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Mike Kesby wrote: > the NATO Press Office may indeed use terms like democracy, human > rights, free speech etc - but it doesn't own them. These discourses > are polyvalent and can be attached to variety of actions eg bombing Serbia, > justifying the publication of opposition newspapers in Zimbabwe, opposing > state murder in Communist China ... > Thus - given the unstable nature of these discourses - but their stability > as currency on the international stage - there is presumably much strategic > work that critical geographers and others can do to reproduce and redefine > these discourses in new ways that produce recognizable benefits in practice? Hitler did not own the term national-socialism: it was polyvalent, and the NSDAP was a coalition in itself. It was contested, challenged and questioned: that is why Hitler had to kill so many members of his own party. The SS did not own the slogan "Unsere Ehre heißt Treue" and indeed it resurfaced recently in the mouth of the FPÖ chairman in Niederösterreich.... http://www.kakanien.com/snitz9.htm But imagine a divergent future, in which Hitler had conquered not only Europe, but the whole world. 200 years later, only a handful of professional historians understand anything else but the Nazi world view. To others it is as alien as prehistoric culture. They all grew up with Nazi rhetoric and Nazi concepts. They attribute any failure of society to meet their expectations to the malfunctioning of this world view, not to its existence. In that imaginary world, you might see the poor in Africa demonstrating for 'more racial purity'. You might see European radicals criticising the local Gauleiter for 'insufficient loyalty to the Fuhrer'. You might even see a new generation of critical Nazi academics, doing strategic work to 'reproduce and redefine these discourses in new ways that produce recognizable benefits in practice'. But so long as they all did these things, the world would stay as it was. The Weltanschuung would define the Welt - just as the liberal world view defines the liberal world. Both stay or go together. The point is, *why* do critical geographers wish to save liberal ideology. Why do they wish to redefine and polyvalorise the 'discourse' which kills millions, instead of abandoning it? -- Paul Treanor http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/forget.html