> This is an insult to the thousands,
> maybe millions, of Persians, Arabs,
> Latin Americans, etc., who've been
> jailed and/or killed fighting
> against their oppressive states.
Let's see. In this debate or conversation with Americans, whom we'd like to attract to the fight for a new U.S. foreign policy, the issue of the "suckiness" of other regimes pops up. So, we indulge, take due distance from those "sucky" regimes, because keeping the focus on the nature of our foreign policy -- and the social conditions on which it is based -- (i.e. on the things Americans can directly alter) would insult the memory of foreign dead social fighters and the sentiments of political prisoners?
That's excessive to me.
I am not going to claim knowledge on what insults the memory of the dead or what offends the sentiments of political prisoners. It seems to me that, by invoking them in their absence to settle this matter, we can only run in circles. Most likely, we're going to project on them our own views, and it's precisely those views that are being debated.
I don't have a problem admitting that it's difficult not to take preemptively the issue off the table by acknowledging at the outset the flaws (real or imagined) of the other regimes. It does provide some degree of comfort to our audience. In a sense, it gets them off the hook. I'm not sanctimonious about this. But I still believe it's a trap -- it's the mirage of a balanced and higher-ground perspective.
An evasion, as you put it.
> And who said anything about
> feeling superior?
> So I don't get this "superiority"
> thing at all.
I said it.
In this debate/conversation with regular Americans, the more we focus on the (real or imagined) faults of the other side, the more we foster passivity towards our own policies and social conditions. On top of that, we reinforce this morbid mixture of commiseration and contempt towards other peoples that a lot of people in the U.S. (and other rich countries) feel.
It's only through engagement in the struggle to change our own policies and society, that the perspective we have of the ills of other societies can deepen and broaden. We change ourselves, expand our mutual understanding, by struggling to change our social environment.
On the other hand, if the analysis of other regimes (and the social conditions on which they stand) is superficial (and it will be at this stage), the "suckiness" of their regimes will be attributed at best to chance and at worst to the moral failure of those nations. In my own experience, this happens invariably.
The sense of moral superiority, commiseration (on one end) and contempt (on the other end), that many in the Western world feel towards people in poor countries (and towards the most oppressed in their own countries) is widespread and visible. Among the lower classes, it takes crasser forms. But the sentiment is rampant among the higher classes, the urban "middle class", the intelligentsia. True solidarity is not charity. True solidarity is about changing ourselves, the policies of our state, the character of our state, and ultimately the character of our society, to engage others as equals.
> You can't explain the emergence of
> political Islam, for example,
> without connecting it to U.S. and
> British support for the emergence
> of its ancestors. (I was just reading,
> in fact, how the Brits essentially
> created the Muslim Brotherhood.) Nor
> can you explain its appeal today
> without connecting it to modern
> imperialism.
And what's the point here? That all forms of political Islam, since it was tainted at birth by British imperialism, remain unreformed and unreformable -- forever unfit to serve as a legitimate political vehicle of the toiling masses in those parts of the world? Isn't this to be decided by those toiling masses? And I'd like to know the name of one, just one, important political formation anywhere in the world that was either born unpolluted or that born unpolluted remained pure throughout.