Alexander Cockburn defended the Soviet invasion with the infamous line that "if any country deserved to be raped, it was Afghanistan." But leaving aside this crude and stupid remark, Cockburn in the 1980s was one of the few writers who noted that the anti-Soviet resistance the U.S. was backing was made up of religous fanatics. (I think Robert Fisk was another). So he deserves to say, "See, I told you so."
About Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia. According to the October 2001 issue of Lingua Franca, Benedict Anderson's work on nationalism was inspired by that war. "The roots of Imagined Communities lie in what Anderson, in the late 1970s, saw as 'a fundamental trnasformatin in the history of Marxism and Marxist movements': the wars between Vietnam, Cambodia, and China in 1978-1979. Far from presenting a unified front against Western imperialism and capitalism, those regimes...were engaged in undisgised fratricide. And so Anderson undertook a full-scale study of nationalism, a force whose power and complexity were not explained by the Marxist theory in which he had been schooled."
>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>Subject: Re: I Don't Get It
>Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 11:21:16 -0500
>
>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>I'm curious about how American leftists reacted to the Vietnamese
>>intervention in Cambodia, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan,
>>etc. at the time when they happened.
>
>Dunno about VN in Cambodia, but the only left group in the U.S. to
>support the Soviet intervention (or invasion, depending on your
>proclivities) was the Spartacist League. Everyone else was critical.
>The Sparts have reprinted some of their commentaries from then in an
>I-told-you-so manner.
>
>Doug
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