Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >Without exception, every single proposal for punishing them is going to
> >have the result, if carried into practice, of _certainly_ killing and
> >disrupting the lives of 10s of thousands of people and STILL not
> >necessarily catching or punishing the bad guys.
> >
> >That's good?
>
> So you do nothing? And that's not a rhetorical question.
What frustrates you and Seth is that there is really nothing that _can_ be done within the framework of lbo _at this time_. That's one my reasons for sneering at Steve Perry's misplaced squawks about the academic, but more on that on another day. There is a good deal to do on the local level in just helping people get in motion in ways that will allow them to keep in motion. E.g., I'm trying hard right now to explain to everyone I talk to in the local CP&J why one-hour vigils are a bad idea. For a group to stay together it has to (a) be together and (b) grow. So one needs something. Vigils are a wonderful holding operation. But one-hour vigils are too long. They will taper off rather than grow. Also they have to start thinking how to _raise_ the level of struggle, SLOWLY. If you raise it too fast people burn out, etc. And a lot more. Piss on Solutions now. We need to get people talking to each other and taking actions that will lead to more actions rather than to a deadend.
But all this doesn't make very interesting or very useful chat on an international talklist. What we should be talking about are things that make some difference at least six months or so down the road. Since we really don't have the foggiest idea now of how this war is going to develop, the only sensible thing to do is to explore various "What If's." The most interesting one to explore (though I still have a feeling that the fools in D.C. won't be quite this idiotic) is the tar-baby scenario. The quick fix -- kill 5 or 10 thousand (maybe more) people, claim victory, leave a couple more regiments here and there, and forget about it, is a real possibility, but I don't see what we can do if that happens. Hence back to the tarbaby scenario.
But even to talk about that with minimal sense one has to escape the jouralistic itch to map out a bureaucratic process for someone else to carry out. That's what Seth and McReynolds are getting carried away with. Neither has started with the question: what effect will our babbling have on Washington? And neither has given an honest answer to that question: No effect at all. You, Seth, and McReynolds (who remains in my book indexed under racist) want us to make confessional statements that we really dislike the bad guys. That is what in a post lately on Socialist-Register I characterized as the endless tendency of leftists to apologize for being leftists. The bad guys are not going to be punished. Period. (Except, of course, by killing a couple of million people among whom the bad guys _may_ be hiding.) For leftists to talk about punishing the bad guys is simply irresponsible.
I'll think about it a bit more on a later post.
Carrol
The U.S. is going to do what the U.S. is going to do, and it is going to be very terrible, whether it lasts a short time or a long time.