Here’s De Genova’s full letter.
Frankly, after reading this, I hate this guy more than I did before. What particularly grates isn’t his juvenile blather about imperialism or his fashionable dislike for white folks, but his excruciating pedantry. For example: not his snide aside about “American” referring to “all of the Americas, not merely to the United States, as U.S. imperial chauvinism would have it.” You can almost see him smirking as he says this to a bespectacled girl in a coffee house. Someone smash this guy guitar on the Delta House wall.
Anyway, here’s an excerpt (but you should really read the whole thing):
… I also affirmed that Iraqi liberation can only be effected by the Iraqi people themselves, both by resisting and defeating the U.S. invasion as well as overthrowing a regime whose brutality was long sustained by none other than the U.S. Such an anti-colonial struggle for self-determination might involve a million Mogadishus now but would ultimately have to become something more like another Vietnam. Vietnam was a stunning defeat for U.S. imperialism; as such, it was also a victory for the cause of human self-determination.
Is this a tirade against “anything and everything American”? Far from it. First, I hasten to remind you that “American” refers to all of the Americas, not merely to the United States, as U.S. imperial chauvinism would have it. More importantly, my rejection of U.S. nationalism is an appeal to liberate our own political imaginations such that we might usher in a radically different world in which we will not remain the prisoners of U.S. global domination.