How Should the Left Respond to a U.S. War Against Iraq?

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Dec 18 09:06:09 PST 2002


Michael Pugliese quoted Ellen Willis:


>And so do self-proclaimed anti-imperialists whose politics boils
>down to general moral outrage against American power as such,
>regardless of where exercised and for what reason

I've admired a lot of Ellen Willis' writing in the past but this is awful (and in no small part the result of her Zionism). Right after 9/11, all she could talk about was the fundamentalist repression of desire and the Twin Towers locked in their mutual phallic sadomasochistic dance (I never understood the S/m bit - did 1 WTC dominate 2? did they switch? did they jointly conspire to top 7?), because she either doesn't know anything about political economy, or like her lifemate's attitude towards empirical evidence, thinks it doesn't really matter much. So instead there's this silly case by case analysis of U.S. intervention without any larger theoretical context. Ick.

Doug



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