On Mar 21, 2011, at 10:57 AM, lbo83235 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?
If you look at a map, you will see that right next to Libya is a big country called Egypt. Egypt is now in a revolutionary process like that in Libya. Egypt also has a big, very well-equipped conscript army that is totally unimpaired by the revolutionary process. Whose commanders' present preoccupation is in controlling, undermining, and ending the revolutionary process. Instead of securing the country's frontier, protecting the population of eastern Libya, or supporting democratic revolution. Because, it is obvious, they have been so ordered by their overlords in Washington.
Revolutionaries, if "realistic" in the slightest degree, would have been raising an army of Egyptian volunteers (former conscripts, thus well-trained) to fight Khadafi, and demanding that it be fully supported by Egyptian military resources.
Where is the Egyptian Danton, the Egyptian Brissot, to call for his revolution to aid its fellow revolutionaries across that border, the way the French Revolution came to the aid of the revolution in Austrian-ruled Wallonia in 1792?
>
> 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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