Most of the dissidents -- Trotskyists come neo-cons, Polish Solidarity, etc. -- and descendants of Napoleon became pro-capitalists. Few in today's world think that they can or must create a non-capitalist world. You don't either.
At 9:56 PM -0600 11/26/02, Peter K. wrote:
>>The destruction of the natural environment was not a conscious motive
>>of Islamic fundamentalists (at least they have yet to make it the
>>center of their grievances), but if you think of the environment in a
>>broader sense of the word, including social, political, economic, and
>>cultural, the analogy makes sense.
>----------
>Not in my opinion. Al Qaeda wants a return of the Caliphate. It
>would be like the Taliban - no kites or music and women as chattel,
>not a homey beaver dam - or imagine if Pat Robertson or Jerry
>Falwell ran their own country.
The analogy doesn't make sense to you because you think that, for the analogy to make sense, the beavers have to be "good guys," who aspire to create a modern liberal democracy, rather than a new Caliphate with no kites, music, or women's rights. In the long history of colonialism and imperialism, however, only a minority of those who opposed the empires would count as "good guys" in anyone's book. The majority of opponents of colonialism and imperialism throughout history were illiberal, millenarian, and reactionary, most of whom (including those who espoused such modern ideologies as liberalism, anarchism, socialism) committed war crimes (by the post-Geneva Convention standards) -- e.g., the uprising led by Tupac Amaru (1780), the slaves turned revolutionaries in the Haitian Revolution (1794 - 1804), the Boxers (1900), and so on.
More often than not, neither the empires nor their enemies were "good guys." That's what makes for a great material for art (as artists ranging from Joseph Conrad to Gillo Pontecorvo knew), though a comparatively few artists have directly made use of rich sources of narrative that are the history of colonialism, imperialism, and (ideologically heterogeneous but mostly reactionary) uprisings against them. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>