[lbo-talk] Meanwhile in Pakistan

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Wed Dec 19 10:18:30 PST 2012


What does that have to do with shooting health workers?

It is difficult to talk about "crimes of resistance" in abstraction. It is one thing when a resistance unit, say, blows up a bus that carries refugees mistakenly thinking it carries enemy soldiers, and another unit getting into a village and raping women and killing health workers.

Another thing - who decides what is a "foreign invasion"? One man's foreign invasion is another man's foreign assistance. The Russians came to Afghanistan to aid their Afghan allies, but that was portrayed as a "foreign intervention" by the CIA, the ISI and the bandits that these agencies armed. But even if it is a foreign invasion by any reasonable standards, then so what? I am pretty sure the Germans did not appreciate 'foreign intervention" by the Allies, but I am not particularly moved by their discontent. In fact, I see nothing intrinsically bad, or good, in any foreign intervention - it all depends to what end and what outcomes are achieved. But then I am not a nationalist, I don't consider "national sovereignty" as a value in itself. In fact, claims to national sovereignty and nationhood are often thinly veiled shams devised to draw attention away from internal class divisions and class struggles.

To use a hypothetical example: if a country A invades country B and imposes socialism that significantly improves living standards of a great majority of B population - that is a good outcome, even though B was invaded and its national sovereignty violated. It would not change even if the invading country was not socialist itself. If, otoh, A invades C and overturns socialism, resulting in immiseration of C population, this is a bad outcome. In the latter case, however, we have a choice of arguing why it is bad - either because of a foreign intervention or because socialism was overturned. In my opinion, the former argument is much weaker because its premise - intrinsic value of national sovereignty - is at best conditionally valid.

-- Wojtek

"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."



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