Gordon:
> >While I found this article somewhat prolix, it does raise
> >interesting questions: What are the boundaries of our
> >moral concern, and why? One is encircled by sets: self,
> >family, neighborhood, tribe, ethnicity, nation, class,
> >species, set-of-the-sentient-beings, biosphere. Which
> >boundaries are valid, and which should be made transparent
> >or removed altogether? Few can care about everyone and
> >everything, and at least some of the boundaries appear to
> >be intuitively valid, although the nation-state (the
> >province of patriotism) seems to possess one of the
> >weaker claims.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> Some Anglo/American leftists said, "_This_ [= 911] is an attack on
> _us_," but it makes more sense to say that the US war on Afghanistan
> & other nations is an attack on us, if we don't allow ourselves to
> get browbeaten into American Patriotism.
I believe it would make more sense to construe the warlike acts in Afghanistan and elsewhere as police actions, which are presented to the American people as traditional war in order to make use of certain cultural artifacts like patriotism to ensure public support and speed the work. (I believe that Capital has moved beyond the nation-state long since, but for the lower orders, _divide_et_impera_.) I think most leftists are probably not very susceptible to this form of manipulation, but let's assume they are.
If the aforesaid Anglo-American leftists were to drop their nationalistic identification, they might still feel that they had been the targets, rather than the beneficiaries, of 9/11, since most of them are effectively members of a semi-privileged class under Capital. Certainly this would apply to me in the most explicit way: I work only a short distance from the site of the WTC for a company connected with international commerce. (But, as I found out a long time ago, no one in America, with the possible exception of some survivalist hermits in the mountains of Idaho, is off the grid. That was in the 1960s; today, one must think of most of the world in the same way.) Hence, it would make sense for me to kill anyone who was trying to kill me and people like me simply as a matter of self-preservation regardless of my opinion on more abstract matters.
In my particular case this consideration doesn't lead to support for the military activities in Afghanistan because I don't believe in the boss media; the recent business in Afghanistan has been especially unbelievable, reading like something out of the _Arabian_Nights_. But many leftists seem to think these media are believable, hence they try to advise the ruling class on the conduct of its wars. (Even I couldn't pass up an available anti-bombing demonstration, but I hope I have no illusions as to its effects.)
So if Capital were interested in speaking to leftists and near leftists, it wouldn't invoke tribal fetishes like the flag, but would instead appeal to the leftists' class position and sense of moral and intellectual superiority, and invite them to work within the system for the good of mankind, etc. If this isn't being done it must mean the Left is now below their radar, but many of its constituents are ready to do it for them anyway, as I'm sure you've noticed. Some of them, in their enthusiasm to get aboard, have even regrettably adopted ruling-class habits of dishonesty and sophistry. I think this is about par for the course, though.
In general I think the patriotism thing is sham. It may even be perceived that way by the folk, a kind of gigantic pomo simulacrum employed to relieve feelings of anxiety and anger. We're dealing with class. The supposed Osama bin Laden and company represent one kind of class struggle, obviously delusional, ineffective and self-destructive, at least from my point of view. I've advocated other strategies which I will not tediously rehearse here. I thought Jensen was interesting because he seems to think radically.
-- Gordon