>> Second, thank you for this insight. For me, it substantiates that there can
>> be no emergernce of powerful anti-capitalist/socialist political forces, in
>> the US context, without the concurrent raising of
>> anti-racist/anti-imperialist awareness. These things are dialectically
>> inseperable. You cannot have one without the other, in the US context.
>> Otherwise we get Lou Dobbs, and cases such as the one that you mentioned.
>> So, I agree with you on this second point.
>>
>
> (I generally agree with this.) Some Observatons.
>
> She _did_ come to a rally clearly advertised as opposing u.s. military
> action;, and this at a time when much of the oomph has gone out of the
> anti-war movement. But a call really directed only at anti-war
> enthusiasts brought someone with real grievances but also terrible
> confusions into conversation with "the left" for a few minutes, even if
> the particualr embodiment of "The Left" at that
> point couldn't do much but punt.
I'll just make this obvious point: Of all the people in America who are against the Afghanistan war, probably for only a tiny percentage is their opposition grounded in even the vaguest notion of solidarity with the weak and oppressed. A much larger number probably oppose the war for reasons that are closer to "I'm sick of helping people halfway around the world; they don't even want our help; we should be helping Americans instead."
If you just think about it from the most naive "what would a Martian assume?" perspective, a war advertised as being designed to prevent a medieval-minded gang of violent theocrats from taking over a country and letting it be used as a base for senseless international attacks against civilians - there's no obvious reason to expect that the opponents of such a war would tend to be sympathetic to the values of the left.
SA