[lbo-talk] Achcar's latest

Voyou voyou1 at gmail.com
Thu Mar 24 13:59:32 PDT 2011


On Thu, 2011-03-24 at 16:25 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:
> What's the goal? Keeping people alive and making their lives better,
> or sticking blindly to a rule about not supporting interventions?

Sure, but imperialism kills people and makes their lives worse, and the continuation of that has to be weighed against the people who may indeed be kept alive by an imperialist intervention. I'm not proposing a "rule" about always opposing interventions, but rather a rule about not ignoring the harm of imperialism when we consider the harm that imperialist powers might prevent. I'm not saying never make compromises, I'm saying I think Achcar is, in this instance, missing an important element in how we evaluate whether a compromise is worthwhile.


> Does Achcar have to prove his anti-imperialist bona fides every day?
> Is it more important to sniff out heresies than to think about what he
> said?

I don't care whether or not Achcar is an anti-imperialist. Someone can be an anti-imperialist and still make arguments that aren't anti-imperialist on some particular occasion. I'm not denying that he's aware of the issues I'm raising, but I don't see them being addressed specifically in this piece, so I find his argument here mostly unconvincing.

--

"I had never understood why Socialism need imply the arraying

of oneself in a green curtain or a terra-cotta rug, or the

cultivation of flowing locks, blue shirts, and a peculiar cut

of clothes." -- Isabel Meredith, _A Girl Among the Anarchists_ Voyou Desoeuvre <http://blog.voyou.org/>



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