Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 04:00:56 -0500 From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> Subject: [lbo-talk] LBO-Talk = Outliers (What Do The Iraqi Resistance
Debates And The Mars Rovers Debates Have In Common?)
(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).
This is bound to attract many new converts to your side (I don't think). Actually statistics don't give you the whole story. I think that among your group B there is something more significant than colour, namely attachment to the old dogmas of official state marxism. It is true that these dogmas achieved greater currency amongst 'people of colour', mainly because of the support (for whatever it was worth) from the SU and China for certain anti-colonial struggles. There are a great many things that could be said about this, which I'll refrain from saying right now except for this one: Terrorism (blowing up people in the street, etc.) has NEVER liberated anyone and never will. It is nothing more than armed propaganda, which hopes by human sacrifice to bring the opposite side to the negotiating table and thereafter to divide the spoils. Those who are poor stay poor and those who are dead stay dead. You equate terrorism with resistance, why? Anyone who knows anything about an anti-colonial struggle and has lived through one knows that what brings down the old regime is not the actions of the few but the concerted action of the mass that destroys its legitimacy. Where the opposite happens, i.e. a terrorist group manages to take state power directly, then watch out .... (think: Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Liberia .... ) Tahir