[lbo-talk] The effect of drones

[Wojtek S]

Shane: I was alive then.  The US never went to war against the Nazis.
It was Hitler who declared war, and the US war was conducted against
the German people via extermination bombings while the train lines to
the death camps remained unthreatened and Hitler's buddy and ally,
Franco (a Nazi in all but name), remained a good friend of the US and
was promptly rehabilitated  after the war.  As were all the Nazis
except for a few in staged show trials. "Denazification" was a farce
in which the anti-Nazi Wilhelm Furtwängler was denied the right to
conduct in Germany while the Nazi "wünderkind" Herbert von Karajan was
cleared and placed in a dominant position over European music for the
next half-century!"

[WS:] So what are you trying to argue here, Shane?  That the US went
to war with wrong intentions?  Who gives a flying fuck.  The road to
hell is paved with right intentions.  Its material deeds that count,
intentions and reasons are mere PR for public consumption, cheap talk
if you will.  Whatever their reasons, if the US stayed out of it,
folks on my side of the pond would go through the chimneys and we
would not be having this discussion today.  Or rather you would be
pontificating about virtues of US pacifism to some German-speaking
dude.

Ditto for the civil war.  Lincoln's reasons for fighting it are
immaterial - I doubt he had much concern about the fate of southern
blacks - but his decisions had material effect on that fate.  That is
all that there is.  Everything else is parole, parole, parole ....

-- 
Wojtek

"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."