[lbo-talk] The Occupation

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Wed Dec 22 09:28:59 PST 2004


--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:


>
> Think of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson --
> they were slave
> owners (worse people than the worst Islamists and
> Ba'athists in Iraq)
> who had more self respect than Tory slave owners.

FWIW I don't think it makes much sense to talk about slave owners as being "bad people" in an era in which slavery was taken for granted.


>
> Resisting the occupation imposes a tremendous
> sacrifice on you.
> First of all, you are likely to get killed or
> tortured.

Seems to me this is a likely fate for collaborators too.

You wouldn't
> do it if all you wanted were money or power _at any
> cost_, even at
> the cost of becoming a lackey of the foreign
> occupier. You would do
> it only if you have at least enough self respect to
> make submission
> to the foreign occupier intolerable for you.

You might do it out of religious fervor, fanaticism, even peer pressure (Sunni martyr culture?). I can think of lots of reasons.

You could make the self-respect argument in the case of Nazi partisans fighting the Soviet Union, BTW. Go to the Baltics or Western Ukraine. It's a common argument.

===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!

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