Let's NOT Think Post-Invasion

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 7:47 PM +0000 2/14/03, loupaulsen at attbi.com wrote:
>(3) This is the age of the Internet which means that everyone can 
>know a lot about what everyone else is doing.  That means that 
>people in Baghdad, Cairo, Karachi, etc. can find out how we here in 
>the US, and in fact what we here on this list, are saying about them 
>and how we are approaching the crisis.  Now, those people are going 
>to be standing up to US imperialism themselves, and they are going 
>to be making choices about how to do it.  WHICH IDEOLOGIES WORK, AND 
>WHICH DON'T?  Who is on their side, and who is not?  Which 
>ideologies give you the courage and mental tools to stand up to 
>overwhelming odds, face down the United States, unite with your 
>fellow human beings in other country, and keep the struggle going? 
>There are some obvious choices out there: socialism, militant 
>Islamicism, pacifism, "progressivism" (if that is the word to use 
>for something common to the non-Marxist anti-imperialists on this 
>list), and so on. 
>
>Now, speaking as a socialist, and having the FUTURE OF THE WORLD in 
>view, I intend to do everything possible in these weeks and months 
>of crisis to show what socialism is good for.  That it is a reliable 
>ally, that we are courageous, that we don't get discouraged, that we 
>are not a slender broken reed or a fair-weather friend.  That when a 
>holocaust threatens Iraq, we do  not look the other way.

I agree with you on the above, but we have little to offer peoples in 
the Middle East and elsewhere, unless we can go beyond taking 
courageous and principled actions to oppose the US war on Iraq to 
come (or any other US war).

At 10:31 PM -0500 2/14/03, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>At 7:47 PM +0000 2/14/03, loupaulsen at attbi.com wrote:
>(1) We are supposed to be having a huge wave of demonstrations 
>tomorrow, and we will in fact be in pretty much constant 
>agitprop-and-action mode for the foreseeable future.  If we take our 
>minds off that and start thinking about strategies for what happens 
>"after the invasion", we are not giving full concentration to the 
>immediate task at hand.

The immediate task at hand should consume much of our time and 
energy, to be sure, but it makes sense to think about how to avoid 
activist demobilization (a la the anti-war movement against the Gulf 
War) in the event of invasion and quick US victory.  We have to think 
about how we may build a movement within a movement, i.e. a movement 
against capitalism and imperialism within a movement against _this_ 
war.
-- 
Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: 
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>