Seth Ackerman wrote:
>
> From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
>
> > "Let them duke it out?" Yes. That is exactly what the First
> > International proposed that England should do during the U.S. Civil War,
> > one of the bloodiest civil wars in history.
>
> And yet they didn't hesitate to declare which side they "supported":
>
> "From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of
> Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny
> of their class" --Marx to Lincoln, 1865.
>
> I have no reliable information on the workingmen's thoughts regarding the
> election of Franklin Pierce, however.
>
Very good. Perhaps a topic for a dissertation in u.s. history. :-)
When a force appears in Iraq that a) clearly is a force and b) clearly is politically preferable to other forces, then we (anti-imperialists) can not only declare our support of (solidarity with) that force but urge organizations and coalitions in which we take part to make that support part of our public agitation. Like others, I presume, I too miss the days when without hemming and hawing we could chant (how did it go exactly?), something like "Ho Ho / Ho Chih Minh." And one of the two or three most effective speeches I made during the anti-war movement in the '60s (effective in terms of reaching people who had not been part of the movement) was at an impromptu forum on campus of about 50 people in which I expressed such solidarity. A colleague in the English Department had given a hemming and hawing speech in which he had pulled out the old chestnut about the "Viet Cong" being just a peasant movement and somehow not "real" communists. I mentioned that Ho had been a prime agent of the Third International, that he was indeed a "real" communist, and that I supported the Vietnamese for that reason, adding that I too was a real communist and had two ears, two eyes, etc. just like any other human being.
A couple years earlier, at the first anti-war demo I had attended, I had been asked by an AP reporter the question Doug insists on cluttering the list with, "But what _should_ 'we' do?" and I had hemmed and hawed myself. The movement did not achieve clarity and thrust until we had thoroughly rejected that question. What 'we' (the U.S. state) should do is strictly a problem in logistics: how does one go about moving the men and women now cluttering the landscape in Iraq back to the states. What _we_, the left, should do is make that clear to growing numbers of our fellow citizens.
But for now there is no force in Iraq that so qualifies as the NLF and the DRV did. So we must simply insist on the necessity of the Iraqis working out their own fates without interference from The Evil Empire.
Carrol
P.S.
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >Yoshie, you're stating the obvious. Why are you participating in an
> >email discussion list if nothing said here matters in the absence of
> >a meeting and a majority vote?
> >
> >Seth
>
> Because it's fun to talk with people I like, such as yourself.
> --
> Yoshie
A pretty good answer. But the discussion also clarifies our ideas and our rhetoric, so we won't fumble when we do speak to people who ask the kind of question Doug posed to Yoshie.
> Seth
>
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