Margaret wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>) wrote:
>
> >In Columbus, Ohio, we had a protest against the US/NATO bombing of Serbia &
> Kosovo today.
>
> I'm curious. I hardly ever these days play the
> apologist for US imperialism, but the attacks on Serbia
> -- regardless of true motivation! -- seem at least to
> be directed at the right target.
Sigh! I wrote the first draft of this post (with its opening sigh) before Barkely's similar use of the expression to open a post. My use overlaps but is not identical with his.
I spent a large amount of time from 1964 on acquainting myself with all the details of Indo-Chinese history since the French invastion in the 19th century, alongwith lengthy accounts of European intervention in China itself during the 19th and 20th centuries. I engaged in long, usually unresolved, arguments over the precise ratio of PLA atrocities to those of the Kuomintang (and those of the irregular guerilla units), arguments then repeated in respect to the PLAF, the French, the puppet troops, and the Americans. I listened with patience to exposition of the difference between good anti-guerilla and bad anti-guerilla tactics and the precise percentage of each in U.S. tactics and Indo-China and in the earlier British tactics in Malaya. I read with eagerness each of Bernard Fall's new dispatches from the front lines and critiqued in private thought and in discussions the ponderous pronunciamentos of the Alcotts.
(I had been blissfully free from such labor during the Korean War, being then a passive but quite committed Cold Warrior, and quite happily wearing out hundreds of pencil erasers in Arlington Hall Station deciphering the internal communications of the Czech Border Guard. But that is another story.)
At my first anti-war demonstration (a pathetic state-wide mobilization of some 30 people in Springfield) an AP reporter asked me what I thought the U.S. should be, sending me into a number of moments of blithering nonsense such as a number on these lists have submitted on the current bombing. When, the following year, I attended my first large Vietnam War conference in Ann Arbor, I found a conference at which all the official meetings structured by experts who took very seriously indeed the question of what the U.S. should do. Fortunately by that time, however, SDS, YSA, and incipient Yippee groups had become powerful enough so the conference was well stocked with unofficial forums, workshops, and discussion groups that focused sharply on the only relevant question: How can we create so fucking much trouble for Washington that they will get the hell out of Vietnam?
Margaret, there is no such thing as a "right target" for U.S. military power. Is the U.S. attacking a fascist state? Hurrah for the fascists! Is the U.S. attacking a bunch of barbarians? Hurrah for the barbarians! Is the U.S. attacking a cadre of unreconstructed Stalinists? Hurrah for unreconstructed Stalinists! Is the U.S. attacking fascists disguised as Stalinists? Hurrah for fascists disguised as Stalinists.
Whenever U.S. military power moves, the only set of questions of any interest are variations on "How do we make the bastards hurt?" There are complex analytic questions, but only *within* the framework established by this How. For example, there are already appearing conflicting analyses as to the precise goals of imperialism in this instance, and the resolution of those questions might affect strategic and tactical decisions.
The two most important groups of people in the United States right now have been described by Yoshie: (a) those out there with placards (b) those honking their horns in support. Our task is to figure out how (a) horn honkers can be turned into placard wavers and (b) how silent horn honkers can be turned into actual horn honkers.
Intermittently the chorus of a somewhat sloppy song becomes the only question: Which side are you on? In between batttles one tries to persuade. In the midst of the battle one mobilzies the troops.
Carrol