We have different experience. Mine over many decades (I know you have more) is that to build coalitions and win support you have to establish common ground -- not just Out Now, but Should I Work With You?
And a detailed denunciation with a bill of particulars is not called for. All you need yo say, practicaly is that Saddam Hussian (or whoever) is brutal tyrant and I would be happy to see the Iraqi (or whichever) people themselves get rid of him, BUT it' s not our call. We should not be involved because . . . .
All the left wingers denounce me as a bourgeois liberal democrat anyway, _and they're right!_ so I don't wrangle with then. But I never saw anyone get anywhere with building an Out Now coalition without the "X is an evil bastard and I don't support him" preface.
Actually with the Sandinistas and Castro it is a little more complex because they are not evil bastards, just people who do some bad things sometimes and more good other times, so I get in troublde not with the left but with the Democrats for saying so.
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > This is arrant none sense, pernicious claptrap,
> and
> > politically idiotic. One of the few places it
> matters
> > what we sat about Cuba, etc., is in live
> > antinterventionist movements. There the audience
> is
> > not the Cubans, etc,. but potential participants
> here
> > in the movements. Needless to say, if you refuse
> to
> > say, Milosovic (Saddam, etc.) is a tyrant, BUT,
> you
> > will paint yourself into the self-isolated ghetto
>
> First of all, I don't think the last sentence here
> is empirically
> accurate. The _main_ negative response one gets from
> "potential
> participants" is always, in one formulation or
> another, What Good Will
> It Do? The mass of people simply don't hassle about
> this in the way
> leftists worrying about the mass of people do. And
> it is among the
> organizers that this hassle about Saddam etc does
> its damage: it is a
> barrier to discussing the things that need to be
> discussed. Chuck's
> lunatic response to you (quoted below) shows my
> point. You don't get
> that sort of looniness (or Mpug's sort) outside the
> narrowly defined
> left (and of course among dogmatic followers of
> Rush, etc). In mass work
> refusal to be sidetracked into "criticism" of Saddam
> or Milosevic or X
> simply doesn't bother anyone. But it certainly eats
> up meeting time
> among leftists and drives people away who are there
> for the first time
> and can't stand or don't have time for the
> wrangling.
>
> Carrol
>
> Chuck wrote:
> >
> > andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > > I ask you the same question I asked Chuck: do
> you want
> > > the Miami Cubans back in power and Cuba as whole
> > > flushed the way the Nicaragurans were?
> >
> > What a fucking stupid question!
> >
> > Come on, you can do better than that!
> >
> > You know, it is possible to oppose Castro, the
> Miami Cubans, the U.S.
> > government and support other more positive
> alternatives.
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