<< What conclusions follow? Simply this. Mewling about Blair's folly or Bush's crudity, is merely saving the furniture. Arguments about the impending war would do better to focus on the entire prior structure of the special treatment accorded to Iraq by the United Nations, rather than wrangle over the secondary issue of whether to continue strangling the country slowly or to put it out of its misery quickly. >>
So, we should count among the "mewlers" the haute bourgeoisie of Davos, the leaders of the AFL-CIO, a career US diplomat, and Senator Robert Byrd (to name just those who have appeared in posts to LBO-Talk today)?
These pillars of the Establishment recognize how completely out of the bounds of "normal" imperialism the Bush coup regime lies. Maybe the intellectual Left should just consider this a minor academic point. Maybe a near-encyclopedic knowledge of imperialist atrocities and hypocrisies through the years can allow one to dismiss the Bush regime as just a minor variant on any number of past US administrations.
Or maybe the Bush regime IS dangerously different. Maybe much of the Left response is (sorry for the flame bait, but there it is) eerily similar to the CP's 1930s arguments that there was little real difference between fascists and capitalist-appeasing social democrats--arguments that were, from what I can see, for the most part sincere (certainly among the party rank-and-file), correct in most particulars, and generally as cogent as Anderson's.
So the capitalist ruling class and the leaders of its nation-states are hypocrites? No kidding. Well, two cheers for hypocrisy--also known as a rational understanding of maintaining the moral and legal legitimacy of unjust rule. The Bush regime makes it quite clear that they will have none of this. This is NOT a minor point. It is what allows for long-term social order in a class society.
I sometimes wonder if those living in the US or observing it from the capitalist West, even its severest critics, can actually envision the US's constitutional republican structure collapsing into nothing, or whether the ideological power induced by its relatively stable existence is so great that it is assumed to be essentially a part of the natural landscape. If so, this is a very naive and dangerous attitude. Or maybe it is just assumed to be of no importance--another naive and dangerous assumption.
These Bush people are whack jobs, and they are, to me, clearly capable of leading the US and the world down a path of war of destruction never before seen. I am most certainly including the fascist regimes of the 30s--their military capabilities were as nothing compared to today's.
And I am still waiting for a statement from the Left as well-written, impassioned, and conscious of the historical moment as those of that neo-Confederate pork-barreling old carny, Senator Robert Byrd.
The Bush regime must be stopped. Then... the struggle continues.
---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: "Ulhas Joglekar" <uvj at vsnl.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 22:39:35 +0530
>LRB (Vol. 25 No. 5)
>
>Casuistries of Peace and War
>
>Perry Anderson on the assumptions the Bush Administration and its critics
>share
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>"If the movement is to have staying power, it will have to develop beyond
>the fixations of the fan club, the politics of the spectacle, the ethics of
>fright. For war, if it comes, will not be like Vietnam. It will be short and
>sharp; and there is no guarantee that poetic justice will follow. A merely
>prudential opposition to the war will not survive a triumph, any more than
>handwringing about its legality a UN figleaf."
>
>http://www.lrb.co.uk/index.php
>
>
>
>