[lbo-talk] Left Forum

Bhaskar Sunkara bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com
Mon Mar 21 08:30:03 PDT 2011


Richard Seymour, quite ably, on the follies of intervention in Libya:

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/a_humanitarian_intervention

It's amazing to see the "left" lapse back into support for these kinds of actions.

On Mar 21, 2011, at 11:00 AM, lbo83235 <lbo83235 at gmail.com> wrote:


> On Mar 21, 2011, at 1:23 PM, ymorvan at scss.tcd.ie wrote:
>
>> But if that leads you to support a US/France/UK lead intervention, you
>> are stuck thinking within the parameters they set, instead of thinking
>> politically. Leaving aside the fact that France and the UK have been
>> arming Khadafi, there are a number of things that could have been done
>> to support the rebellion. (People have suggested releasing the regime's
>> cash held abroad to them, giving them weapons, opening borders to
>> facilitate volunteers helping, etc.)
>
> No offense, but this is a tragicomically absurd pattern of thinking: armchair diplomacy at it's most reclined. You and whose army (of volunteers)? How on earth do you think you could realistically do, or even encourage the doing of, any such thing to "support the rebellion"? Hypothetically, if you were to pursue that line of action (as distinct from that line of thinking), what would have been your first move? Whom would you have called? And said what?
>
> I'm all for identifying and strategizing alternative and more genuinely emancipatory courses of action, and then organizing the resources to make them real, but that's never a hypothetical exercise. In this case, how is what you're saying even remotely anything other than a fantasy?
>
>
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