For The Defense (of Saddam): Ramsey Clarke
Perusing my pal GM 's Corner blog I stumbled upon the not-so-surprising news that former attorney general and current wingbat Ramsey Clarke has signed on to the defense team of one Saddam Hussein. 
Everyone, including war criminals, deserve proper legal defense. And I'm not being sarcastic.
What's meaningful about this development — at least to me"”is that Clarke is also co-founder and often chief spokesman and human face for International ANSWER , the grouplet that has headed up most of the large anti-war rallies of the past few years.
Meaningful, but as I said above, not surprising. ANSWER is, in turn, the creation of a cultish-stalinist group called the Workers World Party.
I wrote two years ago "”as an opponent of the war in Iraq -- that the liberal and democratic left was making a monstrous mistake in ceding the leadership of the anti-war movement to this wacky fringe who, indeed, supported not only Saddam but also Slobodan Milosevic as well as that nice family that runs North Korea. I predicted, as if it was any effort to do so, that a movement with these dimwits anywhere near its leadership was doomed.
Let me tell you, I was called every name under the sun for having criticized ANSWER and, worse, for having noted its barely disguised link to the WWP. I was a red-baiter, an opportunist, a CIA agent, a splitter, and that dottering intellectual cadaver, Ed Herman, branded me a "cruise-missile leftist." Yada yada yada.
But, here we are two years later, with 56% of the American population opposing the war, and just where is that peace movement? In a word: invisible. Does that make me a genius? Hardly. It does confirm, however, that those muddle-heads who said it made no difference who actually organized the rallies were dead wrong.
In fairness, "the movement" will re-emerge a few weeks from now in some planned mass demonstrations and the robotoides from Ramsey Clarke's ANSWER will be right in the front lines of them. How long do you think it will take supporters of the war — outside and inside the media-- to notice that the founder of one of the organizing groups of these demos is now not only a legal, but also a political defender of Saddam?
Keep telling yourself, it doesn't matter.
For me, now, the only suspense is whether or not Counselor Clarke is going to be once again afforded a place on the speakers' dais. I bet he will.
January 1st, 2005 at 7:28 pm
Clarke is a certified idiot. Conservatives use him as a contrary indicator.
I predict that we are unlikely to see a significant anti-war movement in this country even if it has competent leadership (and of course the fawning attention and support of the MSM).
We don’t have a draft. When the threat of being drafted and sent to Vietnam ended, so did the anti-war movement, leaving only the most violent radicals to raise hell.
However, for those who choose to exercise their right to demonstrate against the war, don’t for one second fool yourselves into the idea that you support the troops but oppose the war. In practice, it doesn’t work that way. See how many of the troops would want you out there marching against the war. Then look at their opposition. Protesting the war tends to aid the enemy, who are truly foul people.
It’s your choice. It’s a free country.
January 1st, 2005 at 7:41 pm
“However, for those who choose to exercise their right to demonstrate against the war, don’t for one second fool yourselves into the idea that you support the troops but oppose the war.”
You confuse an important issue, namely who is the target of the protest, namely those who make policy. The troops don’t make the policies and, indeed as numerous reports have now made eminently clear, many troops have expressed considerable doubts about what they’re doing in Iraq–but that’s neither here nor there. The protests are directed at the policy makers, something that is not only right, but important in any democracy. In Mussolini’s Italy it wasn’t acceptable, but this isn’t Mussolini’s Italy. If anything, we’re in a situation much like, though obviously not the same as, Vietnam. And we know full well from that experience that both civilians and vets from the Vietnam War were actively participating in all sorts of anti-war activism directed at the most powerful of policy makers in the Johnson and Nixon administrations. That took about 5 years to develop into a movement that couldn’t be ignored and one that changed the press coverage of the war from generally favorable to largely unfavorable.
In the current anti-war movement, we’re at about 1965 with already numerous marches that outdid much of what we saw in the best moments of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Marc’s assessment of the ‘invisible’ state of the movement is static at best and even he acknowledges that more is to come. Will Clarke likely be at the forefront of the movement? No. He hasn’t been and is unlikely to be at the forefront. That his presence is an excuse for the media attacks to come on the antiwar movement is also no big deal. If he weren’t involved in the movement, the media would find other ways to slander, misrepresent, underreport, mock, and distort the aims and results of the antiwar movement that has emerged in response to the invasion and current US occupation of Iraq. That Ramsey Clarke’s decision to be on Sodom’s defense team is going to be a big deal for the movement or that he will be a prominent actor in the antiwar movement is hyperbole at best.
January 1st, 2005 at 8:17 pm
Frankly, I think it’s beneath you, Marc, to engage in this kind of petty name calling and told-you-so blogging. Why is it that such a thoughtful, polite and respectful interviewer like yourself becomes such a high pitched weisel on your cite? I’ve noticed this contrast every since I’ve been readng your page, but it’s reached a point where I think it’s taking away from your more insightful commentary. If you think Clark and ANSWER are jeoprodizing the effectiveness of the antiwar movement, why not just explain why and let your readership decide on the merits of your case? (which is what you tell bloggers you’re doing when criticized for your soft touch interviews with Hitchens. The political company he’s been keeping these days isn’t exactly bloodless) Calling people “dimwits”, “wacky” and “cadavers” might be ok after a few too many beers in a bar or living room, but on a cite that’s trying to engage people with serious issues? Frankly, I don’t get it. I have no affiliation with or lost love for Ramsey Clark or ANSWER, but how about affording your readers the same courtesy you offer your guests on radio nation: the marc cooper that is calm, reasoned, often insightful, always respectful of even the most fringy elements of our side of the political line of scrimmage. Just a thought.
January 1st, 2005 at 8:40 pm
Edward Herman, back in 2002: “Marc Cooper recently published a second article in the Los Angeles Times that focused on the recent failures of the peace movement, attributed to the influence of a left faction “steeped in four decades’ worth of crude anti-Americanism,” although why he and the “decent left” haven’t successfully stepped into the breach and revitalized the movement, Cooper never makes clear (“Protest: A Smart Peace Movement is MIA,” LAT, September 29, 2002).
Marc’s response to that: “Setting himself up as the Ayatollah of Political Correctness, academic Ed Herman called us critics the “Cruise Missile Left” and officially excommunicated us out of the “real left” – whatever that is.”
Actually, a close look at Herman’s article refers only to “a real left” – which could be hypothetical, and in the future. Chomsky himself has been baited by self-styled “real leftists” from splinter-faction nutgroups while on speaking tours, responding in exasperation at one of them, “who is the ‘real Left’? The Left is not a membership organization!” I doubt Herman’s sentiments differ much from Chomsky’s on this issue, so the idea that he “officially excommunicated” anybody seems pretty over the top.
That said, Herman’s “CML” (“Cruise Missile Left”) was obviously name-calling. In fact, it’s name-calling somewhere near the level of calling Herman a “doddering cadaver”. Gee, I wonder if all this might have something to do with a question Edward Herman raises: why some “decent left” has yet to “successfully step into the breach and revitalize the movement,” instead of leaving all that protest march organization to a bunch of wingnuts who can carry it off because … well, because they have party discipline, if nothing else, and they absolutely agree with each other all the time on very important issues like who we should all egregiously insult THIS week.
January 1st, 2005 at 8:40 pm
Vince…. first of all the correct spelling is weasel. So let’s get that straight. The radio show and the blog are two different media. In the first case, it is an intstitutional representation I am making and it is not my personal show and does NOT reflect exclusively my views. The blog by contrast is mine and and say what I feel. Calling Clarke a wingbat I think is polite. Ed Herman is intellectually mort and therefore a cadaver. The WWP is wacky…sorry. Cant think of a more appropriate term.
Also, I have said before and will now repeat… this blog is an entertainment that is meant to rile, provoke and piss off. So it looks like I am achieving that much
As to ANSWER, I provided a link where people can indeed read my entire argument and reasoning.
January 1st, 2005 at 8:50 pm
Eurocommunists had a great put down of the WWP type, “Tankie.” Think it was ban allusion to the Herbert Aptheker’esque defense of the tanks in Budapest in ’56.
Much on WWP below by Kevin Coogan, who wrote a great book on neo-fascist intellectual, Francis Parker Yockey, an influence on Willis Carto of The American Free Press/The Spotlight, a noxious far right “populist”anti-semitic rag that I’ve seen the nuttier of anti-Zionists on the hard left cite. Cynthia McKinney praised their “reportage” on 9-11.
http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/03/229254
THE IAC AND THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST SANCTIONS: HELPING THE IRAQI PEOPLE OR SADDAM HUSAYN?
One of the IAC’s best-known campaigns is aimed at lifting all economic sanctions against Iraq. By raising this issue, the IAC is trying to appeal to many people who have no sympathy for Iraq but who are rightly concerned that the way sanctions are currently imposed only ends up punishing ordinary Iraqis, particularly children, who are deprived of food and medicine while the ruling elite remains unharmed. UN agencies involved with Iraq believe that as a result of the way the sanctions policy has been implemented, thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians are needlessly dying every month. The sanctions policy has also been seized upon by Saddam Husayn to generate sympathy for Iraq, both in the West and especially within the Muslim world. Husayn, of course, wants an end to all sanctions so that he can go about rebuilding his war machine. From his point of view, humanitarian concerns about sanctions serve as a perfect “wedge” issue to force an end to any UN-imposed restrictions on Iraq’s sovereignty, restrictions that were heightened after he violated his promise to allow UN inspectors to freely examine potential nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare sites on Iraqi soil.
In an attempt to rectify the injustices caused by sanctions, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared on March 7th, 2001 before the House International Relations Committee to argue for “humane, smart sanctions” that “target Saddam Hussein not the Iraqi people.” A similar view was reflected in a report on Iraq from the Fourth Freedom Foundation authored by David Cortright, a former executive director of the anti-war group SANE. Cortright proposes a revised sanctions policy that specifically targets Husayn’s ability to use Iraqi oil revenue to either build or import weapons and “duel use” goods while letting commercial companies, not the UN, be responsible for certifying and providing notification of civilian imports into Iraq. The proposal would also permit the ordering and contracting of civilian goods on an “as-required basis” to overcome cumbersome UN regulations.
While by no means perfect, Powell’s support for “smart sanctions” met with enormous resistance from both Congress and the Pentagon, both of whom fear being seen as overly “soft” on Iraq. Given this political reality, one would have thought that the IAC might have given at least some of Powell’s or Cortright’s proposals a degree of critical support, since they would materially improve the conditions of ordinary Iraqis — something the IAC itself claims to be so concerned about — as well as open up a broader discussion of the sanctions issue. Yet in a March 20th statement, Richard Becker, the IAC’s “Western Regional Coordinator” (and a leading member of the WWP), denounced smart sanctions as a “poisonous fraud,” claimed that smart sanctions were a form of colonialism, and renewed the IAC’s demand “to unconditionally lift the genocidal sanctions against Iraq” which, coincidently enough, is exactly what Saddam Husayn himself would like so that he can rebuild his military machine.
The manipulation of the Iraq sanctions issue by the far left for its own political goals may have hurt the campaign against sanctions, according to Scott Ritter. Ritter, a former Marine Captain who led the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) disarmament team in Iraq for seven years, is today a leading advocate of ending the type of sanctions that only hurt the Iraqi people. In an interview with Ali Asadullah (available from iviews.com) that appeared on February 2nd, 2000, Ritter stated that one of the problems which genuine sanction critics have being taken seriously is that the issue “has been embraced by, I would say, the fringe left of the United States. . .Because the issue has been embraced by the left — including radical elements of the left — it’s lost a little bit of its political credibility.” Due to the fringe left’s radical beliefs, “virtually all of what they say [about Iraq] is wrong, factually; or heavily slanted with a political ideology that most of Americans don’t find attractive.” When one fringe left group claimed that American policy in Iraq was equivalent to Auschwitz, Ritter told them that such a statemenot not only alienated people, but that “[it was] about as grossly an irresponsible statement as I can imagine. This isn’t Auschwitz, this isn’t genocide. . .This is a horrible policy that’s resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead kids. But there’s a big difference between the two.” Ritter also said that it was almost impossible to get a legitimate debate in the U.S. about sanctions because while one side “demonizes” Iraq, the opposition views “the regime as some sort of nice little genteel Middle East nation.”
When specifically asked about Ramsey Clark, Ritter replied: “I wouldn’t be in touch with Ramsey Clark. . .I fought in the Gulf War. I was in that war. I know what went on during that war, and we’re not war criminals. I’m not a war criminal. And none of the people I served with are war criminals. And yet he’s accusing the U.S. of committing war crimes because A-10 aircraft fired depleted uranium shells at Iraqi tanks. That’s horribly irresponsible. I don’t want to be associated with that man. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. He may have a point when it comes to economic sanctions, but he hasn’t a clue of what’s involved in modern warfare and why we targeted certain targets. . .He’s grossly irresponsible in some of the things he says.” Apparently, Saddam Husayn disagrees with Ritter’s assessment of Clark. Otherwise why would he continue to welcome Ramsey Clark-led IAC delegations to Baghdad year after year with open arms?
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Appendix 2
“ANSWER”AND THE “POD PEOPLE”
The IAC/WWP’s new group, International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism), coordinated the September 29th protests in Washington and San Francisco that drew close to 20,000 participants. ANSWER is now calling for renewed nationwide anti-war actions on October 27th.
There can be little doubt about ANSWER’s ties to the WWP. ANSWER’s September 23rd press release, for example, listed as “press contacts” Richard Becker and Sarah Sloan. A director of the West Coast IAC, Becker was one of the WWP leaders chosen to give a presentation honoring the memory of the WWP’s founder, Sam Marcy. As for Sarah Sloan, “Youth Coordinator for ANSWER,” she is also the “Youth Coordinator” for the IAC. Wearing her WWP hat, Sloan gave a presentation on the evils of capitalism at a WWP conference held at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology on December 2nd and 3rd, 2000. Teresa Gutierrez, another ANSWER leader, a speaker at the September 29th Washington demo and the “Co-Director, IAC,” is further described in an ANSWER press release as the “co-chairperson of the National Committee to Return Elian Gonzalez to Cuba, and [as] a coordinator of the International Peace for Cuba Appeal.” Unmentioned in the press release is the fact that Gutierrez is also a long-standing WWP leader who, in her March 14th, 1998 speech at a WWP memorial to Sam Marcy held in New York, gushed, “As a lesbian, as a Latina, as a woman and as a worker, I feel compelled today to express my utmost gratitude to this man [Marcy].” Yet another ANWER statement came from one Brian Becker (not to be confused with Richard Becker), a “Co-Director of the International Action Center,” national coordinator of the January 20th, 2001 “Counter-Inaugural Protest” in Washington, D.C., and “a frequent commentator on Fox TV.” In the WWP paper Workers World, Brian Becker is identified as a member of the WWP’s Secretariat.
The WWP/IAC/ANSWER network is now pushing its own paranoid Marxoid line on the war by claiming that U.S.-led military actions against “Usamah ibn Ladin and other Islamist terrorists is really part of a U.S. imperialist plot.” An IAC statement on the current crisis begins: “As the U.S.-led bombing campaign against the people of Afghanistan continues and civilian casualties mount, the International Action Center condemns in the strongest terms this latest terror bombing of a civilian population.” Of course, only the most hardened leftist ideologue (or Muslim extremist) could believe that the U.S. attack in Afghanistan is a “terror bombing” campaign that is intentionally directed at Afghanistan’s “civilian population” and not at the Taliban. The IAC statement then calls for opposition to “this imperialist war” and concocts a conspiracy theory blaming the “U.S. military-oil complex” for using the 9/11 attack as “a cynical opportunity” to beat its “rivals in Germany and Russia, for the oil resources of the former Soviet Union,” thereby ignoring the obvious fact that both Germany and Russia completely support U.S. actions against Islamist terrorist fanatics.
