<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN"> <html><head><style type="text/css"></style><title>Re: [lbo-talk] "Knee-Jerk Anti-Imperialism" Re: Two Ta</title></head><body> <div>Which is further removed from reality</div> <div>-the assertion that there was some Trotskyist</div> <div>  somewhere who supported the US in its war against Japan</div> <div>or</div> <div>-the assertion that there was, or is, something "democratic"</div> <div>  about US imperialism</div> <div>?</div> <div><br></div> <blockquote type="cite" cite> <blockquote>Who is it who can't read? I wrote "you're wrong that "Pearl Harbor"</blockquote> <blockquote>made WW II in the Pacific anything but an imperialist</blockquote> <blockquote>slaughter on both sides. " in  reply to your claim that the imperialist</blockquote> <blockquote>war was "justified by just war theory"</blockquote> <blockquote> </blockquote> <blockquote>* * *<br> A point I carefully described as independent of internationalism.</blockquote> <blockquote>* * *</blockquote> <blockquote> </blockquote> <blockquote>and that you regarded</blockquote> <blockquote>US victory as "preferable."</blockquote> <blockquote>* * *</blockquote> <blockquote> That from an internationalist point of view, yes. I said (I repeat for the nth time) that liberal democratic imperialism was preferable to Japanese quasi fascism.</blockquote> <blockquote> </blockquote> <blockquote>****</blockquote> <blockquote> My point was that a deliberately</blockquote> <blockquote>provoked attack is no sort of justification and that the two</blockquote> <blockquote>imperialist rivals were *equally* engaged in slaughter.</blockquote> <blockquote>* * *</blockquote> <blockquote>From the point of view of just war theory, provocation mitogates but does not excuse. A reasonable nation is supposed to be able to remain grownup in the face of provocation.</blockquote> <blockquote> </blockquote> <blockquote> I also reject your Gore Vidal derived fantasy story about the Day of Infamy being a setup; I love Vidal, but he's not a hiistorian. Charles Beard, whose work on this I do not know, is apparantly out of his deoth; he's also not a military/dipolomatic historian. The consenus of the experts is against you. The idea that Japan did no real damage at PH is absurd.</blockquote> <blockquote>* *</blockquote> <blockquote> </blockquote> <blockquote>to</blockquote> <blockquote>your claim that "virtually all" socialists supported the</blockquote> <blockquote>imperialist slaughter in the Pacific, I can assure you that</blockquote> <blockquote>*no* socialist in the tradition of the Third International</blockquote> <blockquote>(I exclude Stalinists, of course) supported the war against</blockquote> <blockquote>Japan whether or not they supported defense of the</blockquote> <blockquote>Stalinized "Soviet Union" against Hitler.</blockquote> <blockquote>* * *</blockquote> <blockquote> </blockquote> <blockquote>So who the hell are you talkinga bout? Not Stalinists and not Trotskyists -- wasn't that virtually all socialists at the time? There weren't any (western) Maoists, and if there has been any they surea s hell would have supposed a war against Japan (any help you can get!).</blockquote> <blockquote>****</blockquote> <blockquote><br></blockquote> <blockquote>I might add that many bourgeois Asian nationalists, from the</blockquote> <blockquote>great Subhas Chandra Bose, to the Burmese Thakins, to</blockquote> <blockquote>the great Aguinaldo, to many Indonesians, and even to</blockquote> <blockquote>such a significant Chinese nationalist as Wang Chin-wei,</blockquote> <blockquote>supported Japanese imperialism against its Anglo-French-</blockquote> <blockquote>Netherlandic-American imperialist rivals.</blockquote> <blockquote>* * *</blockquote> <blockquote> Yah, the Japanese got a certain amount of milage out of that "We are Asiatics" line. But I said the Reds didn't buy it.</blockquote> <blockquote> </blockquote> <blockquote>jks<br> </blockquote> </blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite> <hr size="1"></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite>Do you Yahoo!?<br> <a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/finance/mailsig/*http://tax.yahoo.com" >Yahoo! Tax Center</a> - File online, calculators, forms, and more</blockquote> <div><br></div> </body> </html>