>>>[lbo-talk] What Do The Iraqi Resistance Debates And The Mars
>>>Rovers Debates Have In Common?
>>>Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
>>>Sun Feb 15 09:36:06 PST 2004
>>><snip>
>>>Others (most, it seems) have decided that all violent resisters
>>>are Ba'athist or Jihadist criminals; I believe Rumsfeld used the
>>>term "dead enders"; many on the left apparently agree.
>>
>>Aren't Left Business Observers who -- echoing the White House,
>>Christopher Hitchens, et al. -- loudly protest that all or most
>>resistance fighters in Iraq are Ba'athists, Islamists, Jihadist
>>criminals, gangsters, etc. really *outliers,* i.e. an exception
>>rather than the norm of the broadly defined left of the US
>>political spectrum (ranging widely from liberal Democrats to Greens
>>to religious pacifists to anarchists to socialists [whose politics
>>in turn ranges wildly from CPUSA to the Spartacist League])?
>>
>>Take a look at the following comment by Tom Andrews, a former
>>Democratic congressmember from Maine and National Director of Win
>>Without War <http://www.winwithoutwarus.org/>, which is a
>>self-described "mainstream voice" of the anti-war movement and
>>definitely the most politically cautious outfit among big national
>>anti-war coalitions and organizations:
>>
>>***** Renewed calls to bring troops home
>>Archive Recent Editions 2003 Editions Dec 20, 2003
>>Author: Tim Wheeler, Washington correspondent
>>People's Weekly World Newspaper, 12/20/03 00:00
>>
>>. . . WWW [Win Without War] National Director Tom Andrews, a former
>>Democratic congressmember from Maine, added, "The fundamentals of
>>the quagmire in Iraq have not changed. Iraqi resistance to the U.S.
>>military occupation is not simply the work of Saddam loyalists. It
>>is being fueled by the widespread and deep-seated anger and
>>frustration of the Iraqi people with the U.S. military occupation."
>>
>>He cited heavy-handed tactics such as encircling villages in barbed
>>wire, aerial bombing and strafing, raiding homes and personal body
>>searches. . . .
>>
>><http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/4556/1/194> *****
>>
>>Win Without War's political objectives -- i.e. elect Democrats and
>>"transform the U.S. military occupation into 'a truly international
>>effort to help the Iraqi people stabilize and rebuild their country
>>while transferring authority to a legitimate Iraqi authority'"
>>(Wheeler, <http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/4556/1/194>) --
>>differ from those of the anti-war coalitions and organizations to
>>the left of it, but it doesn't appear that WWW stoops to the kind
>>of over-the-top hate-mongering rhetoric that is favored on LBO-talk
>>and that helps only Washington's propaganda machine.
>>--
>>Yoshie
>
>You're constantly denouncing everyone else around here as an oil-orc
>and stooge of Empire
"Everyone else"? Hardly. Actually, LBO-talk is about equally divided.
(A) Among the subscribers of LBO-talk who posted on the subject of resistance fighters in Iraq, those who must have prompted Dwayne Monroe to conclude that "Others (most, it seems) have decided that all violent resisters are Ba'athist or Jihadist criminals; I believe Rumsfeld used the term 'dead enders'; many on the left apparently agree" are Seth Ackerman, Doug Henwood, John Lacny, Mike Larkin, Grant Lee, and Luke Weiger.
(B) Those who offered different portrayals of resistance fighters are Charles Brown, Carrol Cox, James Heartfield, Hari Kumar, Shane Mage, Stephen Philion, and myself (I note that there are three persons of color in [B], whereas [A] are all white -- race may be a statistically significant variable if we poll on this topic in the USA).
If Dwayne got an impression that "most" here think like (A) rather than (B) -- despite the fact that numerically (B) is larger than (A)! -- it is probably because the moderator is in (A). Even though it is true that the moderator gets to set the tenor of discussion on this listserv regardless of the majority opinion, I'm saying to Dwayne (and anyone else who gets the same impression as his) that it is not a good idea to conclude that "many on the left" think like (A) on the topic of resistance fighters in Iraq, just because (A) is the dominant ideology here. Not even CPUSA and Win Without War talk like (A), to say nothing of any individual or organization to the left of them. Seriously. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>