Given the sheer crudeness of the WWP and its allied organizations, one would have thought that the “capitalist imperialist” press would play a key role in exposing the WWP’s central role in both the IAC and ANSWER. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, ANSWER itself reprints reports from both Reuters and the Washington Post about the Washington protests that treat both the IAC and ANSWER as if they were perfectly legitimate groups. CNN’s C-SPAN even covered the September 29th Washington demonstration in its entirety. Until now, virtually nothing has been written about the IAC/WWP, even in the upscale left/liberal press — with two notable exceptions. The first was John Judis’ article on Ramsey Clark for the April 22th, 1991 issue of the New Republic. More recently, The Nation magazine’s UN correspondent, Ian Williams, wrote a June 21st, 1999 article for Salon entitled “Ramsey Clark, the war criminal’s best friend,” which comments on the IAC/WWP. Outside of these two articles, in order to find any real commentary on the IAC and WWP, one has to turn to the left sectarian and anarchist press. Perhaps the most detailed article dealing with Ramsey Clark, the IAC, and the WWP appeared in the Lower East Side New York-anarchist journal The Shadow a few years ago, in an article by Manny Goldstein entitled “The Mysterious Ramsey Clark: Stalinist Dupe or Ruling-Class Spook?”(to which one is tempted to add “or Flat-Out Kook”). This article has recently been widely circulated on the Internet. Self-described “council communist” Lefty Hooligan has also exposed the WWP/IAC in the punk rock publication Maximum RocknRoll. In his February 1998 MRR column, for example, Hooligan commented on longtime WWP honcho Gloria LaRiva, whose “handcuffs-and-nightstick Leftism is also evident in her unapologetic support for Saddam Hussein’s brutality.” (This is the same Gloria LaRiva who, according to a report in the August 9th, 1990 Workers World, told a San Francisco audience that “Cuba is far more democratic than the U.S.”) Hooligan’s remarks, however, did not prevent MRR from later running a virtual press release from the IAC attacking American perfidy in its misnamed “News” section. The WWP/IAC connection has also been repeatedly exposed by the WWP’s rivals in the fringe Trotskyist movement, most notably in the Spartacist League paper Workers Vanguard, which in its September 28th, 2001 issue casually refers to the “Stalinoid Workers World Party” as well as the “WWP’s International Action Center” without further elaboration, presumably since the WWP’s role in the IAC is already so well known to fringe leftists. The April-May 1999 issue of The Internationalist (from yet another Trotskyist splinter group) devotes an entire page to attacking the WWP and “its creation the International Action Center” for serving as a “leftist front for reactionary Serbian nationalist politics.” The WWP’s presence inside the IAC is equally transparent to European leftists like Max Bohnel, a writer for the German Communist paper Neues Deutschland. In describing the IAC in a June 23rd, 1999 article, he wrote: “Hinter dem IAC steht die ‘Workers World Party’ (WWP), die den langsamen Zusammenbruch der US-Restlinken bemerkenswert gut überstanden hat.” ["Behind the IAC stands the Workers World Party, which has withstood the gradual collapse of the remaining US left remarkably well."] Neues Deutschland then points out that both Ramsey Clark and the WWP have even come under criticism from other leftists because of their lack of criticism ["wegen mangelnder Kritik"] for the governments of Iraq and Yugoslavia.
Even activists on the libertarian/isolationist right like Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com have noticed the heavy hand of the WWP. In a July 2nd, 2001 column, Raimondo pointed out that Ramsey Clark “is nothing if not a walking stereotype, ever since he joined up with the Workers World Party cult that runs his ‘International Action Center’.” Raimondo then continues: “The WWP pod people, having taken over the body of an ex-U.S. Attorney General, use Clark as a front to push their own zealous defense of virtually every tyrant on earth, from Saddam Hussein to the black ‘anti-imperialist’ militias of Rwanda, to Slobadan Milosevic.” After describing Clark as “positively spooky,” Raimondo notes that the IAC “not only defends tyrants against US intervention — it glorifies them as heroic fighters for ‘socialism’.”
Of course it should be pointed out that the WWP’s radical critics themselves often promote views that are almost as wacky as those of the WWP. Nonetheless, up until now it has primarily been voices from the fringe Left that have pointed out the ties between the IAC and WWP, ties that are utterly transparent to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the Left, but which appear to be utterly opaque to big “capitalist” media outlets like Reuters, the Washington Post, and CNN.
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Appendix 3
THE WWP: FROM KIM IL SUNG’S BIRTHDAY PARTY TO THE RUSSIAN “RED-BROWN ALLIANCE”
The Orwellian absurdity that is the WWP reaches its summit with the group’s well-known love for that well-known bastion of human rights and free thought, North Korea. Longtime WWP leader Deirdre Griswold captured the sect’s admiration for the world’s last remaining Stalinist state when she wrote as follows in the April 20th, 2000 Workers World: “In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — the socialist north of the divided land — no date is more important than April 15, the birthday of Kim Il Sung. . .this year as Koreans celebrate Kim Il Sung’s birthday — and in the U.S.-occupied south, where such actions must be taken in secret because of repressive ‘national security’ laws — they will also be telling the world that they are proud of and confident in their new leader, Kim Jong Il [Kim Il Sung's son and heir -- KC], who is following in the socialist footsteps of Kim Il Sung.” A frequent visitor to North Korea, Griswold regularly goes into fits of literary rapture when relating her experiences in the North. Her December 22nd, 1986 WW report on her visit to Pyongyang (entitled “A visit to People’s Korea where there is housing for all”) begins “What a success story!” She then describes a nation where there is “no homelessness, no hunger, no poverty.” The fact that North Korea is one of the poorest countries in the world and that North Korea’s population faces the threat of famine on a regular basis has somehow escaped Griswold’s notice.
Ever since its beginnings as the Global Class War tendency inside the SWP, Sam Marcy’s clique has regularly singled out North Korea for special admiration. The WWP’s direct “party to party” relations with the North, however, only began to blossom fully after the WWP started attacking Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The WWP’s big break came in May 1990, when the first official WWP delegation headed by Marcy visited North Korea “for 12 days in May” at the invitation of the Central Committee of the Workers Party of Korea. While in Pyongyang, the WWP delegates “had the great honor of meeting and exchanging views with Kim Il Sung.” The June 7th, 1990 issue of WW even included a photo op of the WWP delegates with their North Korean friends, including Kim Il Sung, who stood in the center of the photo flanked by Marcy and Griswold.
In April 1992 another U.S. delegation led by Marcy that included Sue Bailey (a WWP’er who heads the “U.S. Out of South Korea Committee”), as well as delegates from the CPUSA, the SWP, and the American Democratic Lawyers Association, again visited North Korea to attend a “Joint Meeting of Parties, Governments, National and International Organizations” organized by CILRECO, an organization that “promotes solidarity with the Korean people.” (As the official leader of the U.S. group, Marcy received the North Korean equivalent of a papal blessing.) The Americans, along with delegates from 130 other countries, traveled to the North “to attend mass public celebrations of the 80th birthday” of Kim Il Sung, according to a report in an April 1992 issue of WW by Sue Bailey and Key Martin datelined Pyongyang.
While in the North for Kim’s birthday party, the WWP entered into discussions with other hardline Communist groups, including a Stalin-worshipping sect called the Russian Communist Workers Party (RCWP) (Rossiskaia Kommunisticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia, or RKRP), which emerged from the anti-Gorbachev, “anti-revisionist” Movement of Communist Initiative in November 1991. On September 3rd, 1992, WW ran an article by Viktor Tyulkin, the group’s top leader and the Secretary of its Central Committee. The introduction to the article explained that Tyulkin and Marcy had first met in Pyongyang during the April festivities for Kim “and [had] discussed the political situation in the USSR and the U.S.” They remained in contact, and on Marcy’s 85th birthday Tyulkin sent him a “message of solidarity” from the RCWP that was reprinted in the October 17th, 1996 WW. Tyulkin’s comrade Victor Anpilov from the Executive Committee of Working Russia also enclosed his own message of solidarity.
Although the RCWP doesn’t receive much press coverage in WW, it seems clear that the WWP has a sympathetic view of its activities. In a January 13th, 2000 WW article on Russian politics, the RCWP was singled out for its leadership role both in the strike movement as well as inside the “Communist Workers of Russia” voting bloc. The RCWP “left” is also contrasted favorably to Gennadi Zyuganov’s far larger KPRF. Workers World’s reluctance to devote extensive press coverage to the RCWP, however, may stem from the fact that any overt alliance with the RCWP would be rather difficult for the WWP’s more naive rank-and-file members to stomach, since the RCWP is a textbook example of a radical “left fascist” group.
The anti-globalization movement was recently confronted with the problem of the RCWP after it was learned that two RCWP members were officially invited to take part in the recent Genoa protests by the international association ATTAC (the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens, which is best known for supporting the proposed “Tobin tax” on speculative transactions.) The leftist International Solidarity with Workers in Russia (ISWoR-SITR-MCPP) group immediately alerted other anti-globalization activists that the RCWP was an extremely racist and homophobic party whose members worship Stalin, campaign against black people in general and rap music in particular, issue material calling for homosexuals to be jailed, and published a party document in 1997 that blamed Russia’s economic crisis on “American imperialism and international Zionism.” The group also attacked Russian President Vladimir Putin for being so close to “the Jews that he ignores true Russian ‘patriots’.” According to ISWoR, the RCWP could be best described as “a pseudo-Communist anti-Semitic organization.” At the same time that the RCWP appeals to the far right, it maintains a pro-Stalin analysis of Russia that is almost identical to the one promoted by the WWP. According to the RCWP program, for example, “The RCWP completely rejects the revisionist, opportunist, traitorous line that was promoted and adhered to by the CPSU leadership from 1953-1991, which brought about the temporary collapse of the Soviet Union in a counter-revolution. The XX Congress of the CPSU (1956) was the breaking point in the history of our country and the communist movement.”
Victor Anpilov, a former Soviet journalist who became co-secretary of the RCWP in 1992 (but who broke with Tyulkin in 1996-1997 over electoral strategy), also sent his greetings of solidarity to Marcy on his 85th birthday in 1996. However, if anything Anpilov is even further to the right than Tyulkin. After leaving the RCWP, he first entered into an alliance with the notorious Eduard Limonov and his Natsionalno-Bolshevistskaia Partiia (National Bolshevik Party). Today, Anpilov is promoting a new party, the CPSU Lenin-Stalin that backs Stalin’s grandson as Russia’s new leader.
Kevin Coogan is the author of a crucially important study on the postwar right, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia, 1999), as well as a regular contributor to Hit List. Among other things, he wrote “How ‘Black’ is Black Metal? Michael Moynihan, Lords of Chaos, and the ‘Countercultural Fascist’ Underground,” an article which appeared in Hit List 1:1 (February-March 1999), pp. 32-49.
January 1st, 2005 at 8:51 pm
Turner.. can it possibley be true that you interpreted my phrase about excommunicated in a literal sense? Or that I thought it literaL???? That’s rather shocking. Of course Herman was being rhetorical… who would give a flip anyway about what he or anyone else thinks is the “real left.” What a sterile concept. Not to say I wouldnt proudly be drummed out of any formation that gives cover to totalitarian skunks like ANSWER. In any case, Herman is but an ossified brick-tosser, safely ensconsed at the Wharton School and miles and decades removed from any testing of his increasingly cracked theorizing. When and if there is, indeed, a “real left” in the US it will have nothing to do with the likes of Ed Herman.
January 1st, 2005 at 9:18 pm
I love to read the delusions of the state of the movement. As if the results of the election did not prove that the peace movement is totally ineffective. Not only that, comparing our current situation to 1965 is silly. It is utterly impossible to compare the two wars, and the state of American politics at the time.
Beyond that, the 1960′s “movement” was pretty much a failure. The height of it was 1968, the year Nixon got elected. The war continued on for a number of years, doubling the US casualties. So the “movement” couldn’t even get an anti-war candidate elected. Not only that, Conservatism has been on the march since that time and has continued to win, win, and win. If you cannot get anyone elected, you are failing.
I don’t say this to undermine the sincere efforts of many during the 1960′s, but it would be real beneficial to make an honest assessment of the history of the American Left.
Considering the size of the population, 250,000 people or even 500,000 at the RNC protest is really not all that impressive considering the population of the country and the size of the electorate. The Red Sox got 3.5 million.
Yes, it does matter that the movement is dominated by sectarians and groups like ANSWER, UFPJ and all the other sects that organize almost every single rally are a thorn in the side of the peace movement and the left.
I love the fact that Chomsky included some words by Ramsey Clarke (and Edward Said) in Acts of Aggression.
January 1st, 2005 at 9:47 pm
Josh wrote: “Not only that, comparing our current situation to 1965 is silly. It is utterly impossible to compare the two wars, and the state of American politics at the time.”
Really? Increasingly few observers of the current US occupation of Iraq would agree with you, even supportive ones widely quoted in the media. The comparison of the protest turnouts and RedSox turnouts is hardly relevant, the same could be said about the protests in the 1960′s, which you are one of the few to believe was not significant from the vantage of Johnson, McN, Nixon, Agnew,…
And this is a beauty, now even the non-Marxist UFPJ is a ‘sectarian’ organization! Though what is sectarian these days, it sounds like that other favorite word ‘fascist’ or ‘terrorist’, whose meaning is ‘anyone I don’t like’.
Thank you to Mike P. for the extended long long long quote. I don’t think I”ve ever even put out even one long quote that matched even 1/10th that length! wow.
January 1st, 2005 at 10:18 pm
You don’t see it as the least bit unsettling that a professional sports team winning a championship is more inspiring than a war?
Boston was cold with freezing rain. 3.5 million.
NY during the summer (a nice place I think). 250,000 (or 500,000).
Yes it does matter. It means that the anti war is not inspiring regular people to hit the streets.
I think war is a more important issue than a pro sports team winning a championship. Most of those that voted would agree. And if they were staunchly opposed to the war, they would be inspired to march a few blocks.
Yes, the climate in 1965 was much different. Leading up to the movement you had the Civil Rights movement and the Student Free Speech movement (both successful). You had cultural movements like the Folk Revival and emerging counter culture (both resonated). You also had the momentum of the post WWII liberalism, a movement that elected politicians and passed legislation. You also had residual energy from the popular movements of the previous 50 years like the successful labor movement and successful Progressive movement. You also had the benefit of a strong, emerging intellectual movement (the New Left – SDS – Port Heron, etc). You also had the post McCarthy liberation that allowed many left wing figures to emerge from the black list. A LOT different than now.
Must I describe the sorry state of the current intellectual movement and the lack of a populist cultural movement? How about the lack of momentum due to the 30 years of electoral defeat? How about the simple fact that the youth of today are more interested in I Pod’s than politics? 1965 was entirely different than 2005.
Vietnam and Iraq both are unjust wars but not the least bit comparable. North Vietnam had a unified anti-colonialist opposition (NLF and NVA). Iraq does not have that. Vietnam had the USSR and China supporting it. The Iraqi resistance does not have a state supplying it with arms and money. We are not in the middle of the COLD WAR. NO, they are not the same.
You can ignore the ramifications of the 60’s to you are blue in the face. But in the real word, with the good (end of Jim Crow, feminism, etc), came a whole lot of bad (culture war leading to 30 years of conservative victories).
The anti-war movement in the 60’s was led initially by the original leadership of the SDS and religious folk. Now, the religious folk are voting for Bush and the leadership of the movement are good old sectarians. The rise of sectarianism in the late 60’s (the Weather Underground and the Progressive Labor Party) destroyed SDS and greatly damaged the movement and the left. Actually, you can trace the rise of violent radicals to the victory of Nixon and the rise of the cultural war (that the left is loosing badly).
1965 and 2005 ain’t the same.
I will cease any more debating on this thread out of respect for the host.
January 1st, 2005 at 10:24 pm
You don’t see it as the least bit unsettling that a professional sports team winning a championship is more inspiring than a war?
–no. it didn’t seem to matter during the civil rights movement, which was quite successful, ditto the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War.
You state that by 1965 the environment was so ‘different’. Well, in a sense, yes. On the other hand, the antiwar movement was very small at that point and hardly able to draw the kind of dissent and protests that have occurred in the last 2 years.
It’s interesting that you state that I said the Vietnam War and the ongoing US occupation of Iraq are one in the same. In fact I have stated quite the contrary. Similar, but hardly the same.
January 1st, 2005 at 10:38 pm
“Clarke is a certified idiot. Conservatives use him as a contrary indicator.”
Actually, the problem is probably a little more complicated than that.
Let’s take the man at face value – which I will, for the sake of argument. After all, nobody knows Ramsey Clarke’s soul – maybe not even Ramsey.
Ramsey Clarke is in fact very intelligent indeed, but I think he has fallen prey to two fatal temptations:
(1) the existence of so much human-inflicted human suffering makes us yearn strongly for a supportive milieu that offers the simplistic scenario of a Good Us versus an Evil Them;
and
(2) much time spent in the circles of power and the limelight around those circles makes it hard to retire and work sanely in the shadows for a better world.
Lie down with dogs, get up with their fleas – possibly including fleas infected with bubonic plague. Example: Ramsey Clarke was right, I think, to state forthrightly that the sanctions against Iraq were very inhumane. But then he went to Iraq, as Saddam’s guest. Well, that got people’s attention, but not in a very productive way. I doubt he got the whirlwind tour of any mass grave sites except those associated with the U.S. bombing. As for his supportive remarks as an invited guest of the Schiller Institute (a LaRouche front group) in Copenhagen … words fail. I mean, defending LaRouche – yeah, everybody needs a defense lawyer. But supporting his cause?
In the Tsunami thread, I wrote in dealing with people for whom life is cheap, you can end up cheapening life even if that was not your intent. Clarke neatly exemplifies what I was trying to say.
Well, that’s all beside the point for any legal defense of Saddam. What Clarke will undoubtedly try to do – and what someone should do – is to highlight the supportive role of Western superpowers in Saddam’s career. Clarke is the wrong guy to do it, but I don’t think we’re spoiled for choice at the moment.
I seriously doubt we can expect a fair trial anyway, so it probably doesn’t matter. After all, Cambodia has been run by a former low-level Khmer Rouge, and former Vietnam occupation government puppet, who, on the one hand peddles “autogenocide” figures that are double that of the highest (among many highly improbable) estimates, but on the other, cannily stalls any international war crimes tribunal what would inevitably bring some Americans in for indictment. Better to just wait for all those high-level Khmer Rouge to totter off this mortal coil in due time. He knows which side his bread is buttered on.
