Imperialist War and Anti-War

Apsken at aol.com Apsken at aol.com
Sat Mar 27 18:14:21 PST 1999


First Greg Nowell invoked "the national question" as though it somehow trumps the principle of opposition to imperialist war, and of revolutionary defeatism. I suggest he needs a remedial course in the classics. The right of nations to self-determination is not the right of an imperialist power to crush another nation, nor has it ever been. Nor is his "y'all" posturing anything but a provocation, and an attempt to change the subject. When did Greg's Pentagon heroes and the Commander in Chief ever shed tears for the world's wretched sufferers whom we leftists so callously shunned?

(By the way, Greg, how often have you joined us in protesting the wretched plight of East Timor or Cyprus or Chiapas -- and when you did, did you notice which parties to those conflicts were encouraged by your government? Or do you not concern yourself with such faraway suffering, preoccupied as you are with enlightening us on LBO-talk?)

Next Greg wrote, "People who retrospectively advocate bombing of concentration camps in WWII are faced with the fact that the bombs would have killed the camp interns as well as the camp s tructure and garrison."

But that wasn't the proposal, nor the reason the proposal wasn't adopted, and it wasn't made "retrospectively." The proposal put to Churchill by the Jewish leaders was to bomb the railroad tracks to Auschwitz, which would have disrupted the transports. Britain refused on grounds that would divert a few precious bombs from military targets.

Some of Margaret's pro-bombing arguments are even worse. When I joined the first Chicago picket line against the U.S. war in Vietnam (in 1963, when Madame Nhu came to visit the city), our Student Peace Union protest was portrayed as kooks, probably persuasively to the media's general audience; mass opposition developed only when the number of body bags soared, and as even the sons of privilege faced conscription. By her logic, we should have supported Kennedy's war instead, as did most liberals and social democrats of that day.

In fact, these pro-imperialist-war arguments get endlessly recycled. Mussolini was opposed by anti-fascists and anti-imperialists when Italy invaded Ethiopia, but was supported by liberals who regarded the Italian army as an anti-slavery liberator. Henry Wallace quit the left over Korea, choosing the "United Nations" side. Berlin pushed most ex-Trotskyist Third Camp veterans, en route to neoconservatism, into careers as U.S. propagandists, and India's border war with China claimed the next group. The Bay of Pigs was Max Shachtman's moment to choose the CIA; Norman Thomas moved into the imperialist camp next, when the Marines landed in the Dominican Republic. And so on. Recently, bombing Iraq claimed allegedly "progressive" Paul Wellstone. By now we can see that anyone who supports Clinton and NATO, as these once radical and progressive forebears demonstrated, is groping not for socialism and human liberation, but rather for a rationalization to retire from struggle, ceding political initiative to the world's most powerful and ruthless plunderers. Sadly, they won't be the last.

Ken Lawrence



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