni of Manchester has a campus in the City of London. No, I don’t understand it either. I imagine it’s a way of grabbing a greater share of the overseas students
Tim N,
Bravo.
Tim N
Yes some colleges have opened London outposts to attract foreign students, one of the Welsh colleges bet on it as a strategy and lost leading to cuts that weren’t well received.
University of South Wales’ London campus closes with no students after one year – at a cost of £750,000 to the taxpayer, say reports
Can’t comment on Manchester University’s London outpost, but the Chancellor lives in London, not Manchester.
Interesting that Ernst Bloch is cited in the linked article.
Apparently, according to Wikipedia, his work “allowed for the emergence of utopian performativity and a new wave of performance theorizing as Bloch’s formulation of utopia shifted how scholars conceptualize the ontology and the staging of performances as imbued with an enduring indeterminacy”.
Just sayin’
BniC,
some Uni’s have no ambition, if you are going to open a campus, why not do it somewhere nice
http://en.indian-ocean-times.com/Mauritius-The-prestigious-Welsh-Aberystwyth-University-open-its-doors-on-the-island-in-October-2015_a5239.html
of course the Chancellor and all her cronies had to check it out personally.
If they thought there was even a remote chance of the USA turning into Kampuchea under Trump they’d be fleeing to Canada or Europe. These are not heroic people. They are cowardly little weirdos who tittilate themselves with fantasies about oppression and them being the hero. They are, in short, mentalists.
Sanders supporters would be the ones putting the plastic bags over the heads of the Trump supporters and leaving their corpses to rot in the fields. Fuck Bernie Sanders. He was even worse than Clinton, and she was a fucking nightmare. Trump’s going to do a lot of things that will make us howl, but at least he’s neither of those cunts.