Injustice in these sorts of trials is nothing new, of course. In the Far East Asia War Crimes Tribunal, one General Yamashita’s case was argued by an American military lawyer who made an excellent case. He presented ample evidence that Yamashita had sternly disciplined his troops when they committed atrocities, and that atrocities continued primarily because of insubordination: the officers reporting to Yamashita had simply stopped supplying him with information about such events. However, only the judge from India ruled against the majority, and Yamashita went to the gallows. Emperor Hirohito had no such defense, but was pardoned by Macarthur because, well, Macarthur was personally moved by Hirohito’s shouldering of full responsibility (itself quite inaccurate, given how little control the imperial family had over what the Japanese Army was doing in China), and – misplaced compassion meets cold pragmatism – sparing Hirohito any further indignities happened to be the politically convenient thing to do for the stability of post-war Occupation-era Japan.
I once sat in Macarthur’s chair in his former office in an insurance building across the street from the Imperial Palace Grounds. The office is kept as it was the day he left it. (You have to know where it is, and know who to ask, and know how to ask.) Sitting in that worn leather-upholstered swivel chair, I tried to imagine Macarthur’s state of mind on that day Hirohito came to visit. And failed.
War tinges even the best of us with insanity. Sometimes it’s more than just a tinge. Just as there was a lot of the best of us in Douglas Macarthur, there is also a lot of the best of us in Ramsey Clarke. But there’s also the starkly evident fact that – in his own undeniably intelligent way – the man has gone plumb crazy.
It can happen to the best of us. So don’t think – NEVER think – it can’t happen to you. Especially if things are set to get even worse from here on out. Which I find myself thinking, as the new year dawns.
January 2nd, 2005 at 12:08 am
First things first, Marc As long as you feel a need to correct somebody’s spelling of “weasel” (when it’s from someone you disagree with – correcting people’s spelling being a time-honored sign that desperate flamage is in progress) I feel must point out that when you said Ramsey Clark is a “wingbat” (twice now, the second time with a defense, so there’s no excuse) you MUST have meant “moonbat.” In the first page of Google results on “wingbat”, I find only one reference to political thought, and it’s used for ostensibly-lunatic RIGHT-wing thinking:
http://javadis.com/blog/index.php?cat=66
A Google search on “moonbat” – well, try it yourself. It’s inescapable: “moonbat” is used almost exclusively against those thought to be credulous and stupid left-wingers (including people like me, who aren’t leftists, but happen to agree with certain opinions.) It’s often modified with “barking,” as in “Joe Wilson is a barking moonbat.”
Face it, Marc: you have been caught out in a Class A Invective Error. Your career as a blogland purveyor of invective may suffer as a result. You have been warned.
As for the mutual pissing between you and Edward Herman, well, you persist in calling him a “cadaver”. Fine. Where I part company with you – since the man is so clearly dead – is in calling him “doddering.” He is actually a very spry old zombie, if this recent contribution is any indication:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-11/08herman.cfm
Pretty sloppy compared to writings past, but unusually energetic compared to the literary output of your average corpse.
OK, OK, I’m being annoyingly literal. I plead guilty to forgetting the first (unwritten) rule of blogging-for-journalists: print media is where where you check your fly to see if it’s unzipped, but your blog is where you can piss in public, on any target you fancy. One would think that journalism was still journalism, wherever you find it. But you’re a pro, I’m not, so I won’t second-guess you on that.
Yours truly on the receiving end of the next golden shower,
-michael
January 2nd, 2005 at 1:06 am
Oh, dear, Marc. How depressing.
(By the way, to avoid having to wade through the above Appendices 1, 2 and 3, here’s the link to the 1999 Salon article on Ramsey Clark, which sums up much of that same material in a far more…um…readable fashion.)
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/06/21/clark/
Michael T. Your analysis of Clark is quite interesting and emotionally generous. Yet in the end, I think you’ve got it right with your conclusion: “But there’s also the starkly evident fact that – in his own undeniably intelligent way – the man has gone plumb crazy.”
I think your cautionary note is also right, that all of us who choose to stare hard at some of the human race’s knottier problems risk going a bit round the bend if we’re not re-e-eally careful.
And while we’re on the subject of the dreadful fallibility of the species in which we all claim membership, I just saw “Hotel Rwanda†tonight. It’s not a flawless film by any means. Don Cheadle is really stunning—a performance of quiet and complex perfection. Nick Nolte seems miscast. Plus it won’t tell any of the commenters on this thread anything all that new. But the totality of the experience is….shattering. I urge everyone to see it. And to urge everyone THEY know to see it.
January 2nd, 2005 at 1:12 am
Just read Michael T’s newest post and it’s a damned good thing I wasn’t sipping late night tea….or any other liquid with staining properties!
January 2nd, 2005 at 1:54 am
Did no else cite Vance’s misuse of “cite” when “site “was clearly indicated? I point this out only because I don’t want to weasel out of being called a wingbat because I oppose most moonbats.
Oh, and Marc? Thanks for the plug!
January 2nd, 2005 at 2:18 am
And did anyone notice back on the tsunami thread where I wrote “we’re” where I should have written “were”?
No?
Oh, good.
reg noted that the UNA-UNSO website material in English that I’d pointed to (see Orange Revolution thread) seemed to have been translated by Babelfish, but he was either nice enough or oblivious enough to not mention that some of what *I* write recently also seems come out Babelfish.
Celeste – thanks for the kind words. I pretty much gave up blogging
http://www.transcendentalbloviation.blogspot.com
when I lost my sense of humor a few months back. I know it’s around here somewhere … friends of mine have urged me to resume blogging, telling me that it’s pretty rare to run across that balancing act of combining commentary with humor. I tell them there’s a good reason for this: it’s really hard to do it right. And I’d rather not do it at all if I can’t do it right.
What is the essential ingredient that distinguishes both knock-knock jokes and witty derision from true humor? I think it’s what you’ve called “emotional generosity,” above. And maybe that’s precisely what makes it so difficult. Ed Herman the “doddering cadaver”? Hey, I got a snicker out of it myself. But half the snicker was in laughing AT Marc, not WITH him. Yeah, it was funny. But it’s not humor. That’s harder. Much harder.
P.S. GMRoper, you made me laugh too. Good for you.
January 2nd, 2005 at 2:50 am
Oh, crap, I just realized I got Marc completely wrong about Edward Herman. Marc wrote that Hermans was a “dottering cadaver,” not a “doddering cadaver,” as I first read it. He meant that Herman was a cadaver who performs a certain kind of angioplasty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angioplasty
I.e., Herman is not just a zombie, but a zombie practicing medicine – cardiology, even! – without a license. OK, that really IS reprehensible. My God … how, in any civilized society, can such a … well, anyway: Sorry, Marc. I take it all back.
January 2nd, 2005 at 7:53 am
“Ed Herman is intellectually mort and therefore a cadaver.”
Posted by: Marc Cooper | January 1, 2005 08:40 PM
WTF?
January 2nd, 2005 at 8:29 am
what is really odd is the idea that a movement can be destroyed because one individual signs onto the defense team of what will be a kangaroo court that is designed to legitimate victors’ justice. Even odder is the belief that if Clarke didn’t do this the media wouldn’t find other reasons to attack the anti-war movement. That before the war even started large numbers were involved in large anti-war activities is already a sign that the movement will not go away because of such a minor minor matter. Marc’s predictions of growing irrelevance of the antiwar movement remind me of Todd Gitlin’s predictions of mass chaos at the march against the war during the RNC. Gitlin of course is also prone to repeat the myth that Chicago 68 brought down the dems…why a sociologist would buy into that is a mystery to put it mildly.
January 2nd, 2005 at 8:54 am
I would suggest that the most interesting question in Cooper’s post is the one he does not ask:
Why has the ‘sane/moral/ethical/democratic elements anti-war Left’ failed to organize and counter International ANSWER while engaging the U.S. electorate…the electorate that is now supposedly ‘anti-war’ and ripe for engagement? Marc Cooper is not the only Lefty to have noted the lack of a credible, moderate anti-war coalition in the U.S. or Europe over the past 2+ years, nor has he been the only Lefty to call for the formation of such a coalition. So what gives?
One could almost feel comfortable suggesting that for all the gnashing of teeth and rending of hair of the anti-war Left that is not allied to International ANSWER, it appears they lack something…be it energy or attention span or courage of conviction…to put in the time and effort that ANSWER does. Or perhaps it is simply that opposition to the war in Iraq was and is just another battlefront in the real war waged by the Left and Democrats to recapture domestic political power.
Reading the more prominent of the Lefty/Democratic Blogs since the election (Marshall, Drum, DeLong, etc.), it seems pretty clear that the war in Iraq has fallen well behind partial privatization of Social Security as the issue of the hour. And in the scheme of things, if you can get more excited about Social Security reform than about opposition to the sustained violence of an extended military action, it should be unsurprising that ANSWER dominates the anti-war movement. They didn’t capture it, they simply filled a void created by other Leftists.
Given that, just who qualifies as ‘doddering’? It’s the Edward S. Hermanns of the world they have what they want…not the Marc Coopers.
January 2nd, 2005 at 10:13 am
Comments on a few posts…
Clark is of course an idiot in the common usage, not the technical meaning of the word. Besides, the technical meaning is un-PC.
I believe that anti-war movement during the Vietnam War was successful (unfortunately). While the war had majority support after 1968 (when the Tet Offensive lie was spread by the media), ultimately the US was forced to withdraw its troops for internal US political reasons, and later forced to abandon all support promised to South Vietnam (again for internal political reasons). The US won the war in the South at least twice (by 1972, the US ambassador drove himself without escort all over the country). It is difficult to separate the various forces leading to our abandonment of Vietnam, but a lot has to go to the anti-war movement.
Right now, the left has suffered a big loss. It isn’t surprising that internecine squabbling is happening. It is natural and appropriate. Personally, I’d like the left to stay divided and ineffective, of course. But in order to recover, the left has to understand its problems, and that isn’t done just by having civilized conversations over tea, but also by factions fighting it out. The right has been through the same thing. It’s just how movements work.
January 2nd, 2005 at 10:28 am
Marc, I think the correct spelling is institutional, not intstitutional.
January 2nd, 2005 at 10:52 am
I, for one, am extremely _happy_ that Ramsey Clarke has signed onto Saddam’s defense team. It means that Saddam’s conviction and imprisonment is now a far greater certainty.
In fact, if Ramsey Clarke wanted to make me positively _ecstatic_, he’d offer to defend Henry Kissinger.
January 2nd, 2005 at 11:37 am
“In fact, if Ramsey Clarke wanted to make me positively _ecstatic_, he’d offer to defend Henry Kissinger.”
Hey, now THERE’s an idea with genuine merit!
January 2nd, 2005 at 12:16 pm
“. While the war had majority support after 1968 (when the Tet Offensive lie was spread by the media),”
Maybe according to John Oneil’s fantasies, but in reality public approval ratings of the war and its handling dropped and disapproval doubled from 1965-1967 from 27-52%, according to Gallup Polls at the time. An excellent book by Peter B. Levy, “The New Left and Labor” goes a long way to dispel myths of the war era that, interestingly, Josh and John share across the ideological spectrum from Hank Jackson Democrats to John Oneil Republicans. Jerry Lembcke’s work on the myth of the spat on veterans also does the same equally well.
January 2nd, 2005 at 12:47 pm
“right now the left has suffered a big loss”
Coming from a proponent of the war in Iraq, that’s not just ironic, it’s damned laughable, in that your phony cliques’ big losses have been unraveling before our eyes for more than a year, are utterly damaging to the country. and – mark my words – will elicit far more payback in the body politic than the mere loss of a presidential election. No, we didn’t elect a liberal mediocrity as president, but the majority of Americans agree with our original assessment of the war (assuming by “left”, we’re talking about anti-war liberals of the Howard Dean stripe) and we won’t be the ones accounting to the American people over the coming decade for sacrificing their children under of an Iranian/Iraqi Shiite alliance having consolidated control of the Persian Gulf.
And of course that “you can’t support the troops if you oppose the war” rhetoric is mindless. Frankly, aside from lacking any logical foundation, other than to shut up critics of manifest failures by ostensible “hawks”, most notably of the Chickenhawk variety, it’s damned anti-American. As is much of what passes for “patriotism” on the hard right that Moore inhabits. It’s also contrary to my own experience, having participated personally in workplace efforts to send “care packages” to troops among a group of people who tend overwhelmingly to be anti-war. We got a helicopter fly-over and a personal “thank-you” visit from a vet (who wasn’t nearly as blindered about the problems in Iraq as some of the pro-war blowhards on this site) for our efforts. If anything, it made us more disgusted with the con-men who are getting these kids killed, while hiding in air-conditioned offices or using them for photo-ops.
Wouldn’t wanna be ya…
Also, Marc, your characterization of the WWP as “wacky” is far too charitable. Even if one wants to stay out of the rhetorical realm of their total moral and political bankruptcy, “insane” is closer to the mark than “wacky” in describing their mental condition. And your absolutely right on regarding your general point about the liberal left largely acting with blinders not just as regards ANSWER, but the Leslie Cagan crowd as well (although her cover is better).
Still, it was as reprehensible as it was predictable for a foul character like David Horowitz to headline deliberate, buffoonish lies like “100,000 Communists March Against the War”, because the mostly-behind-the-scenes sponsors of the big marches were stalinist morons or useful idiots. (I called him on that and he admitted it was bullshit. But he has no journalistic standards and will literally say any damn thing that appeals to his far-right funders, although he makes nice with “decent leftists” in private.)
I couldn’t bring myself to go to any of the anti-war demos because I knew who held the permits and planned the events, but I knew lots of moderate liberals concerned about the war who went because they simply wanted to express broad anti-war sentiment and were oblivious of the cultish organizers.
January 2nd, 2005 at 12:49 pm
I accidentally cut out most of “…sacrificing their children under false pretenses and with the presumably unintended consequence of a an Iranian/Iraqi Shiite alliance…” from that previous post.
January 2nd, 2005 at 1:01 pm
People quoting text at such length need their own blogs. If no one chooses to read them, there’s a lesson to be learned.
Marc’s blog is a wonderful thing, and I hope he’s not using it purely for purposes of provocation… ANSWER is a wretched enterprise.
January 2nd, 2005 at 2:05 pm
If you haven’t had enough debate/discussion about Clark representing Saddam, check out here: http://www.centristcoalition.com/blog/archives/001589.html.
January 2nd, 2005 at 2:24 pm
Todd – appears to be a bad link. Perhaps a glimmer of evidence after a bad week that God is indeed merciful…
January 2nd, 2005 at 2:31 pm
For anyone who actually cares about the people who’ve actually sacrificed in this war and the burden of supporting the troops while wrestling with the most fundamental questions arising from BushCo’s political concoctions, check out the NYTimes article on “Gold Star families” today. Bottom of paper front page, lead story in web National section – http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/index.html
January 2nd, 2005 at 2:38 pm
“Still, it was as reprehensible as it was predictable for a foul character like David Horowitz to headline deliberate, buffoonish lies like “100,000 Communists March Against the War”, because the mostly-behind-the-scenes sponsors of the big marches were stalinist morons or useful idiots.”
I wouldn’t debate your point, Reg. But I would note that the ‘moderate’ Left’s abdication of leadership on the issue is what gave Horowitz his opening. If you lie down with hogs you always run the risk of being labelled a pig…whether such a label is fair or not.
My question remains unanswered: If opposition to the war is as big a deal as the moderate Left proclaims, why aren’t they doing the work necessary to lead the response against it? Is International ANSWER an irresistible force or is there less than meets the eye (and ear) when it comes to the ‘moderate’ Left’s oppposition?
January 2nd, 2005 at 3:05 pm
Dennis, your question is a good one and one that deserves an answer (as opposed to an A.N.S.W.E.R.) I think that the opposition to the war for many was the fad of the moment if you will. There are no doubt many, many, many individuals who honestly think the war was a “bad thing” and who can give clear and cogent reasons why that is so. There are as many people that believe the war is a “good enterprise” and can give clear and cogent reasons why they believe that is so.
I am generally anti war, and didn’t like the Viet Nam enterprise the way it was fought, I didn’t like the Panamanian excursion or the bosnian excursion and each side of that conflict (war-hawks vs. doves) had it’s proponents.
But, there are also a fairly large number that supported war that was bolstered by Democrats and against war bolstered by Republicans. The same is true of the Republicans. If a Repub starts it, well OK, if a Dem started it… NO WAY!!!
WWII was largely supported by the populace and was a popular war, as was the Korean war. Viet Nam initially was fairly popular, but quickly became un-popular and most wars since then have been unpopular. This has become apparant along with the increasing pro-us, anti-them partisan attitudes.
The war in Iraq has proponents on both sides of the issue, but many are more concerned with other issues, sadly I think.
