>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.
I didn't mean to say that your approach is actually "knee-jerk" in the sense of being thoughtless or unable to see important concrete differences between cases. Regardless, that's what warmongers call it.
>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.
US leftists who aren't pacifists could and would probably support the following four wars: the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 (minus the invasion of Canada), (the Union side of) the Civil War, and WW2 (minus war crimes like fire-bombings and atomic-bombings).
>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.
Surely -- when the Communists and other left-wingers in poor nations tried to do the sort of agrarian reforms that the New Dealers did in Japan, they often got killed! In Japan, it was possible that there was no viable alternative to top-down reforms in 1945-47 -- Japanese leftists were weakly organized forces, who weren't politically independent of the ruling class. To this day, many liberals and leftists in Japan, most of whom are pacifistically inclined (if not quite philosophically pacifists), cling to Clause Nine of the Japanese Constitution more doggedly than any American imperialist could have possibly foreseen!!! That's both the weakness and strength of the Japanese left: it's a weakness, because the Japanese left can't assert a political, economic, and diplomatic program independent of the USA, without first clarifying what kind of military power it wants for Japan -- clinging to Clause Nine prevents Japanese leftists from charting a way out of the US empire; and it is a strength, because the Japanese left's knee-jerk anti-militarism has in part prevented Japan from taking the sort of international role -- the role of junior military partners to the US armed forces -- that the UK, Germany, Australia, etc. have. A while ago, the _New York Times_ ran an interesting article about the German military:
***** The New York Times March 18, 2003, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section A; Page 3; Column 1; Foreign Desk LENGTH: 1217 words HEADLINE: Germany's Military Sinking to 'Basket Case' Status BYLINE: By CRAIG S. SMITH DATELINE: GENERAL STEINHOFF BARRACKS, Germany
...Germany is making some changes: In a small map-lined room at East Germany's former army headquarters, a handful of soldiers monitor the 8,000 troops now deployed in a half-dozen places around the world. The military is training more soldiers so that it will eventually be able to field 50,000 outside its borders at any one time... *****
I didn't know that the German military had so many overseas commitments.
In contrast to Japanese leftists, the Italian CP, right after WW2, could have done much, much better but for the US interventions (documented by William Blum, etc.). The Italian party, theoretically, could have made a different choice, but it already made the choice ("la svolta di Salerno") even before the war was over.
Oh well, at least the Italians got around to rejecting monarchy at a 1946 plebiscite.
>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.
Perry Anderson said so a while ago, too, and somehow he received a storm of criticisms from unlikely quarters, i.e., less from liberals than from leftists. Mystifying. -- Yoshie
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