[lbo-talk] For a Carter (was Who is the worst american president...)

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Thu May 24 07:45:14 PDT 2007


On 5/24/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Carter: Issued (by silence) virtual death sentence to Bishop Romero;
> responsible for slaughter in East Timor; against specific warnings
> allowed criminal ex-Shah into the U.S., triggering hostage crisis;
> responsible for slaughters in El Salvador; launched subversion efforts
> in Afghanistan.

Jimmy Carter, however, is in part responsible for two revolutions, one of which is still alive: the Iranian Revolution and the Sandinista Revolution. It is his vacillation -- unable to make up his mind whether to restrain client regimes by bringing up human rights, enough to coopt some of the oppositions to the regimes, or to let them do what they want to suppress and defeat all oppositions -- that gave the revolutionaries in Iran and Nicaragua a chance to overthrow the Shah and Somoza.

Wouldn't you want another American President under whose watch two, three, many social revolutions could happen? Things are getting very interesting in Egypt, Pakistan, the Philippines, among other places, the places where Islamists, communists, and liberals face common enemies who are clients of America.

That being the case, what we should aim for in the USA is not a Democratic or Republican or even Green President but a weak one, a Carter. Needless to say, we can get a weak President only through vigorous social movements, not through electoralism. -- Yoshie



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