A.N.S.W.E.R. I suspect is less “anti-war” than they are anti-bush. I don’t believe (though I could be wrong,) that if Gore had been elected and gone after Iraq that A.N.S.W.E.R. would be as vociferous in it’s objections
Cridland, I know this was a longish response, but at least I do have my own blog too. Drop by sometime. http://gmscorner.blogspot.com You may not like anything you read, but you are quite free to comment pro or con.
January 2nd, 2005 at 3:38 pm
GMR – without going into too much supportive detail, I can assure you that the ANSWER crowd would actually relish the opportunity to oppose a “Democrat war.” Their siding with Uber-GOPer Tom Delay in opposing the Bosnian war is evidence of that. (DeLay: “I rise today to voice my complete opposition to sending American troops to Kosovo.”)
The ultra-left crowd see themselves as directly vying with liberals for influence among the traditional grass-roots Democratic bases – politicized African-Americans, union activists, “peace and justice” aficianados, etc. You won’t find crazy lefties trying to unseat the local Chamber of Commerce. They spend their time sowing chaos and discord in places like teachers unions, local peace groups, leftish movements on college campuses, etc. They actually detest politically conscious liberals more than they hate right-wingers because they blame liberal Democrat for “misleading the masses”, while the right-wing is acting precisely as it’s supposed to. It’s a fantasy world constructed by lunatics, but as the dogmatic fundamentalist-rapture crowd has evidenced on a much larger scale, loonie fantasies can impact reality.
January 2nd, 2005 at 4:24 pm
The “moderate Left” undoubtedly abdicated responsibility when it came to traditional street demonstrations, but they hardly abdicated an anti-war movement. There was that pesky Dean campaign, all of the MoveOn activity, the channeling of 99% of anti-war sentiment behind admittedly tepid nominees in a hard fought election, etc.
The reason that the far Left dominated street demonstrations is because that’s the only thing they are capable of organizing – it’s an old-school left-apparatchiks’ game. And they play it under cover with front groups that anyone not familiar with left-sectarian intrigue wouldn’t suspect of foul intentions. What appears to be a harder call among some on the broad left is blowing the whistle when crazies grab the parade permits and call for a march behind a slogan tailored for appeal to diversely leftish, generally well-intentioned people.
But to think that opposition to the war was represented primarily by the ANSWER demos – despite the several hundred thousands of mostly normal, non-”ultra” folk motivated to carry a sign in those public protests – is to vastly underestimate the depth of anti-war sentiment and the breadth of it’s expression over the past two years.
January 2nd, 2005 at 4:30 pm
GM wrote: “WWII was largely supported by the populace and was a popular war, as was the Korean war. ”
Actually it wasn’t popular as much as the post-War Cold War mobilization against the left, which both Repubs and Dems eagerly participated in, made the conditions for an anti-war movement pretty darned near impossible. By the 1960′s, the Civil Rights movement created the political openings for an antiwar movement to emerge from the left. The increasing opposition to the war from corporate America only created more space for dissent and for journalists to document what was actually happening in Nam. In the 1950′s about the only journalist who did that was Izzy Stone and he was unable to get into mainstream print [the great 'liberal' press..].
If you look back at the Korean War, there was one branch of the military that was quite hard to sign up for because of its record recruitment, namely the Air Force–least likely to see combat.
Reg wrote of ANSWER:
“They spend their time sowing chaos and discord in places like teachers unions, local peace groups, leftish movements on college campuses, etc”
That is certainly true of most (heavily government infiltrated btw) sect revolutionary groups. However it tends to not be true of ANSWER by virtue of its orientation toward coalitions that it pushes for with those very institutions. ANSWER has its share of sectarian associated baggage surely, but what your talking about there really has little to do with ANSWER strategy. It matters if one is not to fall into the fad of blaming ANSWER for every failure of the left and taking seriously addressing their real weaknesses and strengths. Dennis the peasant is spot on in asking why the ‘moderate’ left has completely failed in its capacity to creat any alternative to the ANSWER model if they have all the answers, pardon the pun. And you’ll never find a left ‘moderate’ who can answer that question in a straightforward manner.
January 2nd, 2005 at 4:46 pm
Steve – I didn’t specify ANSWER (which you’re right, is a “coalition” front group for certain forms of “mass appeal” actions) in the sentence you quote. I said “ultra-left” – a reasonable generic term for sectarian assholes.
January 2nd, 2005 at 4:48 pm
Reg,
I went to a few of those demos. It was a lot of fun. There was every kooky faction on display. A Che Guevarra T-shirt in 2003? Give me a break.
It also wasn’t many people.
By the way, I was against the Kosovo war. Not because it was a Democrat war, but because I felt it was an inappropriate effort. That put me at odds with the neocons I usually agree with. Time is showing that it hasn’t accomplished much other than tying down our forces and getting a few killed, to protect, from Muslim refugees, the Europeans who bad-mouth us. It should have been a European action, if it was to be anything at all, but Europe is so pathetic it didn’t have the military capacity to take on even Serbia!
I also opposed the way the Vietnam War was fought, up until Nixon and Abrams took over. With adults in charge, the communist invaders were reduced to toast (the “indigenous” forces – VC – were eliminated in ’68 due to a mistake by Giap).
The left may yet prove that the United States cannot take military action if it is going to take too long. This is what the terrorists and Baathists hope. Enjoy your allies, folks, because they are counting on you.
The anti-war crowd, combined with the very strong anti-war media bias, is working to convince Americans Iraq is Vietman., and will probably win given enough time. Then Iraq, whose people already suffered way too much under Saddam (your previous unintended ally), will turn into chaos far more bloody than it is today. Go for it, anti-war folks, but I don’t think you can trump your record of causing millions of deaths in southeast Asia by forcing our pullout.
Perhaps in another thread someone can give me a coherent explanation of what the left thinks we should do about Iraq, and about international terrorism.
Finally, please don’t construe these remarks as charging anti-Americanism or treason or anything like that. It is not my intent. I think the left is very wrong, but that isn’t a crime in this country.
January 2nd, 2005 at 4:57 pm
Moore – Saddam was YOUR, i.e. the Reaganites, INTENDED ally for years. Your crowd helped him commit war crimes. So quit blowing out of the wrong end in your desperation to hang shit on me…
I’m through with you.
January 2nd, 2005 at 5:52 pm
“It also wasn’t many people.”
yeah, only several million at a shot between the US and Europe.
“The anti-war crowd, combined with the very strong anti-war media bias, is working to convince Americans Iraq is Vietman., and will probably win given enough time.”
Are you kidding? They are desparate to figure out some way to make the current occupation into a ‘good’ and ‘successful’ occupation. Just go listen to an interview with Ken Pollack at CNN for one or Anne Garrels of NPR. You mistake corporate liberals with active opposition to the war, a big big mistake. To make that error requires forgetting completely the crucial role that the NYT, Washington Post, and CNN played in selling the war to the American public in the runup to the official invasion of the war.
January 2nd, 2005 at 7:18 pm
Yeah, reg, that’s why we gave the anti-tank missiles to the Iranians, right? It’s called realpolitik and results in some pretty disgusting things. Not all world problem solutions are in someone’s little red book, and not all situations can be solved by only accepting politically correct allies.
I seem to remember that the American left adored Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and denied Pol Pot’s holocaust (or tried to pin it on the US). They liked Mao, who holds the record for number of people butchered by one leader of a regime. Even though we all know of the horrible crimes committed by the Soviets both within and without the USSR, I haven’t heard any outcry for trials, but a tin-pot dictator of a small country, who killed far fewer (but too many), is a favorite target of the left. The left consistently lined up with the USSR’s positions during the cold war, ignored the various horrors of the regime, and blamed us for every proxy war. They were consistently blind to the failures of communism, ignored the way popular revolutions were routinely hijacked by the communists once victory was achieved, and then never said a thing about the secret police, the phony elections with 100% voting for the party, and the economic catastrophes.
After all, Stalin’s USSR, the favorite of the left for a long time, was our ally in World War II, and his killings made Saddam look like a piker. Oh, and let’s not forget that during the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the USSR and the Nazis, the left loved the Nazis.
You guys don’t have any moral high ground to stand on. Not after your performance in the 20th century. Give me a leftist who is willing to disagree with the crowd (like Marc is doing and Joan Baez did) and I’ll have a little respect.
But let’s take your assumption at face value, that we loved and adored Saddam. That we approved of his massacres. The we were just the most evil people on earth for that.
That makes not the slightest difference about YOUR stance. You are right now figuring out how to help butchers and terrorists, like usual. Two wrongs don’t make a right, just a trite.
January 2nd, 2005 at 7:48 pm
John, allow me an impertinent question here; is there a small possibility that you let your perceptions of the left circa the 60′s and before color your opinions of them today?
January 2nd, 2005 at 8:01 pm
jim
It is a pertinent question. My perceptions would be mostly mid 60s-80s. After that, I haven’t paid them much attention until recently. However, at the demos I’ve been to since then, not much changed except there was more variety.
I do note the lack of visible left wing activity demanding that the crimes of the leftist dictators be properly judged, and the guilty punished. Of course, if the MSM is just not running that, I wouldn’t see it.
Also, some of the information about the ties between some major left wing movements and the KGB was not available until into the ’90s when the KGB archives became partly accessible, and former KGB officers started writing books.
But has the left really changed that much? I have watched the growth of multiculturalism and postmodernism with disgust, but is that the left today?
January 2nd, 2005 at 8:22 pm
Well, I don’t think that defines the left of today; but, mind you, I’m speaking from my personal standpoint (with, no doubt, a large dose of naivete thrown in). Maybe it’s just that I basically just ignore what disgusts me, rather than let that disgust define me.
January 2nd, 2005 at 8:24 pm
“not all situations can be solved by only accepting politically correct allies.”
I’m really unclear on what situation that the Reaganites solved by assisting a madman in the Gulf to commit war crimes or giving missles to mullahs. I must be an idiot.
January 2nd, 2005 at 8:29 pm
Why can’t the left get it together and become a serious political contender in the U.S.? Let my take my own little stab at this question.
When the Left seizes on some galvanizing issue such as the war in Iraq, it always does so with an agenda that most Americans have a problem with, and that’s bringing capitalism to heel. Most leftists see capitalism as a system of domination that essentially controls everything, including the governments of capitalist countries. End those filthy capitalist wars, and you’ve cracked the edifice of capitalism! The structure will fall!
Well, one day, walking University Avenue in Berkeley in maybe 1971, I saw something that looked like an early epitaph for American involvement in Vietnam. It was a billboard with a short message, white text on a black background. It said, simply:
It must be ended now.
Underneath, in smaller lettering, you could read the name of the sponsoring organization:
Business Executives Against the Vietnam War
As a sixteen-year-old boy, I was heartened. “It won’t be long now,” I remember thinking. After all, I was only two years away from being draftable. It was a serious concern for me.
If I’d been a certain kind of Communist, I suppose I might have looked on that billboard with a certain grim satisfaction, as a sign of intimidation of the capitalist class by the plucky proletariat of North Vietnam and their Viet Cong cohort. “Hah!” I would have thought. “We’ve got the capitalist pigs on the run!”
But another way of reading it made more sense to me. The Vietnam War had become to mainstream America what some in the Johnson administration and even some in the Nixon camp (including a young Donald Rumsfeld, if you can believe that) had come to believe it was: a colossal waste of lives and resources in a effort that had become very dubious indeed.
Nixon got kicked out, Ford finished out Nixon’s term, and the country appeared to swing very slightly left for a short while – we got Jimmy Carter for president in that same decade. But economic stagnation gave birth not to some more nuanced critique of capitalism among mainstream Americans, but rather to Reagan Democrats.
Basically, Americans believe in capitalism.
Why? Well, so far, capitalism still seems to be delivering the goods. Marxists were once fond of speaking of Late Capitalism in their theoretical musings, but capitalism seems to be perpetually late for its own funeral. I think everyone has pretty much gone home now, leaving a tarp over the open casket so that the wood doesn’t suffer too much water damage when it rains.
Why can’t capitalism make it to its own damn funeral already? Some years ago, I pounded my feeble brain through one of the more unreadable tomes ever written: Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. I’ve read it twice since, somehow. Schumpeter didn’t have all the answers. (His laissez-faire attitude about economic policy for the Great Depression probably only lengthened that catastrophe.) But in that book, he took up with great seriousness the question of how long capitalism had to live. His verdict – as somewhat of a fan of the system – was: not too much longer. In postscripts to that tome, however, he backpedaled.
Schumpeter is, as we all know, the man who coined the neat two-word capsule summary of capitalism’s dynamism: it runs on “creative destruction.” Schumpeter identified innovation as the primary fuel of creative destruction – the process whereby new capitalists emerge and destroy existing capitalists. In this conclusion, I think he was correct. As Keynes showed, mere price competition can result in economic stagnation as bad as any you can find in socialism. But innovation gets you past that problem. For the time being, anyway.
How long will capitalism be around, delivering the goods? How long will it be delivering ever higher standards of living? How long will it deliver ever higher productivity? And how long will it thereby offer political legitimacy to the systems of government that support capitalism and that (to a degree seldom acknowledged by market fundamentalists) also manage capitalism?
All I can say to those questions is: get out your crystal ball. Who the hell knows? Innovation depends on invention, invention depends on discovering or figuring out what nobody has discovered or figured out before, and those things are fundamentally unpredictable. All we know is that it invention and innovation have gone on for a long time, and will probably continue tomorrow and perhaps even into next week. Or into the next century.
Even Fidel Castro probably knows this – he who puts a fairly hefty fraction of Cuba’s national budget toward a biotech research program that’s considered quite respectable by world standards. Why does he do that? Probably because he’s got his legacy in mind. Cuba can only derive so much in export earnings from sugar and cigars. But *patent* royalties – whoa. And patent royalties in markets with highly inelastic demand? Sellers’ markets – like life-saving medical treatments? Yow. Now you’re talking serious money.
Scratch an old Communist – whether it was Karl Marx himself in his later years, or Fidel Castro now – and you’ll often find a competent stock portfolio manager. Idealism dies hard, but the smarter ones just suck it up and adapt.
January 2nd, 2005 at 8:58 pm
Part of the problem with this entire thread is that it accepts as a given that there exists two fixed camps in the real or imagined anti war movement. One one side we have the stalinist aoplogist, pro saddam, north korea cheeleader faction identified with Ramsey Clark and ANSWER; and on the other we have something called the “moderate left”, who are not really defined, they’re been taken to task for not being out organised, haven’t really been defined but are considered the good guys in this equation. The logic goes that if group A was outorganised by group b, the we could have a more broad based and thus effective anti war movement. The problem I have with this logic, as someone who has participated in local grassroots anti war work (in my case not ANSWER) is that this characature is woefully simplistic and misses some of the liveliest and key debates around what the anti war movement should stand for in the first place. Before i get casticated with ritual denunciations of Ramsey Clark and his ilk, let me first say i abbhor sectarian, idiotic organising and something like group A types sort of exist. But, let me get to my point here.
In the organising I’ve been involved with people who could be identified in the non defined “good guy” moderate left camp took political positions which I viewed as abhorant and antithetical to building the kind of peace and justice movement that I would like to be a part of. For example when the issue of having progressive muslim organisations speak at the podium adressing how patriot act style racial profiling and racism were part of the war at home, and effecting their communities many in the “moderate left” category bulked arguing that this issue was unrelated to war, and speakers of Arab descent would limit the appeal of the movement. Ifound this to be politically indefencible. The issue of the US policy of wholescale support of Israel’s occupation was also deemed off limits for many of the above mentioned crowd. THere were many disagreements on all kinds of issues, and no matter what position people took, the discourse could hardly be classified as Stalinists/bad versus liberals/good.
January 2nd, 2005 at 8:58 pm
“But economic stagnation gave birth not to some more nuanced critique of capitalism among mainstream Americans, but rather to Reagan Democrats.”
Not necessarily, Reagan Democrats were never as big a part of the population as imagined, nor were they as static as perceived. More critically you had an angry reaction not to the stagnation as much as Carter’s broken promises to labor to pursue labor’s agenda after it worked hard to get one of the most liberal platforms elected into the whitehouse. More important than the Reagan Dems was the disgust with the concessions the Dems made to capital under Carter, budget cuts in social spending on poverty, cuts in services, increased unemployment as an economic policy [part of Mr. Volker's taking over the Fed], increases in unnecessary military spending, beginning of rollbacks of labor rights in organizing the workplace…It’s generally overlooked by the ‘liberal’ media, but in fact large numbers of unionised workers were not voting for Reagan as much as voting against Carter’s betrayal of his labor policies. Since then the level of excitement about the Dems has never been that great and the Repubs have thus been able to largely control the agenda of the state machinery.
January 2nd, 2005 at 9:08 pm
After trying to read these comments — which I wish were shorter and more to the point– I most closely associate myself with the remarks of reg. He is of course right on target that the ONLY thing ANSWER and the “movement” types can do is organize street demos… never once asking themselves the hard question of WHAT does any of it mean strategically. No such questions are necessary because too often the demos are acts of personal therapy and catharsis rather than political acts.
The moderate or liberal left of course failed to provide adequate leadership of the anti-war movement. That’s rather obvious I thought. There is a key swath of activists — however– an important niche of people on the liberal/prog end of things who ought to have known better to let ANSWER have any role whatsoever in organizing demos. Problem is, hardly anyone on the activist left wants to bear the charge of being anti-communist. Back in the 60′s, coming out of the frigid fifties, when red-baiting peaked, it was a wholly legitimate position to be anti-anti-communist. Today that position makes no sense. Either we are FOR democracy and open societies or we are not. If it is indeed the former, then we should not hesitate one moment to exclude from our ranks or to ostracize apologists for totalitarianism. I am, of course, whistling in the wind. Especially under current circumstances where there is a prevailing “all against Bush” atmopshere. Oh well.
January 2nd, 2005 at 9:12 pm
Michael Turner – I think that leftists who want to see capitalism overthrown are crackpots. Perhaps one day in the long run of history, the dominant economic system will be something no longer called capitalism. But, as Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead – so who knows and who cares. The only rational attitude toward capitalism from the left, IMHO, is that taken long ago by the Swedish Social Democrats. I.E. harness the capitalist economic engine to provide the economic growth necessary to create the conditions for a modicum of “socialist” values to prevail (No Citizen Left Behind). I’m not suggesting that there is a blueprint available for America and I don’t care to argue the complexities of Swedish social democracy at length here (unless whoever I’m discussing it with at the very least knows who Rudolf Meidner is). I also fully understand the problems that rampant globalization has created for the Northern Europeans (along with every other branch of advanced capitalism), but I would suggest that there is a long, still vital left tradition that hasn’t succumbed to infantile revolutionary fantasies about “ending capitalism” since the 1930s. Keynesianism and the liberal pragmatism I would associate intellectually with John Dewey are also notable “left” alternatives to “smashing capitalism” (in one’s dreams) or succumbing to “One Market Under God” faith-based economics.
And for the record, any “free-market” right-winger who would argue that the quality of life is somehow worse in Northern Europe – or moderately social-democratic Canada, for that matter – is arguing from a position of pure ideology as half-baked, reactionary and ill-informed as the crackpot leftists who want to see capitalism smashed rather than reformed.
January 2nd, 2005 at 9:48 pm
Marc – re: “Back in the 60′s, coming out of the frigid fifties, when red-baiting peaked, it was a wholly legitimate position to be anti-anti-communist.”
It sure seemed that way, but as a former brash, young asshole who voted to lift the “non-communist” clause for SDS members way back when, I have to say that we were terribly wrong. It opened the door to every kind of creep imaginable. A bunch of well-meaning, naive kids playing it by ear are no match for disciplined communist cadre (or even undisciplined psuedo-communist thugs), and the turn from “The Port Huron Statement” to Stalinist PLP and Lin Piaoist Weathermen was launched.
I think we were right to not bar commie PARTICIPANTS in the first big April ’65 anti-war march, but letting the marxist-leninist sharks into the membership of an organization that originated by trying to revitalize the stagnant social-democratic tradition, and was shaped ideologicially in the crucible of the civil rights movement, clearly hastened it’s premature demise. Disgust with the paranoia of Old Left Shactmanites who controlled the old Socialist Party-front that sponsored early SDS instigated the shift toward anti-anti-communism, but it was mostly a stupid move by youthful, politically inexperienced idealists who should have known better.
January 2nd, 2005 at 10:04 pm
Marc Cooper: “hardly anyone on the activist left wants to bear the charge of being anti-communist.”
That’s an amazing thing to say. Imagine if the activist right could not bear the charge of being anti-fascist. What would that say about the right?
I know full well this doesn’t mean the left is communist. It is, at least in part, the fear of being labelled a McCarthyist. People need to get over it. Far better to be falsely labelled a McCarthyist than to be correctly labelled as one who cannot bear the charge of being anti-communist.
January 2nd, 2005 at 10:13 pm
John Moore: “not all situations can be solved by only accepting politically correct allies.”
reg: “I’m really unclear on what situation that the Reaganites solved by assisting a madman in the Gulf to commit war crimes or giving missles to mullahs. I must be an idiot.”
Don’t say “idiot”, you moron! It’s not PC!
Military assistance to Saddam (and – through the Iran-Contra channels – to Iran as well) did in fact “solve” certain problems.
Both regimes promoted an anti-Israel agenda. Keeping them at each other’s throats served a certain foreign policy purpose.
It also served a stabilizing purpose for both Iraq and Iran. Iran could mount offensives against Iraq with names like “Operation March to Jerusalem”, without having to face the strategic consequences – undoubtedly dire, given Israel’s nuclear deterrent – of actually trying to march to Jerusalem. Likewise for Iraq – actually *defeating* Israel would be very likely be internally destabilizing in the short run, for any Arab country that attempts it, and also destabilizing in the long run, in the unlikely event of success, because it deprives Arab regimes of a useful propaganda scapegoat.
As well, both regimes had to sell more oil to pay for their wars, which helped keep world prices down.
Also, Iraq was borrowing heavily from Kuwait (and I think Saudi Arabia and other gulf oil states) to pay for the war, which those states were quite happy to do, considering that they considered Iran far more of a threat than Iraq. That also helped “stabilize” both the geopolitical and the oil-supply situation – if you can call a million
Iraqi teenage boys dying in the mud “stability”.
Of course, it couldn’t go on, and it didn’t. And Kuwait’s refusal to cancel Iraq’s war debt afterward was painted – not unreasonably, in some view – by Saddam’s regime as a case of Iraqis dying horribly to defend the oil wealth of spoiled Kuwaiti princelings. Kuwait thumbing its nose right back at Saddam put Saddam in a put-up-or-climb-down predicament. A climbdown might have meant a coup. Internal stability demanded war. And so war led to war. And to a new stability. People say that Saddam only lost out in his invasion of Kuwait, but they don’t consider the consequences to him personally – and perhaps for the region – of Saddam backing down.
No, I guess, that military aid back in the 80s didn’t “solve” any problems, not in the long run. That whole sorry chapter was just a case of Rummy et al. making the best of a bad situation. In some weird – and amoral – sense of the word “best”.
January 2nd, 2005 at 10:19 pm
Michael Turner – that was a satire, right ?
January 2nd, 2005 at 10:44 pm
Satire if you reside on the far left, fairly good description if you reside on the far right. Michael Turner may not have meant it either way however.
I thought it was an interesting perspective from right of center.
January 2nd, 2005 at 10:56 pm
So it’s “far left” to reject rampant immorality sold as “strategy” by incompetents that yielded political outcomes disastrous to all concerned and actually escalated regional instability…oh, and at the expense of millions of lives ? I thought that at the very least the “real” in “realpolitik” was supposed to denote some relationship to effectiveness, cost/benefit, etc.
If anyone wants to argue seriously in defense of aiding Saddam and/or the mullahs militarily, they should be doing it from the vantage point of a padded cell or a place in Hell.
January 2nd, 2005 at 11:09 pm
“Either we are FOR democracy and open societies or we are not. If it is indeed the former, then we should not hesitate one moment to exclude from our ranks or to ostracize apologists for totalitarianism.”
This sounds fair enough, but I’m honestly left to wonder whose totalitarianism are we speaking of, and who should or should not be obstracized from “our ranks”. Discussions centering on human rights abuses and totalitarianism always have a built in bias, which often, properly, castigates official enemies of the United States while excusing, justifying or ignoring the actions of our alies, and friends. I’ve sat around tables with people who adanmantly defend every act of Israeli expansionism and occupation under the rubric of a just campaign against terror. Some of these people also oppose the war on Iraq. Should those who offer wretched defences of policies which imprison over 3.5 million people in open air prisons and caged banstutans, also be excluded from our “ranks”? Should conservatives who offered moral and intellectual justifications for the horrid proxy wars waged throughout Africa and Latim America through the Reagan years, but opposse this current war be purged due to their awful alliaces with murderers and thugs of all sorts in the 1980′s? I don’t have easy answers, but what I’m trying to problematise your simple and easy formulation which rails at a cetain type identifiable totalitarian apologetics, but is silent on others
January 2nd, 2005 at 11:22 pm
Sounds like you guys have your work cut out for you.
As a conservative, I find reg’s comments on using capitalism to fuel welfare statism (or whatever) to be closest to my position. It is clear to me that there is no such thing as unbridled capitalism, because politics trumps capitalism, and the people will demand bridles.
Furthermore, the people want benefits. I just got back from a hospital ER where my daughter was billed $5000 for one rabies shot – she has no insurance – my shot was cheaper. I have long said that conservatives don’t understand the medical payments system (see an early posting on my blog), and that the populace will demand reform. Hence politics can be seen as both an extension of and check on free markets. And that’s good, if the government interventions are rational, take into account the nature of politics, bureaucracies and real human beings, and are only done when necessary for an important social goal.
Shocking, eh? There are really three issues: (1) people are naturally microcapitalists, and corporations allow macrocapitalism to handle larger needs. (2) corporations on average are amoral (not immoral or moral) and need checks against abuse. (3) Some services cannot be delivered effectively by a market that has a low level of regulation – in the US an example is medical payments (anyone can get care – it is the payments that are screwed up). I work in the industry and understand the market failure (caused originally by government wage and price controls, btw).
Conservatives are just vastly more suspicious of the ability of government to do a good job for people, and would rather turn to it only when needed. At the same time, of course, we view government as necessary to protect us – police and military – and view protection in a broader light than I have seen from the left.
January 2nd, 2005 at 11:28 pm
Regarding proxy wars, and especially Iran/Iraq.
Iran was a sworn enemy of the US and had committed acts of war against us in the late ’70s. It was a supporter of terrorism. Iraq was a dictatorship that went to war against them. Iraq was losing the war, threatening an extension of Iranian power and an Iranian dominance of much of the world’s energy supply. It was also committing acts of war against the US and other countries in its mining of the Persian Gulf.
So we gave Saddam some help against our enemy. Very much like our alliance with Stalin’s USSR during world war II, but on a much smaller scale. Then we gave Iran some defensive weapons (anti-tank missiles) so Iraq couldn’t get too far out of hand (and to help fund the contras).
There is nothing sinister in any of this (other than the bizarre dancing required due to the several Boland amendments, and a few lies told by people in the administration who should have known better). As usual, the left, in this case the Democratic party, was trying to prevent Reagan from driving the unelected communists out of El Salvador and Nicaragua – classic proxy wars where the USSR took advantage of indigenous movements to put some pieces in place in its plan to destabilize Mexico.
And that’s that. Yes, we played with people’s lives, and many died. That is what happens when great powers collide, and violence is in the equation. Without the cold war, Latin American interventions would have been a different kind of issue.
Now go to today in Iraq. No cold war. Who here wants to admit that they think we should have left Saddam in power?
January 2nd, 2005 at 11:31 pm
Sorry. Correction on the above. Iran, not Iraq, was committing acts of war against other countries.
January 2nd, 2005 at 11:36 pm
No, it wasn’t satire. Well, OK, the part where I called you a moron, yeah, that was satire. Directed at John, of course.
There actually was a major Iranian offensive against Iraq called Operation Push to Jerusalem. You can’t make this shit up.
As for Gulf War I having a *relatively* stabilizing effect on Saddam’s rule, well, that’s admittedly speculative, but … how else to explain April Glaspie telling Saddam that of the two choices he was clearly considering when they met, going into Iran again was out of the question, but that, for any move into Kuwait … well, the U.S. had “no position” on “Arab-Arab” border disputes?
There was certainly the basis for a position, diplomatically. The oil reservoirs straddling the border that Kuwait was drilling into (yet another stimulus to Iraqi saber-rattling) could have been shared by negotiating within standardized international frameworks for these issues, with U.S. support for fair adjudication. Likewise, the U.S. could have pressed for debt relief for Iraq, by putting pressure on Kuwait, which swims in oil by comparison to Iraq on a per capita basis. And finally, Glaspie could have carried the message: “Invade NEITHER Iran NOR Kuwait. Or face the consequences.” But she didn’t say that, did she?
Glaspie had lived in Iraq for years, knew the political map of the country like the back of her hand, and suspected, I’m sure, that Saddam was near the end of his rope in holding onto power. When, in that same meeting, Saddam told her “Iraq will not accept death,” it’s pretty likely he meant that a coup against him was the worst of a number of possibilities, and that he needed at least tacit help from his reliable ally-of-convenience, the U.S., in holding onto power. Which at that point, as far as he was concerned, probably required invading somebody. Call him a madman if you like, but maybe he was right about that. And Iraq policy analysts in the State Department might have agreed, if only from “devil-you-know” reasoning.
We didn’t go to Baghdad that time. For all the talk about it in the late stages of that short war, it was always a non-starter. Bush Sr. wasn’t up for occupying a “bitterly hostile land.” It would have been “mission creep”, they said. But in chasing Iraqi troops in retreat, and pummeling them from the air in the infamous Turkey Shoot, we may have seen a case where the U.S. decided to make post-war life a little easier for Saddam. A retreating army of embittered conscripts – many of them Shi’ites, who are the majority in Iraq, after all – can be a revolutionary army. Or a separatist army. Mercilessly killing them deprives a potential Saddam opposition of armed force. So does raking them into POW camps, then sending them off to Saudi Arabian POW camps (a whole major human rights violation in itself, it turned out.) Either way, potential opposition pawns were knocked flying from Saddam’s chessboard. I’m sure he was grateful.
War tinges even the best of us with madness. But madness has its methods, too. Staring into this kind of moral abyss, it stares right back out at you. Maybe peering over the edge of it has driven me around the bend as well. I’m just trying to make sense of it all. Unfortunately, the explanations that make the most sense to me also make me feel like a tiny figure gesticulating wildly behind the pupils of Henry Kissinger’s eyes, yelling, “Lemme outa here!”
January 2nd, 2005 at 11:41 pm
1. “I thought that at the very least the “real” in ‘realpolitik’ was supposed to denote some relationship to effectiveness, cost/benefit, etc.”
What Reg said about the whole sorry mess—then and now.
2. About those Peace demonstrations organized by ANSWER: I went to the big one in Los Angeles in mid February of 2003. Personally, I found it annoying that A.N.S.W.E.R. had the permits. But, trust me, the average person who came knew nothing of A.N.S.W.E.R or any other organizing group. (By the way, if for no other reason, A.N.S.W.E.R. should be instantly dismissed as a serious organization for their childish unwillingness to dispense with the &%$#*^& periods in their name, which make the thing unbelievably aggravating to type.)
The majority of the folks who turned up that day, and at all the other big demonstrations, simply came to say, NO. We don’t want the US to invade Iraq. We feel it’s terribly wrong. And we are participating in this event to swell the numbers of demonstrations taking place in major cities all over the world in order to make that point. That was it. Period.
Few really gave a damn about the speakers. Only a tiny fraction of those who came could hear the friggin’ speakers anyway. The event was much, MUCH too big for that.
3. I honestly don’t get what the whole fuss about A.N.S.W.E.R and their ilk is about anyway. These people don’t matter. Hey, maybe this just proves how middle-class, and politically unhip I am, but I think even the notion of THAT “left†is hopelessly passé….except as an intellectual exercise. Marxists. Stalinists. Oh, my, how charmingly quaint.
MoveOn is worth discussing—like ‘em or hate ‘em. ANSWER isn’t. (By the same token,“60 Minutes†just devoted 2 segments to Google tonight, whose CEOs are trying to position themselves as enlightened capitalists. Whether they’re successful or not, remains to be seen. But THEY’RE also at least worth watching, discussing, studying, as opposed to the likes of the doddering and/or dottering Edward Herman et al.)
4. To echo Reg again: John, your whole thing about “You can’t be against the war, and support the troops,†really has to go. I mean it.
I respect the experience you had personally during the Vietnam years, but you can’t use your individual feelings—however deep, and valid—to dismiss the actions and feelings of a good half of your fellow Americans. In my little town of Topanga, CA, our primary group of politically active women—all of whom were and continue to be very much against the invasion of Iraq—repeatedly sent care packages to service men and women, and will continue to do so. Many of us have draft age sons. I have a draft age son who is the light of my life. When I—we—look at the faces of the service people on the news, we see other mothers’ children. When we look at the faces of those kids killed—and the majority are kids—we find their deaths unbearable. UNBEARABLE. And all the more unbearable because we believe they’ve been sent into harm’s way for catastrophically wrong and mendacious reasons. To suggest that we mothers—and the rest of the 56 percent of Americans who now feel with that the war in Iraq was a mistake—can’t demonstrate, or sign petitions, or e-mail our representatives, or organize, or write Op Eds, or just scream in grief and fury—whatever it takes— to bring those kids home, while also supporting and honoring the courage with which they serve is….
….well, please don’t do it anymore. You’re better than that.
January 2nd, 2005 at 11:43 pm
Like I said, from a padded cell or a place in Hell…
January 2nd, 2005 at 11:58 pm
From John Moore
As usual, the left, in this case the Democratic party, was trying to prevent Reagan from driving the unelected communists out of El Salvador and Nicaragua
John, i usually don’t all the ranting eminating from your quaters seriously enough to actually engage you, but this is simply enough. I’d be intersted to know what unelected communists the Reagan clique were trying to drive out of Nicaruagua. Last I checked, the US was in fact creating and funding a coalition of unelected thugs and mercernaries, with the intent to reek mayhem and mischief in order to drive an ELECTED goverment from office. Correct me if I’m wrong here or perhaps you’ve come across some new historical archieves I’m unaware of.
Your usual nonsense minus such deliberate falsification of history and flagrant dishonesty is bad enough, this is below contempt
January 3rd, 2005 at 12:32 am
“Vince…. first of all the correct spelling is weasel. So let’s get that straight…Calling Clarke a wingbat I think is polite.”
As long as I still hold my membership card in the Spelling Brownshirt Weasels of Death Strike Force (not to mention my special advisory role for the National Organization of Invective Analysis), I must lay my truncheon once again across Marc’s shoulders – and across MY OWN, it turns out. (Ouch!)
It’s Clark, not Clarke. Unless, of course, the IAC can’t even spell their founder’s name correctly on the home page and elsewhere on their site. If so, their error is seconded by the Columbia Encyclopedia
http://www.bartleby.com/65/cl/Clark-Ra.html
By the way, I’ve noticed a sudden upsurge in spelling errors and typos in this comment section. Expect a knock on your door in the middle of the night, sometime soon. But don’t expect much help from your neighbors when my troops and I start to drag you away.
Sure, there have been a few half-hearted attempts to interfere in the past, but I just show these would-be saviors what you’ve written and ask them (rhetorically, of course!) “Don’t you know that just living next door to people like this can indirectly knock several points off your kids’ SAT scores?”
They always fold immediately.
January 3rd, 2005 at 12:40 am
Reg wrote, ” I think that leftists who want to see capitalism overthrown are crackpots.”
Maurice Zeitlin
Doug Henwood
Jerry Lembcke
Adolph Reed
The above three are 4 people Marc says he’s good friends with, two whom I also know, and am fairly certain are not ‘crackpots’.
William Fletcher
Robert Brenner
Ellen Wood
John Bellamy Foster
Michael Perleman
Robert Meiskins
Just a few who are respected by many mainstream academics that are not Marxists. I don’t see why the analysis that such people provide would be ‘crackpotish’, indeed they’ve put out excellent work, been involved to one degree or another in activism at the local level…
January 3rd, 2005 at 12:46 am
Ahmed,
Come on. The Sandanistas didn’t assume power in an election. They took power when they violently overthrew the Somoza regime in 1979. Daniel Ortega won a plebiscite in 1984, but the Contras were founded in 1980, and were funded by Reagan in 1981.
It takes a lot of nerve to denounce John Moore as “beneath contempt” because he referenced these widely-known factoids.
January 3rd, 2005 at 12:46 am
Michael…
Actually what you’re laying out—particularly the whole April Glaspie incident, and the continuing (hypocritical) reversals of course that followed—is I suspect pretty accurate. Also you bring up a fascinating point about the opposition to Saddam being weakened by Gulf war I, thereby stabilizing the regime in some ways (while causing hideous hardship for the Iraqis at the same time, and then creating the whole reparations swamp, and on and on…) Irony upon irony.
Oh, and before I forget, an important Rule of Thumb: if anything waves to you from behind Henry Kissinger’s eyes—anything at all—look away immediately. (The turning to stone thang isn’t all that much fun and is, I understand, very tough to reverse.)
January 3rd, 2005 at 12:47 am
I still shake my head when I think of the argument given by those supporting the Contras…the whole bit on stopping communism efore it reached our borders. An hallucinatory take on reality if ever I heard one.
And Rosedog, I think this is a case where it might be hip to be unhip. Might we term those who still dwell on Marx and Stalin as still relevant topics of discussion passeivists?
January 3rd, 2005 at 12:48 am
That was to Michael Turner, not Totten. But y’all knew that, right?
January 3rd, 2005 at 12:51 am
“passivists.” I’m for it. Let’s considered it coined.
(Must sleep. Too many interesting commenters. Must turn off computer. I can do it. I can… ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.)
January 3rd, 2005 at 2:13 am
reg: “If anyone wants to argue seriously in defense of aiding Saddam and/or the mullahs militarily, they should be doing it from the vantage point of a padded cell or a place in Hell.”
I can personally attest, from peer-reviewed hallucinatory episodes, that floating in the aqueous humor of Henry Kissinger’s eyeball is a padded cell, AND a place in Hell. So I guess I picked the right rhetorical stance after all. (I mean “right” in the sense of … oh, never mind.)
By the way, it’s time for an update of the house-to-house search-and-detain schedule for the Spelling Brownshirt Weasels of Death Strike Force:
(1) Despite many truly startling solecisms on Ahmed’s part, the SBWDSF has recommended clemency for Ahmed on the strength of the unintentional humor of the phrase “reek mayhem.” Some of us had to go home and change our shorts.
(2) Michael Totten’s case came under urgent Weasel Red Alert review just now. We’re moving him to Schedule A (“Door to be busted down tonight”). Reasons for verdict: Totten is (a) certainly a native speaker of English, a graduate of the American school system, and widely rumored to be a published political commentator, and (b) he is, by his own report, well-traveled in Latin America. This, in our judgment, leaves him no excuse whatsoever for writing “Sandanista”. For that one, we’re taking express delivery of some surplus South African police truncheons. Furthermore, we intend to — oh sorry, gotta go, the pizza has arrived.
January 3rd, 2005 at 3:20 am
I’m in despair over political categories. Again.
reg extolls Swedish social democracy as a non-Marxist leftism. I can also extoll it, but I don’t consider it leftist. Do I need new glasses?
John Moore outlines a middle-of-the-road conservative (he says) position about markets and their place in democracy. It’s one that won’t provoke much argument from me – but partly because the spectrum of social solutions implied by the general attitudes he describes seems to extend even unto the Swedish welfare state. Did I miss something?
reg brought up Randite blatherings in a diatribe against the Libertarian Right (tsunami thread), and claimed – was that him? – that Alan Greenspan was an intellectual heir to this tradition. Well, maybe on some planet at the other end of the galaxy. Yes, Greenspan was once in her inner circle. He also once wrote (in an essay collection, “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal”, I think) about the virtues of the gold standard.
Yes, but … our Rand-boy Al (who was drummed out Rand’s circle long ago in one of many Objectivist purges) now squats squarely on the thrown of Objectivist monetary heresy: fiat money. At the Fed, he actually creates billions of dollars with the stroke of a pen! Out of thin air! Why, this is altruist collectivist mumbo-jumbo jungle savagery coercive Attila/witchdoctor economics. And, I must add, as Ayn herself would certainly do, if she were still alive, “(!)”.
Someone else – oh, it’s all a blur now – countered that there was a Leftist Libertarianism as well. True enough, if you count anarchism. Kropotkin, Malatesta – I used to read these people. It was fascinating stuff, but I don’t see much political representation for it these days, unless you parse deeply the discourse of certain factions of the Green movement.
I’ve given up. I’ve started my own movement. It has a very simple, very focused agenda. It’s called Spelling Brownshirt Weasels of Death Strike Force. It’s open to all. (Well, you have to take a test, actually. Closed book. 98% correct gets you in. Some training with non-lethal weapons is required after that, but nothing too strenuous.)
I’m not going to toot my own horn very much about this. Mainly, I just want to say: Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it. And this, as well: It’s coming soon to a beerhall near you!
Life seems so much simpler now.
January 3rd, 2005 at 4:36 am
Rosedog, please look up the Cambodian Killing Fields.
As of 1968 and after, the commie victories in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos are all pretty clearly due to Nixon leaving SE Asia, and the Democratic Congress not voting money to support S. Vietnam.
The commies pulled the triggers, but the US defenders had left — and no peeps out of the UN about genocide, either.
we find their deaths unbearable. UNBEARABLE.
“Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes…”
I find the Killing Fields hard to bear, and the US failure to fight evil hard to bear.
But some rich capitalists getting richer by adding offshore jobs in China, or India, or Vietnam — that’s pretty easy to bear. Better than “fighting poverty while opposing the creation of wealth”, which so many anti-capitalists seem to want to do.
Help S. Asia — create jobs there. End textile quotas, end agro-subsidies; lower taxes (and gov’t power).
January 3rd, 2005 at 5:23 am
“There is a key swath of activists — however– an important niche of people on the liberal/prog end of things who ought to have known better to let ANSWER have any role whatsoever in organizing demos. Problem is, hardly anyone on the activist left wants to bear the charge of being anti-communist.”
I see.
So what we have here are a group of dedicated social activists, supposedly motivated by the highest ethical and moral principles to oppose the War in Iraq, who would rather consort with and lend credence to a cadre of unrepentent Stalinists than face the disapproval and/or scorn (coming from who, other than these same Stalinists?) of being labelled an “anti-communist”.
That really does put the moderate Left’s commitment in perspective, doesn’t it? Is it any wonder these folks have failed to meet a single challenge put before them during these last four years? Just who rallies to a banner that reads “End War and Imperialism, but don’t make me move from the sofa at Starbucks!”?
……
“Back in the 60′s, coming out of the frigid fifties, when red-baiting peaked, it was a wholly legitimate position to be anti-anti-communist. Today that position makes no sense. Either we are FOR democracy and open societies or we are not.”
Legitimate? Hardly. It didn’t make sense then, either. And it was all about whether to have free and open societies in those days, too. Sometimes it seems to be very convenient to forget that.
January 3rd, 2005 at 6:43 am
Tom Grey writes: “Rosedog, please look up the Cambodian Killing Fields.”
Yes, rosedog. Please. Y’see, there was the country called Cambodia, and it had these fields, and there was killing and killing and killing. In those fields. By communists. (I think also once heard something about how more bombs were dropped by the U.S. on Cambodia than in all of WW II, with attendant famine, but I can’t understand how these vicious rumors get started!)
Anyway, hardly anybody has heard about this. Please look up Cambodian Killing Fields. It’s incomprehensible. And unbearable.
Of course, you could also spend hours doing a websearch to try to find a citation for any publication by a scientific demographer who, in the face of two U.N. census studies in the late 90s, continues to support the typical figures for Cambodian ‘autogenocide’ still bandied about. You could go over to the Yale Genocide Project and find Ben Kiernan’s ‘demography’ paper where he splits hairs infinitesimally about Cambodia’s population in the year the Khmer Rouge took power. However, somehow, despite the paper being published in 2003, after those U.N. census studies, he fails to cite those studies. Nor, for that matter, anybody’s current population count for Cambodia. I think Ben knows how to add and subtract numbers on a calculator, but he probably can’t take a population growth rate, an initial population estimate and a final population estimate, and watch his attempt at an exponential curve-fit fail miserably.
Anyway, just look up Cambodian Killing Fields. You’ll learn all you really need to know. And if anybody brings it up in conversation, just say, “Gee, I don’t know, but I guess a lot of people died, didn’t they?”
January 3rd, 2005 at 7:52 am
“Rosedog, please look up the Cambodian Killing Fields.
As of 1968 and after, the commie victories in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos are all pretty clearly due to Nixon leaving SE Asia…”
Dear Tom. Bull Pucky. Please read up a bit on the ACTUAL history regarding this subject and get back to me. You might want to start with William Shawcross’s, “Sideshow.†I’d be happy to provide an additional reading list after that.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/081541224X/qid=1104766443/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-2040422-7820122?v=glance&s=books
In 1979, as a reporter I rode on the second American plane to fly into Phnom Penh since its fall to the Khmer Rouge 1975—with the one agency willing to bring in relief supplies when Pol Pot was finally routed, and the mass starvation set in. After that, I spent time in the refugee camps at the Thai-Cambodian border interviewing victims of those Killing Fields you mentioned; saw children too far gone to save; met the soul-dead teenagers who made up the Khmer Rouge foot soldiers in those last months.
Don’t even thinking of lecturing me on this subject. It’s a non-starter.
January 3rd, 2005 at 8:19 am
Since the Swedish social democrats are the only group I’m aware of who actually came up with a non-utopian, non-statist scheme for socializing capital (albeit without “ending capitalism”, and tho the economic strains that began in the late ’70s put the the trade union-originated plan on the shelf), effect a far greater level of wage solidarity than ever existed in the Soviet Union, don’t consider equalizing poverty a sufficient reward for the Workers of the World and believe strongly in basic human rights like freedom to criticize the state, I consider them a lot farther left than Fidel Castro or the remnants of Chinese Communism.
Regarding Cambodia, this would be a subject of great embarrassment to conservatives if they argued from fact. Yeah, anyone can mine Chomsky and some other denizens of the far left for attempts to disprove or minimize the killing fields. But it was Jeanne Kirkpatrick who supported the Pol Pot faction at the UN lo those many years and condemned the Vietnamese for putting an end to the genocide. Somehow the Reagan regime strikes me as a more significant, decisive actor in world affairs than the Chomsky faction. But then, maybe I’m just be a moron.
(I’ll take a pass on plumbing the economic philosophies of either Alan Greenspan or John Moore.)
January 3rd, 2005 at 8:21 am
“maybe I’m just be a moron”v ?
No doubt…
January 3rd, 2005 at 8:56 am
“Since the Swedish social democrats are the only group I’m aware of who actually came up with a non-utopian, non-statist scheme for socializing capital”
Arguably it was statist, without state involvement in the economy it could never have been pulled off to the extent that it was. However, it’s also lack of state involvement that also led to its eventual failure to sustain itself in the face of pressure from Swedish CEOs. Today’s Sweden is not nearly as equal as twenty or thirty years ago.
On Cambodia, Turner is spot on. And the differences between what Americans know about Cambodia [aside from general unawareness of our substantial aid to the Khmer Rouge from Reagan and his helpers in Congress from the Democratic side like Mr. Henry Jackson the erstwhile democracy lover] and even greater human rights disasters in Indonesia are impressive as well. Chomsky was right to point this out then and Turner’s comments speak to that.
Ahmed is right that it’s odd that Marc thinks past antiwar movements were not fighting for open societies too. What is equally odd is how today’s henry jackson democrats and conservatives alike think that somehow militarily occupying countries can build democracy!
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:23 am
Steve – That particular reference wasn’t to what the Swedes actually have done, but to the Meidner Plan, proposed by the trade union confederation in the ’70s, that would have through union contracts apportioned a percentage of wages into a collective stock portfolio and would have given employees majority ownership of large industries over time. I haven’t looked back on it recently, but it struck me when I first studied it as a unique approach to diffusing economic power and using it to implement a more democratic economy. (It wasn’t based on individual “passive stock portfolios” and had no statist component as far as managing industries was concerned.)
I’m not smart enough to know exactly what the Swedes could have done better to get through the last couple of decades. I do know they’ve done better than most. The more things change elsewhere, the more their brand of pragmatic, humanistic economic policy seems utterly rational and relatively stable.
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:31 am
Surely I agree with what you write. I would only add that the Swedes have had one other advantage, even if what they did was entirely within capitalist parameters. Namely, they never faced externally organized threats to their capacity to organize their economies along such lines, unlike Allende’s Chile or Sanidinista Nicaragua or Cuba, which faced constant attacks in one form or another on their economies and political sovereignty from Henry Jackson Democrats and Repubs alike.
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:37 am
I am not surprised, but I am disgusted by the way the left dodges the responsibility of the roughly 100,000,000 deaths that communism caused in the 20th century. Nobody has answered my question about why we aren’t staging trials of those butchers. Read “The Black Book of Communism” written by many French intellectuals if you want to understand the situation.
As to Cambodia. Rosebud, do you really believe that the deaths there would have happened if we had been allowed to win the Vietnam War? It is true that Vietnam invaded Cambodia, although it wasn’t out of any humanitarian motive, but because they have always been neighbors. It did have the good effect of reducing the death rate – too late. China invaded Vietnam. While Kirkpatrick had to support the sovereignty of Cambodia (times were different then – now lefties support the sovereignty of Saddam’s Iraq), it’s not like we actually stopped them.
As for famine, I’ll match you the Duranty covered-up Ukranian famine any time against Cambodia. Or the massacres in China under the “Cultural Revolution” – about 40,000,000 people. And yet we had Maoists at peace marches at the tuime this was goig on.
Why were people in Cambodia in a famine? Could it have been that driving everyone into the fields and emptying Phnom Phen (please no spelling Nazis), killing lots of people, and generally trying to control the population in a failed attempt at centralized agrarian production might have had just a little to do with it.
I know you were there. After Pol Pot did his damage. I also remember the many excuses from the left during the massacres. I remember the left (and the MSM) hiding or maintaining ignorance of the bloodbath that took place in South Vietnam after the fall (read a few autobiographies of folks who have since escaped, including the few remaining Viet Cong who escaped from “re-education camps.”)
Cambodia was the result of communist imperialism – China balancing its ancient enemy Vietnam with its own movement in Cambodia. To put it in terms the left detests, Cambodia was a dominoe.
Any blame the US holds in this is strictly tangential.
