Comments on: Old Ghosts Return to Yemen https://www.isegoria.net/2014/02/old-ghosts-return-to-yemen/ From the ancient Greek for equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts, large and small Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:48:47 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1 By: Toddy Cat https://www.isegoria.net/2014/02/old-ghosts-return-to-yemen/comment-page-1/#comment-1117374 Toddy Cat Tue, 04 Feb 2014 17:55:51 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=34006#comment-1117374 Yeah, I understand, I’m not criticizing you, certainly, but this guy doesn’t even get his facts right, as others have pointed out, and that makes me question the value of his work. I totally agree that we can learn from Marxists and others on the left, but I just don’t see how cherry-picking factoids to prove that everything that’s gone wrong in the world since 1917 is the fault of the Right is really very useful. It’s not like the guy is a really intelligent leftist like Christopher Lasch or Jaques Ellul – it’s all just Oliver Stone type stuff. I’ll shut up about Curtis, we’ll obviously just have to agree to disagree. But honestly, I still just don’t see it.

]]> By: Isegoria https://www.isegoria.net/2014/02/old-ghosts-return-to-yemen/comment-page-1/#comment-1117351 Isegoria Tue, 04 Feb 2014 16:49:27 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=34006#comment-1117351 Toddy Cat, I’m not sharing these excerpts from Curtis’s work because I agree with his world view and everything he says, but because he brings up interesting historical tidbits. You don’t have to share his center-left BBC sensibilities to get something out of his work.

As Anomaly UK has pointed out, you can learn a lot from Catholics, Marxists, etc.:

I have a bit of an interest in Catholic theology, on the basis that since this is what the brightest minds half the world could produce spent about a thousand years on, it is likely to have some value, even if it is fundamentally flawed.

In the same way, a large proportion of political science in the twentieth century was carried out in a Marxist framework, and while it is no doubt the worse for it, it is a stretch to dismiss it as worthless, less worthy as a point of comparison than Hobbes or Machiavelli, or to examine Lenin and Mao as political practitioners without giving any attention to the theories they expounded before coming to power.

]]> By: Toddy Cat https://www.isegoria.net/2014/02/old-ghosts-return-to-yemen/comment-page-1/#comment-1117339 Toddy Cat Tue, 04 Feb 2014 16:15:13 +0000 http://www.isegoria.net/?p=34006#comment-1117339 Here we go again. As if Nassar wasn’t a tyrant and a despot who did more than anyone else to get Egypt into its current mess, and who used nerve gas against the Royalist rebels. Nassar was also backed by the CIA, but this doesn’t fit Curtis’s preconceptions, so he doesn’t mention it. And isn’t this “they weren’t Commies, they were Nationalists!” schtick getting a little old? As Mao, Ho, Tito and Stalin all proved, it was eminantly possible to be both. What do you guys see in this joker?

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