[lbo-talk] Re: A Day When Mahdi Army Showed Its Other Side

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Tue Nov 28 18:43:21 PST 2006


On 11/28/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 28, 2006, at 5:23 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >> No, not because they were theocrats, but because they were brutal
> >> authoritarians.
> >
> > You can't establish a state by flower power anywhere.
>
> You've developed quite a love of power, haven't you? You sound like
> Henry Kissinger or Michael Ledeen, with some modification of terms of
> course.

Realists on the Right and realists on the Left* have one thing in common: realism.

Surrealism is only good for art, not politics. When surrealists take power, you get a Bush White House, making their surreal fantasy our tragic reality.

* "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?" -- Frederick Engels, "On Authority," 1872 -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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