> But we trust you to be our ideological auditor, making sure that
> that goal is much easier when we present an alternative vision to others that
> makes sense to them, even if they can't agree with it. they might be able
> to respect the position, rather than merely laugh in contempt at a left
> that believes that dropping bombs and shooting guns is wrong but war is
> THE, not just an, opportunity for organizing the left.
Given where we're at now, I tend to exactly this view, Kelley - I'm not sure about the definite article bit, but war has a way of laying naked our society's problems, the social distinctions to be made in terms of benefits derived and prices paid, and sometimes the horror has to be felt at home in order that we comprehend a little of what life elsewhere has been like for a long time.
I'm sure Washington was as appalled as the rest of us when those planes went in, but that didn't stop them implementing an opportunistic plan devised for just such a disaster (that's how I think we have to see the unfolding methodical madness, I feel). Whatever you say about that, it is a coherent stance to take. At bottom, the disaster was a realistic scenario for which a wider strategy might be formulated in advance.
So we're appalled at mass murder, too. Does that mean we can't use it as an instance that supports our critique of the way this world is organised? That we can't mobilise against a war that is no less a manifestation of same? That we can't point out that it is the al Qua'idas and beltway elites doing the orchestrating, and the innocents under their sway doing the dying? That to oppose this war is, in effect, to oppose a whole lot more? Perhaps even that this whole lot more is logically prior.
That doesn't strike me as contemptable at all, Kel. Just conscious praxis in the concrete moment. We're dealing with surfaces here - real horror and real deaths, but epiphenomena nevertheless. Radical change is urgent, and perhaps the case for it is communicatively stronger now than it has been ever since Vietnamese villagers and American boys were dying on our screens.
Cheers, Rob.
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