This is the debate that never ends. As long as the notion of imperialism has life in it, we will continue to have these debates. And everyone who says this sort of thing will seemingly not remember what was said on this issue the last time, so we will all say the same things over again. This is one of the problems, I guess, of large heterogeneous lists. I don't know how Doug manages to preside over such a cyclical process without any progression in it whatsoever. But I do see why he simply sends out one-liner questions to the various parties without following the thread any further. No-one really wants to be Sysiphus.
If anti-imperialist struggles have a positive good in themselves, without being anti-capitalist in intent - and certainly the god squad have no programme for ending capitalism - then we are prepared to support one faction of capital against another in perpetuity. In other words we start to like war, to see it as a benefit, for very abstract reasons. Hey it's anti-imperialist war! That's good, isn't it? (One, two, many Vietnams! Yippee!) And it is not enough to see people whom we don't like getting a bloody nose, we must also "support" those who are giving the bloody nose, just because they are doing so. I don't see that that follows. And why is it only right to support nasty elements when the're in foreign places (preferably far away ones)? Smacks of opportunism to me: They'll make the revolution we're not prepared to make ourselves. But who's responsibility is it to settle accounts with the American bourgeoisie? Take a look at the Manifesto on that question.
I despise anti-imperialism more with every passing day. What kind of mentality is it that "supports" (I take this to mean the will to strengthen) elements that you would not like to live under yourself? It is a disgusting sentiment, although expressed with admirable clarity above. But shit situations bring forth shit politics. I have to say that when I read this kind of stuff about the "Iraqi resistance", when the Iraqis are slaughtering each other on putrid religious and ethnic grounds, as if this is some kind of glorious spectacle, it makes me want to puke. Fortunately sometimes I give way to the opposite tendency, to laugh, like when a certain person on this list once wrote that the Iraqi nationalist movement was forming even quicker than what she had expected. Then she got bored when that turned out to be the ridiculous fantasy that it always was and found another even more potent fetish object.
An Islamic inflection? Just what the hell does this mean? That it is really the sort of movement that we ourselves believe in, progressive people like us, who just have a slightly different culture, or wear funny hats? I know nazi comparisons have been overdone, but it is true that the nazi movement attracted many previously left leaning supporters who thought that it was worth supporting because it was ostensibly against what they felt themselves to be also against. And the parallel doesn't end there. The nazis also used a lot of terminology that had been borrowed from communists, just like the Iranian obscurantists do. Anti-imperialism, for example. Well then, let us say that anti-imperialism is the anti-capitalism of fools. Read the story of the Iranian left post-1979, fool, including the leninist left. These Iranians have just your philosophy regarding domestic and foreign: make friends with Castro and Chavez on the foreign stage; slaughter communists at home. That's the Islamic inflection that you're talking about.
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