Dennis Perrin:
> Nice dodge, but the point remains: When the Soviets were wiping out entire
> Afghan villages and killed up to a million people (Jesus, can you imagine
> the reaction on this list if the US did this?) Parenti was in full, vocal
> support. Kill 'em all, let Allah sort them out. Now, he, like many (cough,
> cough) on this list, cry about US "atrocities" and if pushed might support a
> "police" effort to take apart al-Qaeda (though how this could be done
> without some force is never really explained). That the US intervention
> staved off a famine last winter and saved millions of lives is downplayed or
> dismissed as a by-product, if it's mentioned at all. Bomb a wedding,
> however, and it's full-throated roaring about imperialism.
>
> In other words, the lives of Afghans mean nothing to these people, save as
> props in their ideological display case.
I don't think the problem Yoshie advances is a dodge, provided one is radically (rather than provisionally) opposed to imperialism; I think it's a serious problem. Michael Parenti supporting Russian imperialism in Afghanistan is an example of how one falls into the trap: opposition to one imperium quickly becomes support for another; and once one signs on to one of them in a small way, each step takes one further in as the logic of complicity and collaboration deepens. (And the rewards, often, if one is directly involved.) I've been observing this sort of thing since Vietnam.
Imperia are always benevolent, by the way. Someone attempted to recruit me for, I guess, the CIA in 1959 or 1960; we were going to straighten things out in Southeast Asia by means of a sort of Marshall Plan or Peace Corps _avant_la_lettre_. It was only many years later that, with some shock, I remembered this incident and understood what it meant. Dumb as I was, I guess I luckily caught the whiff of sulphur and shied off. I am sure young Soviet citizens were told they were bringing peace and civilization to Aghanistan. A century before, the British fed the poor Irish even while they were starving them; a few hundred years before that the Spaniards were burning Indians at the stake to save their souls. And so on all the way back to the pharaohs, no doubt.
It's just this sort of thing that has led me to anarchism. As a noted rabbi once remarked, you can judge the tree by its fruit. Imperium is the climax form of the State, and the fruits of the State, the tree of violence, are death, destruction, imprisonment, fraud, ignorance and misery. We see this over and over again. There is not much hope in supporting one state over another, although I guess there are times when many people will feel they have to do so due to exigent circumstances; some are worse than others. One might at least not be deluded about the outcome.
-- Gordon