> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Subject: Re: Note to the "ladder of force left"
>
> A bunch of people that have demonstrated themselves capable of
> stunning acts of violence have resolved to kill lots of Americans.
> That would include you, Yoshie, Carrol, even Lou Proyect. There's no
> class warrior exemption (actually they don't like Communists very
> much, so American Communists are doubly doomed). Does this bother you
> at all? Or are you willing to take a spore for the anti-empire?
>
> Doug
We talk about people as if they were the principle beginners of this fight when we speak in these terms. This is the first problem. Then we demand that people we know are not communists, anarchists or whatever- we demand that these people act in the military morality of a left radical. These people are not, so it is about as logical to demand the same of US to "not hit civilians" the horrible/impossible and touching-faith-in-America position adopted by many governments (including Chian/Jiang yesterday).
Then finally, we are being hopelessly ethno-centric; if we accept the reality that the anti-colonial movements have not recently begun, but only recently begun attacking targets here in North America (in itself a very debatable assertion)--we realise that A) these fighters are not fighting the first battle, but the first battle that "hits home", B) they are fighting with tools left to them after the military has been removed at the end of many slaughters by American and other imperialist powers, thus terror is what remains; C) civilians are killed in the Middle East constantly and in a whirlwind- in that case, we have a problem of focus. Our job is not to write theatre analysis, nor is to act as "her majesty's loyal opposition" (I'm Canadian)-- so we should give up trying to help them come up with better foreign policy (a helpless notion if ever there was one). Our job is to point out to people that we are not happy with nor are we willing to accept the fact, but if this is a war- and clearly it is- then when our governments kill Middle Eastern civilians, we cannot go into emotional hyperbole that blocks the fact that targetting "me" right back is, yes, tit-for-tat.
The problem that most people on lists have with this topic is how unpalatable this truth actually is. Perhaps we need to stop wringing our hands over how to stop Arabs from killing American civilians, and do our job- which is to stop Americans from killing Arab and Afghani citizens. One cannot play the role of global cop and the role of stopping and resisting the global cop at the same time. Carrol is right: Do nothing. That's the demand.
This means, yes, the uncomfortable truth needs to be spoken: Address the causes,- which remain imperialism. Everything else is the Blairist Third Way of the anti-capitalist bunch, irrelevent to the core.
Macdonald