It was at the mass meeting in New York of antiwar activists that the coalition was destroyed in the weeks after 911, because a minority refused to call for the 911 killers to be brought to justice under international law, since they argued that imperialists had no right to call for such justice. It was a sickening set of arguments then and hateful in the extreme. And most of the hundreds of people gathered at the time didn't return to antiwar organizing for another two years until the leadup to the Iraq invasion-- losing a lot of momentum that might have helped stop that war.
So yes, I see folks like Churchill as not only hateful but a large cause of the weakening of the antiwar movement after 911. So if we are talking about blame, let's blame him and similar associates for "causing" the strength of the war hawks and their ability to murder so many Iraqis.
Nathan Newman
----- Original Message ----- From: <philion at stolaf.edu>
Nathan writes: "The point is that Churchill could have made a general comment about that theoretical issue, but the minute you refer to RECENTLY MURDERED people as deserving their deaths because of that theoretical analysis, you are an idiot. Timing matters, which a lot of folks on the left at the time refused to admit. And still do apparently."
You do realise that you're talking to someone who actually criticised Churchill for that in the days following his remarks? However, I didn't do it from the lazy man's easy way out approach that Cooper follows, calling Churchill "hateful" and screaming him down. I laid out why I thought that this approach, which, sorry Nathan--ain't a whole helluva lot different from Marcuse even with the timing taken into account *if* you actually read what Churchill wrote--is not capable of moving beyond the Horowitz model of critique.
"How about blaming anybody but the murderers in the days after the attacks. Whatever dispassionate sociological analysis of the causation of terrorism in the world may be useful, the folks who committed the murders were a few dozen individuals on orders from a nasty Islamic terrorist group. They are the ones to blame. THe only question is how to prevent similar attacks in the future, which may include analysis of those causal factors but it's not about "blame."
If detectives in this country followed your advice, they'd solve a whole lot fewer murders. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk