> Enough with this Orientalist hogwash.
Where you got "Orientalism" from this I don't know - seems to have little to do with anything Said wrote on the subject. . None of the articles posted deny that the old dictatorship was horrible and without justification - just noted that what has replaced it seems to be worse.
> Libya had a genuine revolution
> against a vicious neoliberal dictator and is now going through the same
> nation-state-formation pains the rest of the world has had to go through.
> NATO has zip, zero, nada to do with Libya's problems, which are 100%
> Libyan and must be solved by the Libyans themselves. Read the stories:
> http://www.libyaherald.com/
>
>
Am I the only one old enough to remember when NATO bombs dropped on LIbya
helped create the current situation? As Libya descends into warlordism, do
the people have more freedom, more safety or more prosperity than before?
Some left supporters of the NATO intervention at the time were fond of the following Trotsky quote:
>In ninety cases out of a hundred the workers actually place a minus sign
where the bourgeoisie places a plus sign. In ten cases however they are
forced to fix the same sign as the bourgeoisie but with their own seal, in
which is expressed their mistrust of the bourgeoisie.
Maybe that was right in 1938, but today I'd say 10% is way too high. Apparently, after opposing humanitarian bombing in the past some leftist thought they had found a "good" humanitarian intervention. I was tempted by the awfulness of the Gaddafi dictatorship, and the good intentions of many civilian leaders of the revolution who seemed to be at minimum democrats, and anti-neoliberal as well. But I noted that they were an almost entirely unarmed faction, that the armed participants on the side of the revolution were overwhelmingly fundamentalist .And I remembered that the support was coming from NATO in the real world, not some parallel universe of my imagination - meaning that nothing would be done to make sure the will of the people was honored in whatever followed. And it turned out not only badly, but far worse than I thought. I expected a theocratic dictatorship. But instead, Libya is fragmenting into Warlordism. It strikes me as both a horror, and as a lesson not to be too quick to fix a plus sign in the same place as the USA or as NATO - that even horrible dictatorships can be replaced by something worse. Really it should not be a surprise that massive bombing combined with a massive influx of weapons can fragment a society figuratively at the same time it fragments it literally.
Ideologically I'm far from a Pacifist. But on a case by case basis I find myself siding more and more with Pacifists on pragmatic grounds. US and NATO intervention don't tend to lead to positive results from any type of humanitarian viewpoint. The exceptions, if they occur at all, happen a lot less than ten times in one hundred.
The current ISIL horror can be looked upon as a joint Russian - US(and allies) screwup - pouring arms and other types of military support into opposite sides in civil wars. Not to mention the US role in Iraq and
Afghanistan (and going back the Russian role in Aghanistan) . And now I guess the US is going to bomb and pour more arms into the region to stop ISIL. That will contribute to stability in the exact same way it has contributed to stability in the past - not at all. It is one thing to condemn the stupidity of leftists who hold out dictators as some sort of model. It is quite another to leap from that to a cheering squad for US and NATO bombings. It does not make things better. Neither, by the way, does Russian military support for repulsive dictators. But as little influence as we have on US policy, we still have more influence here than we have over Russian policy.
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