> This is hardly a uniquely US left thing. It being the 100th
> anniversary of the 1905 October (old calendar) pogroms, some of the
> Russian newspapers/magazines are doing pieces on it, as well as
> reprinting extracts of articles written at the time. I assume TV is
> doing something similar -- I haven't checked.
>
> It is ASTONISHING the extent to which the Russian liberal and
> social-democratic press at that time to avoid blaming the pogroms
> on the people actually doing the pogroms. It was always the fault
> of the "tsarist system," a "plot by the secret services," etc.
> etc., anybody but the actual pogromshchiki themselves. They just
> couldn't bring themselves ideologically to admit that it was the
> "oppressed workers and peasants" slaughtering people and burning
> down buildings on their own initiative. (Similarly, anti-Semitism
> in the USSR was blamed on "foreign agitators disseminating anti-
> Semitic and anti-Soviet materials among the working class".)
Surely there is a great deal of difference between being ordered by a government (such as the US government) to go to war (in Iraq or elsewhere) and volunteering to commit a pogrom, unless you are saying that organizers of a pogrom, like a government, had the power to present the rest with a choice to commit a pogrom or face at least potentially severe penalties. Once you are in the military, desertion and other acts of refusal carry penalties. Did refusing to participate in a pogrom?
In any case, it's time to retire a straw man. No one here has said that soldiers have no choice at all -- not even Boddi. Boddi didn't say that soldiers had no choice but not to desert -- he said that they shouldn't. The whole point of counter-recruitment is to ask potential recruits and active-duty soldiers to exercise their power to choose -- i.e., to choose not to enlist, to choose not to reenlist, etc. -- while fully acknowledging the economic, political, legal, and other constraints upon their choices.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>