[lbo-talk] Platypus: what we are, what we do, and why

[Gail Brock]

I'll go with "a course of action is good or bad according as the results are good or bad", but there are two problems with it:  you don't know until it's all over and it's rare that results aren't awfully mixed.   The North was right in the Civil War because, whatever rhetoric was slathered over it, the South was fighting to keep slavery.   It's really not ahistorical to note that the overwhelming consensus in other western nations was that slavery was immoral, and had already been abolished elsewhere.  It was rejection not of a governing system or a series of wrongs (a la the Declaration of Independence's indictment of the British crown), but of the possibility that an unjust law and its supporting legal framework might be overturned.   In this context, armed rebellion did justify armed response.

Maybe the issue is that imperialism claims a range of grand aims -- concern over the plight of the oppressed Afghani women is trotted out to shut the hippies up.  Righting a single, not-to-be-borne wrong is different from generally civilizing the brutes, and of course helping them exploit their resources.

On Thu, April 8, 2010 3:11:48 PM, Max Sawicky wrote:

I don't mean to go out on a limb here, but I think the North's victory in the
Civil War was a fine thing.

But there is still a parallel of a sort.  If you have some monochromatic,
ahistorical opposition to all big bad capitalist governments, I don't
want to mention any names but Brother Cox comes to mind, you have to
be a little
conflicted about supporting the North.  The South had slaves,
Islamic states have women, among many other unfortunate souls.

I've always thought the best arguments against intervention under
benign auspices or pretensions is that they never end well, from the
standpoint of the purported beneficiaries.  As to why they are
undertaken, I'd say the standard-issue anti-imperialist
argument works just fine.

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 2:29 PM, Gail Brock <gbrock_dca at yahoo.com> wrote:
> At what point does "imperialism" become a semantic issue?  If a region has different socioeconomic interests from the rest of a nation but is in a relatively powerless position within the national government but the national government enforces the interests of the different powerful region, how does this differ from external imperialism?  It's especially a question when the powerful section is technologically advanced and uses the less powerful region as a source of raw materials and as a market.
>
> This has been a historical issue with, say, Quebec and Canada, the non-English previous countries and Great Britain, the non-Russian countries and the Soviet Union.  It will probably continue to be an issue with the potential partition of Iraq and probably a lot of other Mid-east and African states that I don't know about.
>
> Slavery was a serious enough moral issue to rally the North and a serious enough economic issue for Southern elites to rally the South, and continues to provide adequate justification for the Civil War.  However, is there a general moral principle that distinguishes when a nation is working towards a national solution and when one region of a nation is imposing internal imperialism on another?  Or to get back to the original question, is there such a thing as internal imperialism?
> ________________________________
> Doug Henwood on Thu, April 8, 2010 1:32:04 PM:
>
> On Apr 8, 2010, at 1:10 PM, SA wrote:
>
>> But the point is that for the majority of the South's population, it wasn't one country. It was one group of states attacking another group of states. It was only called a Civil War in the North.
>
> Well of course the South would say that. But I still don't see how one can call a central government's response to secession by a region that joined the nation by choice, not conquest, imperialism in the same sense as bombing a foreign country and/or changing its government.
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