Jon Johanning wrote:
>
> >
> The only reason there is an "isolationist streak" in the American
> population is that Americans by and large know and care nothing about
> the rest of the world. As I said, that was true 40 years ago (and long
> before that), and it is still true today. This so-called "isolationist
> streak" is light-years away from a true interest in peace,
I wonder how much interest hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago in (say) what we now call Indonesia had in hunter-gatherers in what we now call the Ukraine? And so forth. In what pronouncement handed down from the heavens does it say that to desire peace one has to "know and care" about "the rest of the world." Isolationism is, in fact, a synonym for a true interest in peace -- in leaving others alone and in being left alone oneself.
It is precisely those americans who "know and care" a good deal about the "rest of the world" who have for over a century been engaged in turning that rest of the world into a slaughter house. Should file clerks in Pretoria or New Delhi or Kiev or Buenos Aires or Haiti "know and care" about Americans? What in the hell does it mean, anyhow, to "know and care about the rest of the world."
Americans, like people everywhere in a world dominated by the ongoing capitalist holocaust, have plenty to concern them in getting by from day to day without being told that they have some sort of abstract moral obligation to have a "true interest in peace." Several tens of millions of them have a growing interest in getting u.s. troops out of Iraq. Why add the moral burden of a "true interest in peace," whatever that means. Our task is to mobilize, energize, focus the energies of those (so far mostly passive) americans who want the troops home. "True peace" can wait its turn.
Carrol
Carrol