lbo-talk-digest V1 #4706

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema crdbronx at erols.com
Thu Aug 9 07:30:45 PDT 2001


England's conquest and rule of India was certainly imperialism, in an earlier stage. But English rule also involved suppression of the suttee, in which wives got burned alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands.

Luke Weiger wrote:


>
>
> I don't consider it to be a priori preposterous. This will certainly sound
> quite naive (indeed, "preposterous") to many here, but your allusion to the
> US doing "what's in its imperial interest" seems to be more applicable to
> the Kissengeresque realism of the far-right than the liberal interventionism
> espoused by Madeline Albright.

So, like anything else, imperialism has contradictory aspects. It may happen, from to time, for example, that capitalist ruling élites' desire for peace and tranquillity, in some particular set of circumstances, also serves the same ends as a broader conception of justice. It is possible see suppressing Serb nationalism, or, at one time, Nazism, in this way.

Obviously, there may also be, at the same time, quite contradictory manifestations of élite material interests. For example, it seems not to serve their interests to defend the rights of Palestinians, even though Zionist claims to territory have the same quack mystical ring as the Serbian nationalist claim to Kossovo.

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema



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