I find it hard to believe that many American leftists are actually engaged in anti-imperialist organizing and solidarity work _with an objective of withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea and all other countries_. Besides a few Americans like Tim Shorrock, who is working toward such a goal??? Seriously??? Nowadays, we see American troops deployed in more places than before!
(BTW, Tim wrote me offlist that he quit LBO, which is sad. He seemed to be one of the few people on LBO who had real knowledge of the Korean history and its current political development, North or South.)
Now, here are two excerpts relevant for discussion.
***** If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?
What you were really against was not war at all, but American "imperialism" and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America's democracy, which you knew to be a "sham" because it was controlled by money in the end. That's why you wanted to "Bring the Troops Home," as your slogan said. Because if America's troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer.
But you never had the honesty-then or now-to admit that. You told the lie then to maintain your influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason. (David Horowitz, "Hillary Clinton and 'The Third Way': How America's First Lady of the Left Has Bamboozled Liberals and Conservatives Alike," Jewish World Review July 3, 2000, at <http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/horowitz.html>) *****
***** [Book Review] Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992 By William M. LeoGrande University of North Carolina, 1998 773 pages; $45.00
[Reviewed by] Judy Butler
...LeoGrande demonstrates how old-fashioned horse-trading could sometimes pull enough undecided votes to shift the balance--for example, labeling aid to the contras "humanitarian aid" and attaching human rights conditions to it in order to overcome legislators' moral objections. But the Republicans' most useful tactic was red-baiting. Throughout the dozen or so years of the U.S.-financed war in Central America, the one rule that no player--Democrat or Republican--ever took issue with was this: the Central American left was somewhere between a useful tool of the Soviets and a threat to all humankind.
In the House, enough Democrats objected to a strictly military solution in the two countries that, with the support of moderate Republicans, they could usually defeat--or at least modify-- military aid bills on the first round. Liberals, however, drew the line well short of arguing that the Sandinistas should be allowed to govern Nicaragua in peace, even if they agreed to some sort of nonaggression pact with the United States. And they would not have dreamt of defending the Salvadoran guerrilla movement's power-sharing demands before the United States had shaped the country's cruel but inept army into a competent adversary. Reagan had only to threaten Harlingen, Texas with a Sandinista invasion and the Democrats backed down.
Challenging the administration's distorted premises, double standards, and outright lies about the leftist groups in El Salvador and Nicaragua would have required tremendous political courage at the time. The surprise is that LeoGrande--writing in 1998, by which time red-baiting ought to have been passé even in the United States--doesn't challenge them either. And he sidesteps the argument that the congressional opponents of military aid who bought into red-baiting deserve some of the blame for what happened in Central America.
One example illustrates the superficiality of most opposition to contra aid. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega went to the Soviet Union in April 1985 at a time when an important vote was looming in Congress. Ortega's trip made it "untenable," said contra-aid opponents, to be seen as defending the Sandinistas, since it buttressed Reagan's charge that the Sandinistas were Soviet puppets. Some liberals said they felt personally "betrayed" because they had "gone out on a political limb for Nicaragua"; others said the trip was "intentionally timed to insult and embarrass" them.
But, as LeoGrande acknowledges, Ortega went to Moscow because he desperately needed oil. The great irony was that the trip was forced on him because the United States had pressured Mexico and Venezuela to stop supplying Nicaragua with oil. These facts were public at the time, but the Democrats ignored them. The aid votes took place a month and a half later, after Reagan had slapped a full trade embargo on Nicaragua and sent his minions out to "exploit the Democrats' chagrin." LeoGrande characterizes the episode as a "debacle" for aid opponents.
Am I being too hard on the liberals, and on the author himself? Is it nit-picking to point out that LeoGrande includes only half a dozen leftist references in his 200 pages of footnotes? Or that, although his original intent was to "write an account of the domestic opposition" to Reagan's policy, he never mentions the existence of two internationally recognized U.S. umbrella organizations--the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) and the Nicaragua Network--both of which supported a left alternative in Nicaragua and El Salvador?...
...In the early 1980s, a paper commissioned by a pro-Reagan think tank defined both CISPES and the Nicaragua Network, as well as the Institute for Policy Studies and the bimonthly magazine NACLA Report on the Americas, as "outside the framework of democratic debate on Central America." Why? Not because they opposed U.S. policy, but because they were on the left; they were illegitimate a priori. Sadly, that premise raised few eyebrows in a nation that--in the name of "democracy"--has for decades committed or encouraged war around the world against people who think differently and want different things....
Judy Butler, formerly editor of NACLA Report on the Americas, has lived in Nicaragua since 1983 and is editor of the English edition of Envío, a magazine of Central American affairs published by the Universidad Centroamericana in Managua.
(_The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists_ Vol.55, No.4 May/June 1999 <http://www.bullatomsci.org/issues/1999/mj99/mj99reviews.html>) *****
Horowitz and Butler, from different political perspectives, remind us of how failure to overcome red-baiting, demonization of the Soviet Union, and inability to explicitly support people's right to reject capitalism have always presented a practically insurmountable obstacle to Americans who wished to engage in anti-imperialist organizing and solidarity work effectively.
In today's post-socialist world, an inevitable argument we face, whenever we oppose imperial war-mongering, is that if we try to "bring the troops home," we are hoping that a Milo, a Saddam, etc. (instead of the Communists) will win. Names have changed, but the structure of the argument hasn't changed. Be it Stalin-baiting, Saddam-baiting, or Kim-baiting, we have yet to figure out how to overcome it and bring the troops home.
Yoshie