>The Bretton Woods institutions & the SAPs should take a special credit for
>producing reactionary nationalisms on the periphery & semi-periphery
Quite true.
.
>What is the most dangerous, though, is imperial-nationalism at the core --
>especially the USA -- from Pat Buchanan to Bill Clinton to Ralph Nader to
>garden-variety liberals & social democrats here; but American leftists
>can't see the beam in their own eyes.
Here I do not have a perfect answer. There are times when I would agree. EG I think Mahathir in Malaysia was more progressive than Anwar Ibrahim despite his repellent and undemocratic use of sexual politics. Reason: he successfully resisted the tide of international finance capitalist interests during the Asian financial crisis, and preserved local surplus value for the local bourgeoisie, and to some extent the population of Malaysia. The undemocratic price for this was fortunately not the suppression of a whole ethnic or religious group.
Where I differ from Yoshie strategically is in her framing the central dilemma in moral terms, from the New Testament. It is not about moral gestures, hypocrisy, motes, or beams. It is about trying to change the world from a starting point not of our own making. Whatever we do, we should make criticisms of imperialism but we have a chance of influencing the agenda only if we analyse what is progressive in what it is doing, and the balance of forces, and take up a stance likely to have some effect.
It is simply undialectical and fallacious to imply that imperialism does not have a positive side. That is marxism. (surprising as it may seem to some!) Or am I being deadly tedious in saying this? One never knows who has been able to read which posts.
Chris Burford
London