[lbo-talk] The Liberal Morality: Shtum on Atrocities

farmelantj at juno.com farmelantj at juno.com
Mon Dec 29 11:26:13 PST 2008


-- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:

"That's very nice, but I'm guessing that a majority of Americans supports Israel."

I think that Carrol's point is that fact is basically irrelevant to US foreign policy. After all, US public opinion has long since turned against the Iraq War, but guess what? We are still there. Just as forty years ago, US public opinion turned against the Vietnam War (following the Tet Offensive), but the US soldiered on there for another seven years. The crucial factor in both instances was not the passive opinions of most Americans but the active opinions of determined minorities - the ruling elites in the US on the one hand, and the antiwar activists on the other hand.

The antiwar movement, to the extent that it succeeded, did so by providing encouragement to the Vietnamese on the one hand (the hawks who condemned the antiwar movement as "as giving aid and comfort to the enemy", were of course, basically correct), and by helping to demoralize the US forces in Vietnam, who by the early 1970s were in a state of almost continous mutiny or near-mutiny, making them useless to the ruling class.

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