Mina Kumar wrote:
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> The sleight-of-hand is that the criticism is on US foreign policy and > the response is predicated on US domestic policy.
Precisely. For (positive & ancient sense) liberal individuals the U.S. is almost an infinitely (one might say uniformly) more pleasant place to live than Nazi Germany -- or than many of the states with regimes propped up by U.S. power.
But confining oneself only to evidence to be found in the pages of the NY Times, Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, and the e-mail posts of Doug Henwood it is overwhelmingly obvious that as a presence in the world the U.S. of the last 50 years has been a far more ominous and destructive force than Nazi Germany ever aspired to be. After all, Hitler's original dream was to share the world peacefully with the United States. And apparently that dream lived among at least some of the upper Nazi hierarchy as late as Hess's 'flight' to England.
I don't think Doug himself knows fully the reasons for his endless worry about crude leftist dogma. Whenever he speaks of the world and not of other (vaguely defined) "lefitsts," his views of it differ very little from those expressed by me or you -- or even those of Lou Proyect.
Even his views of leftist strategy do not vary from mine as much as he likes to pretend. We both agree on the necessity of developing a left politics independent of the Democratic Party. We both agree that U.S. military action abroad has to be opposed. It's difficult to know why the differences (which all apply to issues seldom raised on this list) should be such a bid deal.
At a time when he, Lou, and I had never significantly differed on anything, I opposed them _both_ on their fuss about "sectarianism" and "dogmatism." My argument was that those charges only made sense in a context in which program and basic political theory were shared. It is pointless to yelp "dogmatic" in reference to someone you believe to be _wrong_. If X is wrong, then that needs to be focused on, and a charge of dogmatism is an attempt (intended or not) to muddy the waters by shifting from the principles at issue to the personality of the offending party.
Carrol