January 3rd, 2005 at 10:51 am
To review a few facts on mid to late 20th century Cambodian history re: American policy:
In 1970 the CIA organized a coup to remove Prince Sihanouk, who had ruled Cambodia since 1941 but who insisted, much to Nixon and Kissinger’s annoyance, on staying neutral in the Vietnam war. Sihanouk was replaced with our puppet of choice, Lon Nol, a weak, superstitious and incompetent man, (as opposed to the popular, wily, autocratic prince) who gave permission for the United States to attack Cambodian territory on a massive scale, first through a land invasion in April 1970 and continuing with a massive bombing campaign that went on secretly even after Congress expressly prohibited it, and continued for another six months after the 1973 Paris accords were signed.
The combination of the bombing and the coup created a sequence of events that propelled the Khmer Rouge–which barely existed before American intervention began—from the margins of society to center stage, as masses of peasants fled their villages for the cities to escape the bombing and agricultural production collapsed causing food shortages, compounded by rampant inflation fueled by the American military presence, leading ultimately to the effective shattering of the Cambodian economy.
(Nixon’s role in these events was the subject of one of the impeachment articles against him that was not passed by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 although it received over a dozen votes in its favor.)
When Pol Pot et al was finally pushed to one corner of the country in 1979 and the new Vietnamese-backed Cambodian government was installed, out of post-Vietnam fury, and a desire to appease the Chinese, the US continued to vote to seat the murderous Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia—and actively prevented the Vietnamese from from finishing off Pol Pot and company in western Cambodia with the threat of a US-supported Thai invasion.
Worse, the US, led by post-Vietnam, Cold War types in the Kampuchean Working Group at the State Department, imposed an embargo on the country, and blocked food and other humanitarian aid from other sources coming into Cambodia. The stated excuse was the completely false claim that all food aid was being trucked back to Vietnam, rather than being used for the good of the Cambodian people who were by then starving to death by the hundreds of thousands. As the spokesman for the Kampuchean Working Group remarked pleasantly to me at the time, “We don’t care how many of ‘em die, we’d just as soon bomb ‘em back into the stone age.â€
Furthermore, in response to US pressure, at least $12 million in World Food Program aid that was supposedly allocated to the refugee camps along the Thai Cambodian border, was instead sent, via the Thai military, to the regrouping Khmer Rouge, according to Richard Holbrooke, who was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs under Carter, and one who got fed up with the damage created by this morally insane policy. Meanwhile, the US secretly funded Pol Pot’s exiled forces on the Thai border, to the tune of $ 85 million from 1980 to 1986.
In short, American administrations from Nixon through Carter (with some substantial after-the-fact collusion on the part of Reagan) were culpable in the Cambodian genocide and subsequent mass starvation. Or as Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey put it when he testified in hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: what the US had, “…done to the country,” said McCloskey, “is greater evil than we have done to any country in the world, and wholly without reason…”
Tom, I don’t mean to pick on you in particular, but weren’t you one of those who was busy with the liberals-let-the-commies-take-over- and-caused-the-Cambodian-slaughter trope on some thread or other early last summer?
If there is any possible future resonance between the Cambodian catastrophe and the disaster that continues to unfold in Iraq, it’s the foolhardy American insistence on trying to impose our own will/political structure/desires on that of another country, without adequate understanding of the history and cultural imperatives of the region, thereby triggering a host of ghastly—if unintended—consequences that greatly outweigh the ills we were supposedly trying to “cure.”
Dear heaven, I’ve just written a post that’s roughly the length of a novella. Sorry about that. I’m going to shut up and go back to work now.
January 3rd, 2005 at 11:01 am
“As to Cambodia. Rosebud, do you really believe that the deaths there would have happened if we had been allowed to win the Vietnam War?” etc. etc. 100,000,000 deaths…all liberals fault.
Sorry, won’t bite. Needle on illogicometer fully in red zone. Danger! Danger! Run!
January 3rd, 2005 at 12:54 pm
GREAT post, Rosedog. Thanks.
At some point, this long thread gave me a headache. It seemed like a smart discussion, but I felt the same tedium I feel (and others express) about certain predictable posters. You make me see that it just boils down to this: most of us are — far too often — fervently full of shit. No matter how authoritative the rhetoric, even the BEST (much smarter and better informed) posters often do what I do: argue ideology — posed as logic — based on fourth-hand info.
Real experience or actual reporting or a detailed personal grasp of a specific history cuts through the bullshit like a knife, every time.
January 3rd, 2005 at 2:05 pm
Steve writes, “somehow militarily occupying countries can build democracy!”
I agree with steve, and so do the modern day citizens of Japan, German, and Italy.
January 3rd, 2005 at 2:12 pm
Oh, so we’re responsible for Cambodia? Well, that’s another 2+ million hauled up on stakes in the name of U.S. Imperialism, isn’t it? What a bitch, eh?
Tell me, after beating the plebs in Paduca over the head with the bloody shirt of Cambodia, do you think mobilizing them for anti-war duty on Iraq is going to be an easy sell? If a feeling of self-satisfied moral superiority is what you’re after, fine. But I’m not sure it’s a technique that is going to be terribly useful in building a mass movement.
After reading the Cambodia tangent here, it seems appropriate to ask if the differences between International ANSWER and the rest of the anti-war Left center more around style than content. Or maybe it’s just a matter of the vast majority of the moderate anti-warnics are tired of being ragged on about very freakin’ sin under the sun by other less-than-moderate anti-warnics who see the U.S. as the real problem behind each and every problem the world has faced since 1492. Hell, you don’t have to join an anti-war to get that kind of abuse…you can stay home and read, in safety and comfort, an issue of The Nation and get the exact same thing.
And Marc, note that opposing the War in Iraq couldn’t hold their attention for 80 posts…hard to build a credible mass movement when everyone considering joining has ADD.
January 3rd, 2005 at 3:20 pm
“I agree with steve, and so do the modern day citizens of Japan, German, and Italy.”
Radically different conditions. Japan, Germany, and to some degree, Italy were allowed the possibility of economic sovereignty, which is fundamental for the possibility of democracy. Iraq has basically been sold off to the IMF before the current US occupation has ended (in about 5-10 years maybe?). Very very different conditions, the US will never allow Iraq the kind of economic sovereignty it granted Germany or Japan in the post-War half century.
January 3rd, 2005 at 3:59 pm
Rosebud, the first of your post is nonsense. CIA did not organize Lon Nol’s coup. Long held myth. I’m sure they wanted to, but it wasn’t necessary.
As to the rest, I don’t have the time or handy reference material to get into it. Suffice it to say that I consider it one sided. Tell me, did Pol Pot get his ideas of an agricultural utopian communism from the west? Are the Khmer such a screwed up people that our bombing made them nuts, when worse bombing didn’t drive the Vietnamese, Germans and Japanese crazy? It don’t wash. During the ’70s, it was hard to get information, and I was so disgusted with what the left had done to our foreign policy that I figured Carter could screw it up without my help. He did.
Face it. Khmer Rouge was one of the most vicious regimes on the planet. It was not created by us (hell, by the time the Khmer took over, our forces had been banned from the whole area for two years). Remember, Communists were the left’s friends, not the right.
Were they bit players in an anti-Chinese drama? Yes. Did we set them out to kill much of their population? No. Was ait our idea to run everyone out of Phnom Phen? To kill everyone with glasses or a hint of education? Sorry, but those ideas fit best with utopian communism (creating the “new communist man”).
Topanga is a nice place (although probably flooded right now). I enjoyed the Moonfire Inn when I lived at Big Rock. My wife did some of her growing up there. I’m sure the soldiers appreciate your care packages, and I’m glad you are doing that.
But you are also doing things that in my opinion endanger them, but are well within your rights.
“”As to Cambodia. Rosebud, do you really believe that the deaths there would have happened if we had been allowed to win the Vietnam War?” etc. etc. 100,000,000 deaths…all liberals fault.
Sorry, won’t bite. Needle on illogicometer fully in red zone. Danger! Danger! Run! ”
Common reaction to someone confronted with unpleasant truths. No, it wasn’t all the liberals fault – it was the communist’s fault in those countries. Various other blame can be passed out in many directions. But you didn’t answer the question.
If you haven’t read the Black Book of Communism, your illogicometer is not even close to calibrated. It wasn’t written by right wing cranks. It was an attempt by French intellectuals to document the history of Communism. The name came later after what they found in their research, which was that every Communist government in the world killed off many innocents in its population. It is a big book full of details. Check it out. I can’t claim to have read it all, but I do recommend it.
January 3rd, 2005 at 4:00 pm
By the way…
This is an interesting thread, but it’s really a bunch of threads woven together. This is one place where blogs need to catch up with BBS software.
January 3rd, 2005 at 4:32 pm
Jean Meer, this is not my argument, but is there a reason you keep
refering to her as Rosebud. I’m sure it’s not an attempt to be funny, or to show disrespect…
January 3rd, 2005 at 4:36 pm
No, it is a simple example of a senior moment. No meaning intended and no misspelling intended. Just an oops.
Rosedog, my apologies.
January 3rd, 2005 at 5:28 pm
I had plenty more to say on the anti war movement, but this thread no longer resmebles the original discussion, and has diverged in all sorts of different direction. Anyways, the following is from a long time activist and author Lenni Brenner
Nation scribes write endless pages on how to build the peace movement. But, in 51
years of left politics, I remember exactly ONE Nation staffer attending exactly ONE planning meeting, and doing the work that goes into building a demo.
Anti-war work, like charity, begins at home.
Here, here
January 3rd, 2005 at 5:35 pm
‘Tell me, did Pol Pot get his ideas of an agricultural utopian communism from the west?’
Well, he did attend university in Paris…more than likely his introduction to the “utopian” and “communist” aspects of what I guess one is forced to call his ideas.
Cue Frog Bashing !
January 3rd, 2005 at 6:28 pm
Can you blame regular people for not wanting to march side by side with Mumia nuts, ANSWER/RCP sectarians (they ALWAYS show up, organizer or not), blac block trust fund anarchists, etc??? Can you blame regular people for not wanting to march next to giant dinosaur puppets with “Halliburton is evil,†topless activists with “bush = Hitler†written across their breasts, and the sectarians with signs that say “Bush is the criminal, free Mumia, and End Racism, twirling hippies playing drums, etc?â€
Modern day protest accomplishes nothing tangible (unless you count the self- exaltation
of the protestor counts). It is for therapy and it is meant to be elitist. It is a way for the protesters to feel smarter and more righteous than those that are sitting at home.
You can thank the Diggers and the Situationalists for all of this crap. The infected the New Left with an obsession with Political Theatre and symbolism.
I can almost guarantee that the numbers at these protests will decline to nil. The election is over and those folks that did show up got more important things to do like buy I Pods and watch TV.
Don’t delude yourself into thinking that the numbers in NY were a reflection of a real anti-war movement or consume yourself with some kind of nostalgia for the 60’s. Give up it is over.
A very small minority of people feel passionate about the injustice of the war. A VERY small minority. My guess is most people (even those that protested and voted for Kerry) have slid into post election apathy. Bush won, they feel that the battle was lost.
The average Nation writer may not organize protests. Sure. But the fact that the Left now has professional “activists†and “organizers†is perhaps the real root of the problem. Most activists are out of touch fanatics and no matter how miserable they fail; they will always convince themselves that they are winning. In their mind, the action is the victory. Holding the sign and yelling “free Palestine†is enough. That is what it is really all about. Being able to look in the mirror and call themselves an “activist†is all that matters.
The average person watches the protests on CSPAN and is mortified.
Look into the bullshit that the YES MEN did on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster? http://gooie.com/2004/12/schadenfreude.html . They were celebrated by Democracy Now but the only real thing they accomplished was further victimizing the victims.
In regards to being anti-communist. I have begun to notice a real disturbing current in young left wing counter culture politicos (my interns and the kids I talk to at shows are a good sample). They have adapted a kind of Soviet revisionism. Soviet imagery in rock videos (see Franz Ferdinand, The International Noise Conspiracy, The Coup), hammer and sickle shirts, etc… There is even a popular punk rock band called The Soviettes. One of my interns insists on wearing a smaller hammer-sickle pin (Soviet kitsch is the rage for tourists these days in Russia) on his hat, not knowing, or ignoring what it represents. I begged him to read Gulag Archipelago or The Great Terror and he looked at me like I was Irving Cristol. So did the President of my company. How sad it is…
January 3rd, 2005 at 6:47 pm
“Can you blame regular people for not wanting to march side by side with Mumia nuts, ANSWER/RCP sectarians (they ALWAYS show up, organizer or not), blac block trust fund anarchists, etc??? Can you blame regular people for not wanting to march next to giant dinosaur puppets with “Halliburton is evil,†topless activists with “bush = Hitler†written across their breasts, and the sectarians with signs that say “Bush is the criminal, free Mumia, and End Racism, twirling hippies playing drums, etc?—
If one ever needed any more evidence that Josh hasn’t been to a major demonstration against war in a while, there it is. Every Horowitzian stereotype of protestors is in that rich ‘description’.
If ya don’t like the very small number of protestors who match your description, then march next to the Teamsters or the SEIU or next to Veterans For Peace or welfare rights groups, or the Henry Jacksonites for aiding dictators contingent. Ok, ya won’t find the last one there, but the others ought to be palatable to a self-proclaimed social democrat.
In fact the antiwar movement has had an impact, one need only think back to the fact that the US had to delay its official invasion back to April of 2003, much preferring to invade a few months earlier. There is no way that European leaders would have had the backbone to oppose the US invasion of Iraq without the protest movements coordinated in Europe and the US. It accomplished far more than not doing anything or wilfully misrepresenting the character of the protest marchers. Far far more.
As for the average person watching the protests and being mortified, that’s nonsense. I have a brother who is a dye in the wool military guy, now in civilian life, who remarked that he was really glad to see so many people show up in NYC to protest the war, that it woulda been a disgrace if only a small number showed up…I’ve heard such comments from numerous people who caught the protests on CSPAN or CNN. The only places I hear Josh’s stereotypes of the protest marchers is typically from FOX “News” watchers.
January 3rd, 2005 at 6:57 pm
Regarding your last paragraph, Josh…I think it’s just the same old attempt to shock and annoy their elders, rather than a political statement. Maybe asking them to really have a clue is asking to much of the majority of them, at that age. Or, maybe, at any age, unfortunately.
January 3rd, 2005 at 8:01 pm
Josh, that’s some absolutely terrible stuff, give it a rest will you. During the build up the to the war on Iraq, we witnesses some of the largest demonstrations against war this country has ever seen. What happenned to those tens of thousadns of people who protested this war, what political capital has been earned or squandered and what are the possibilities of building a long term movement capable of articulating an alternative vision of US foreign policy. These are tottaly legitimate questions that can be posed now that we reflect on the streghts and weaknessses of the movement that came out of the war on Iraq. But, to simply castigate all those people throughout this country who participated in anit war demos as nutcases, fundementalists, hippies, and stalinists, really insults all of our intelligence here. Not only do you sound like Horowitz, but you have no idea how far off you are here. Marching as part of a mass protest is certainly not the be all and end all of polics, but it can be and has been, part of a mature political act.
For all you raving here, I really don’t see those of your ilk stepping up and propossing an alternate course of action. Mature discussion coming from a place of sincerity is fine, but idiotic rants and absurd characatures get us no where
January 3rd, 2005 at 8:01 pm
Josh,
Since the villains in the USSR were never called to account, and the left mocked Reagan for his correct “evil empire” characterization, is it so surprising that kids might want to resurrect it? Hollywood hasn’t done much to dramatize the evils of communism, but every day it dramatizes the “evils” of corporatism, religion, and various other things. Maybe you guys need to answer for your past before folks are going to pay much attention.
The right can’t do the whole job of exposing the evils of the communist regimes.
Steve,
Having been to some of those marches, John’s stereotypes were accurate.
The anti-war movement has a very serious problem: it is “anti.” If it doesn’t offer a plausible alternative, not many folks are going to pay attention. Most adults recognize that war is both evil and necessary.
So I will ask the question I asked earlier: anti-war folks, what do you demand? Do we pull our of Iraq and let it go to hell? What exactly are you FOR? Or are you just anti for the sheer hell of it?
January 3rd, 2005 at 8:07 pm
“One of my interns insists on wearing a smaller hammer-sickle pin (Soviet kitsch is the rage for tourists these days in Russia)”
Josh in black and white mode takes this to be an indication of acceptance of Stalinism. It could also be, much more logically, taken to indicate a mockery of the Stalinist system that passed itself off as socialism and, more smugly, victors’ justice. The idea that tourists buying Soviet nostaligia is a sign of anything but their mockery of the Soviet Union is laughable.
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:12 pm
Finally, a good, solid, thoughtful reason for our invasion of Iraq.
1) U.S. Soldiers Stealing Organs from Iraqis: In the Saudi daily Al-Watan on December 22, an article by Fakhriya Ahmad alleges that, based on European secret military reports, U.S. personnel in Iraq are stealing human organs: “The reports confirm the finding of tens of thousands of mutilated cadavers missing parts… These teams offer $40 for every usable kidney and $25 for an eye…” The report also appeared in the Syrian daily Teshreen and in Iran’s Jomhour-ye Islami.
