[lbo-talk] "Knee-Jerk Anti-Imperialism" Re: Two Takes

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Sat Apr 12 18:07:17 PDT 2003


Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote: At 3:15 PM -0700 4/11/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>(By this I mean it [roughly, the sort of imperialist argument that
>Brad, et al. advocate] refuses to look at the context and causes of
>US imperialism, and evaluates each case individually.)

The refusal to evaluate each case of US imperialism individually is another reason that your liberal credentials are often put into question. They call it "knee-jerk anti-imperialism." :-> -- * * *

I should have said: _merely_ individually. Obviously each case is different. There are historical instances in which I support US military action abroad and even more or less imperialist condict. World War II is the main example here. The war against Hitler (and secondarily Mussolini) was necessary and just. The US and its Allies did not entirely fight the war by just means -- strategic bombing was an unnecessary evil. Nor were a lot of the US's specific war aims justifiable -- squashing indigeneous left wing movements wherever possible, ensuring the dominance of capital and free markets, etc. But, given that those were the terms on which a capitalist democracy was going to fight Hitler, they didn't outweigh the need to fight him.

The war against Japan was an imperialist war plain and simple, between two imperiali powers; although the US was justified in defending itself on the usual just war grounds, though not in firebombing Japanese cities or nuking a Japan on the verge of surrender. From an internationalist perspective it was better to have democratic that Japanese quasi-fascist imperialism win.

Likewise with postwar reconstruction. Mixed in with a lot of extremely shady stuff, such as the rapid windup of deNazification and the absorption of lots of war criminals into the lkife of the Federal Republic (and the American one!), the dsteuction of radical labor in Japan (about which you, Yoshie, knoiw more than I), and lots of other bad things, the fact is that the US helpeed put Europe on its feet and generally lent a hand in shaping institutions of governance that replaced fascist ones with something like democratic ones. That was self-interested, but also good to do; better that than some real alternatives that the US pursued in poorer countries.

Saying all of this doesn't mean that I retract my analysis of US conduct as imperialist; but there are better and worse modes of imperialist conduct, and WWII was the example of imperialism at it best. I say this without irony.

It is hard to think of a post WWII case where the need was pressing enough, or US conduct comparatively restrained enough, to outweight the ill, not only of military action and the accompanying slaughter, but also of the increasing strength that US military action abroad gave to the US and its general ability to loot and destroy and intimidate.

That is a very great evil -- outweighed in the case of WWII by the far greater evil posed to the whole human race by fascism. It was not outweighed (in my view) by the barbarities of Milosovic's cruel dictatorship, which posed no such general threat. Despite Hitchen's ravings, neither does Islamic fundamentalism, a threat mainly to Muslims that might have been -- might still be! -- met by quiet encouragement of democracy and prosperity in Muslim nations. (That would require patience of course.) In retrospect it becomes clear that the doctrine of "humanitarian intervention" involved there was a mere stepping stone to the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, and prepared the war for the mess we are in. So I think in sum that individual evaluation is necessary, but always in context. Those sop inclined might call that dialectics. Die Warheit ist konkret, Hegel teaches us, truth is concete, und es ist auch immer die Ganze, and it also the whole.

jks

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