Jewish World Review January 3, 2005
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:16 pm
The idea that Americans – liberal and conservative – haven’t been sufficiently schooled in the rejection of Communism is absurd.
As is the idea that Ronald Reagan’s Darth Vader assessment of a Soviet Humpty Dumpty was prescient. That the Brezhnevites, etc., were bastards bent on regional imperialism is a truism. That they were as weak, incompetent and crumbling as they turned out to be was a revelation to right-wingers. I’ve met more left-liberals who believed that the center of gravity for the ultimate transformation of the Soviet system was internal than external. The right lives on this “Reagan defeated the Russians” fantasy. Pure idiocy. Evidence nothing more than just how bogus, self-serving and unhinged from history the right-wing’s understanding of the world actually is. Gorbachev was inconceivable in Reagan’s view of the world – which is why he was so taken with him when they actually met. Remember the Gipper freaking out his advisers by proposing to share Star Wars with Gorby (like there was something to share that actually might work, but that’s another story.) Credit where credit is due – Gorby ended the Cold War. The idea that Reagan was responsible is a joke. My best assessment is that it was in the interest of Cold Warriors to over-rate the long-term viability of the Soviet system, which is what they consistently did.
Now John. When you admit that your wacko, war-mongering crowd has been wrong about everything they predicted regarding Iraq (other than what was totally obvious to an intelligent middle school student, i.e. Saddam was a cruel dictator) and have the blood of our children on your hands for your stupidity and arrogance, I’ll tell you where I think we should go from here.
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:21 pm
John Moore writes: “Why were people in Cambodia in a famine? Could it have been that driving everyone into the fields and emptying Phnom Phen (please no spelling Nazis), killing lots of people, and generally trying to control the population in a failed attempt at centralized agrarian production might have had just a little to do with it.”
Actually, emptying Phnom Penh (did I spell that right? Ah, who cares) almost certainly had as one of its goals, RELIEVING famine. The city’s population had grown rapidly by about a factor of five, as B-52s bombed in tightening concentric circles. The rationale for the bombing? The U.S. saw an insurgency following Mao’s dictum, that revolutionaries should be like fish, swimming in the ocean of the people. The U.S. response: try to empty the ocean. And they did! (But it didn’t work, did it?)
In the process, dikes, dams, irrigation works generally, and draft animals were destroyed, crippling agricultural production even as the farmers themselves had to abandon the land for the city. Well, there was no food growing in the city, was there? When the Khmer Rouge finally overran Phnom Penh, they encountered a starving population, about 80% of them not even original residents of a city that was now cut off from its food supply. It was full of refugee farming families. How to feed them? Get them out into the countryside to avail themselves of Khmer Rouge cached food supplies and, most important, get them farming again.
This depopulation of an entire capital city was unprecedented, rapid, sweeping and undoubtedly brutal. However, the deployment of advanced military technology against an agrarian society in the manner conducted (at firts in secret, and illegally) by Nixon and Kissinger was itself unprecedented, rapid, sweeping, and extraordinarily brutal indeed.
In the years after the Khmer Rouge takeover, we have very few cold, hard economic statistics, but there are are a few that just don’t lie: rice exports – EXPORTS – from Cambodia climbed year on year, until the Khmer Rouger were kicked out by the Vietnamese (who have always despised Cambodians for how little rice they produced with such a wealth of excellent farmland, and have always coveted that farmland.)
The Khmer Rouge were undoubtedly very brutal, but they didn’t have magical powers – it’s hard to see how they could have been killing off 20% of their agricultural labor force AND producing exportable rice surpluses for several consecutive years.
Cambodian ‘autogenocide’ has become axiomatic for precisely the reasons that Chomsky and Herman gave: the U.S. NEEDED to prove that what had been doing in Indochina was, however awful, at least not nearly as bad as leaving Indochina to the Communists. Refugee reports — seldom reliable — were extrapolated across the entire country and across all strata of society. Hey, beats working! Even now, you can go to the Yale Cambodia Genocide Project site, and dig for hours, trying to figure out how they substantiate their 1.7 million ‘autogenocide’ figure, and come up empty-handed. How many people did the Khmer Rouge kill? CGP claims there 19,000 mass graves (with “mass” starting somewhere around “six bodies,” conveniently enough), but last I checked they hadn’t dug up a single grave. The answer is still: nobody knows, but everybody likes to sound knowledgeable with numbers, and bigger numbers make for better ghost stories. And better apologetics for a disastrous foreign policy.
What remains of the Khmer Rouge leadership should go on trial for war crimes. So should Henry Kissinger, though, and that’s why it’ll never happen until he dies. For a truly delectable sample of how Hun Sen stalls justice in these matters, check this out:
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/TXT/letters/L921-4.htm
In short, Hun Sen says he can’t put Ieng Sary on trial because Ieng Sary was already convicted of genocide in 1979, and to try him again would be – no, really! – double jeopardy. And that would be, like, SO unjust. I guess Hun Sen and Ieng Sary just have to continue being drinking buddies, then. It really can’t be helped.
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:23 pm
Dennis the Peasant – I promise to start taking my ritalin and not concern myself with any of Bush’s policies except the war in Iraq until the damned thing is over. Sorry we’re such flakes. I for one will try much, much harder to meet your rigorous standards of political argument in the future. You are a shining example to us all, pathetic cratures that we are.
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:31 pm
This is admittedly trivial, but Josh; what’s up with your hostility towards the Coup? Comtemporary popular music is pretty much defined by its vacousness. Against this background, i find the Coup wholly refreshing. With theie unabshed politics championing the struggles of the black working class, their music deals with every day struggles of poverty, racism and violence. No excapist or romanticised bullshit, just powerful provocative songs, expressions of angst and anger, laced with humour and humanity. Check out underdogs, a personal favorite of mine. Their emblem (which I assume you’re talking about) is a large red star with a picture of an African women holding a baby in her arms and a gun over her shoulders. A little over the top, sure, but its meant to reference old anti colonial imagery, and has nothing to do with Stalin chic. Check it out, and perhpas introduce it to your intern and boss, to see what they think
In the future, let me reccomend that you choose silence over purely made up shit, most of which originates from thin air.
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:44 pm
Uh, Reg…recommend you avoid the ritalin. It might make you, well, voluble…
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:51 pm
Okay, hitchcock. What are you trying to say ?
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:55 pm
How do you kill off 20% of your agrarian population while being a net exporter? Duh. You starve them to death and sell what would have been their food. Worked in the Ukraine.
As far as how many were killed? Do you need an exact number? The killing fields were real. There are too many survivor accounts to ignore that. Proportionally they almost certainly killed off a much higher percentage of their population than Saddam, as is true of many communist regimes.
Emptying Phnom Phen was an act of brutality. Uneducated peasant child soldiers came into a city that was functioning and drove out those they didn’t shoot. It wasn’t an organized effort to avoid famine. It was a brutal method of gaining absolute control.
As for those who think that Americans have been adequately informed of the evils of the old Communist regimes, just look around. What are people learning in school? The US is the bad guy in an awful lot of history texts. What do they see in Hollywood entertainment? Evil corporations (probably based on Hollywood’s style of business), not evil Communists. Evil communists only show up in B movies that don’t get awards (like Red Dawn).
We need a Schindler’s list type of movie about the gulags. Why don’t we have one? How about a movie about the “Cultural Revolution,” which was an odd name for mass slaughter – oddly slaughter by the kids again. If Hollywood was composed of too many greedy leftists, we might see movies that show the many terrible evils that went on in the 20th century carried out by leftist governments and movements.
Until I see this sort of stuff in our culture, I won’t believe that people know enough about the evils of Communism. Heck, too many don’t even know enough about the evils of Naziism, a virulent but ultimately less deadly movement. Until we see more balance in the presentation of the world by the media, especially Hollywood, the left will have failed to come to grips with its past and the evil it was complicit in.
Michael, how about putting on trial the many thousands of other Communist butchers? There are plenty still around and their crimes against humanity were as bad as or worse than Pinochet’s. We hunted down damn near every Nazi (except some useful scientists that the US and USSR kept), but we have let the Communist butchers go their merry way, often bragging in their memoirs of their crimes.
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:55 pm
Ahmed – I hate to stoop to this, but Boots’ dad was a PLP cadre, so I think Stalin may actually have something to do with it. But that doesn’t keep “Me and Jesus The Pimp in a ’79 Granada Last Night” from being a tres cool song.
January 3rd, 2005 at 9:59 pm
I was teasing, Reg. I was laughing with you, in Josh’s direction!
January 3rd, 2005 at 10:00 pm
I knew that…
January 3rd, 2005 at 10:09 pm
Yo reg, I’m feeling you on “Me and Jesus The Pimp in a ’79 Granada Last Night” I’m pleasantly surprised that someone on this list knew what the hell I was talking about.
“This ain’t no macrobionic chemical colonic/ this political symphonic lyrical narcotic.”
January 3rd, 2005 at 10:11 pm
JM – The Killing Fields wasn’t anti-Pol Pot enough for you ? Haing Nor, a real refugee from the Cambodian horror, won an Academy Award for best supporting actor. Of course it was an anti-communist movie based on the account of a liberal journalist, so…well…I guess it really doesn’t count.
January 3rd, 2005 at 10:24 pm
Steve: “The idea that tourists buying Soviet nostaligia is a sign of anything but their mockery of the Soviet Union is laughable.”
Check it out. I agree with Steve! At least he’s partly right, I’m sure. I just got back from Libya. When I was there I just HAD to buy a Ghaddafi watch. I showed it to all my friends at my New Year’s Eve party and they thought it was incredible and hilarious. None of us like Ghaddafi, obviously.
January 3rd, 2005 at 10:31 pm
WOW! A cuckoo watch!
January 4th, 2005 at 12:00 am
John Moore, of an organization I’d still like to investigate someday called “Useful Fools”, writes: “We need a Schindler’s list type of movie about the gulags.”
Up to a point, I think so, too. I spent a summer, years ago, plowing through volumes I and II of The Gulag Archipelago. And believing every word.
But imagine my dismay when Solzhenitsyn himself hinted that he’d employed … well, Joe Wilson’s “a little literary flair” comes to mind.
Shame on credulous me: the work is clearly subtitled “An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” and in it, he admitted he had only a “peephole” onto the Gulag, not the “view from the tower.” Solzhenitsyn himself witnessed very little of what he was passing on to us – he himself ended up in one of those “paradise islands” of the Gulag.
I don’t think there will ever be a Schindler’s List of the Gulag for the simple reason that the two systems – death camps and forced labor camps – aren’t morally comparable. The Nazis had a systematic program of extermination of certain ethnic groups, European Jews foremost among them by a wide margin. If you want to argue that it was closer to 5 million Jews than 6 million, go right ahead. The weight of evidence is still unambiguously toward millions, and precisely because it was such a scrupulously documented killing machine. Those trains ran on a schedule. How many Jews they might have packed into a given cattle car doesn’t change the overall scale.
The Gulag wasn’t so clear-cut. The Gulag was a system of forced labor, mixing common criminals and “class enemies.” No doubt, in some of the camps, this forced labor included formulae for how long it would take to work your average laborer to death, making it systematic murder in those cases. However, how widespread was this practice, and at how high a level was this practice dictated?
In any death toll estimate involving millions – not to speak of tens of millions – political distortions enter, inevitably. If you wipe out an entire village, who’s to say that more than a handful ever lived there? Or for that matter, what’s to stop someone from saying there were thousands of people when there were actually hundreds, if there were no reliable census figures for the region to start with? Partisans seize on whatever figures are convenient, and nobody is ever comfortable with the notion that the true number may be literally impossible to determine.
We’ll see these issues come up in the Iraq trials, naturally. I’ve been told by returning GIs that the liberal media is covering up the “fact” that Saddam was killing 15,000 people a week, right up to the day of the invasion. In the meantime, from what I understand, people are having trouble pushing the total number actually found in mass graves in Iraq dramatically higher than that figure. *Reported* mass grave sites run into the low hundreds – but the bar is set at six bodies, minimum. Given some statistical distribution, we should be finding outlier mass graves with tens of thousands. Where are they?Somewhere, we’re supposed to find where 100,000 Kurds were systematically machine-gunned and buried. Now, mass burial on that scale ought to really pop out of those satellite photos. Or – forget the satellite photos – Kurds have been right there, on the ground, relatively unmolested by Saddam’s troops, in their own autonomous zone for over a decade. But somehow, the locations haven’t yielded a body count even approaching the cited figure.
Somehow, I think if I start looking at Iraq the way I looked at Cambodia, I’ll end up at the same conclusion: a bad foreign policy has made certain people hike estimates of the number of people systematically slaughtered outright by a very bad regime, so that the perpetrators of that foreign policy don’t look quite so bad themselves. Are there no mass graves of soldiers and civilians killed by American attacks? Are there no mass graves of Kurds killed by other Kurds? Are there no mass graves of some few Iranian units who might have made it far across the border into Iraq, only to be torn to pieces by superior Iraqi firepower, and hastily buried? No, there are only mass graves that are Saddam’s fault. Somehow.
January 4th, 2005 at 12:44 am
******* TIME OUT ******8
This thread has ceased to make sense to me. Everyone back to their corners. Before I douse the lights a couple of parting shots:
Leslie as usual wins first place for best comment (you little devil!).
MJT: I can top ur Gaddafy wtach, pal. Ive got a Saddam watch given to me in person by his-then (1991) Minister of Information.
Ahmed: You cant possibly believe that Nation writers dont plan or organize demos, do you? I was expelled from Calif Univ systems for doing such and a few years later in Chile carried an AK-47 in some serious fucking demonstrations of that’s what u like to call them.
Josh: You have my permission to be anti-communist. Indeed the whole concept of anti-comunism has to be redefined in this post-coldwar and post soviet period,. What on earth would it now mean to NOT be an Anti-Communist. Dont let them grind you down on this. Communism is not your friend.
January 4th, 2005 at 1:25 am
“How do you kill off 20% of your agrarian population while being a net exporter? Duh. You starve them to death and sell what would have been their food.”
Dead people don’t till fields. Please address the question: how do you get several years worth of year-on-year INCREASES in rice exports out of a Cambodia that’s killing the tillers of the fields in such numbers?
“Emptying Phnom Phen was an act of brutality. Uneducated peasant child soldiers came into a city that was functioning and drove out those they didn’t shoot.”
They probably shot some who wouldn’t leave, or who shot at them, but I doubt they were under any other orders than to immediately start repopulating the countryside.
Phnom Penh’s 1970 population was about 500 million, with everybody getting fed from a productive countryside. Phnom Penh’s January 1975 population was about 2 million, completely cut off from those paddy fields (whose agricultural productivity had been seriously crippled by U.S. bombing anyway) and also cut off from rice shipments along the Mekong by Khmer Rouge mining of the river and their control of the riverbanks. One of the U.S. servicemen in charge of evacuating embassy personal and Lon Nol government higher-ups had scrounged a cache of stem valves to deflate the tires of cars they planned to use to block entrances to helicopter landing zones. Why not just shoot out the tires? It would attract too much attention, they feared. You don’t want to draw enemy fire in the city, after all. And you don’t want your helicopter landing zone *prematurely* mobbed. He could only find a handful of stem valves – this, according to the USMC history of that evacuation. That handful may have been the city’s entire supply.
You call that a “functioning city”?
I call that a nightmare.
What hope did the Khmer Rouge have of getting that city reprovisioned and on its feet at that point, from foreign sources? Just about zero. Could they have reprovisioned that city from domestic sources? Hey, roads in Cambodia suck even NOW. Back then, all surrounding infrastructure was completely torn up from attacks on supply lines and (further out) by U.S. bombing. You could get in on foot. You could get out on foot. But you probably couldn’t have trucked enough food in from the countryside to feed more than a few tens of thousands, maximum. And Phnom Penh held two million people, most of them malnourished at that point, if not starving.
Really, John. Read some history of this event.
January 4th, 2005 at 3:15 am
Correction, and absolutely the LAST thing I post here: “500,000″ not “500 million”, in the post above. (Like anybody should care, at this point.)
January 4th, 2005 at 5:21 am
Marc – if it took you that long for the thread to stop making sense, you have a better attention span and reading comprehension than anyone else left in the room. Also higher standards…
January 4th, 2005 at 6:25 am
“Dead people don’t till fields. Please address the question: how do you get several years worth of year-on-year INCREASES in rice exports out of a Cambodia that’s killing the tillers of the fields in such numbers?”
They’ll never answer such questions Michael, far easier to just recite what they’ve heard over and over and over and over until it has become firmly ensconsed as a naturalized social fact in their imaginations.
January 4th, 2005 at 9:55 am
Marc, the point was made by Lenni Brenner not myslef. I actually have no idea how active Nation scribes have been on the anti war organising front. but if you’re reaching for the 1970′s as proof, you making the case for Lenni’s argument
January 4th, 2005 at 10:40 am
Give me a break. I understood it was said by Lenni and.. posted by you. I find what you say vaguely insulting but will let it pass. Lenni Brenner is a bit off himself, you know.
January 4th, 2005 at 11:04 am
Fair enough. But don’t diss Lenni, he’s tireless and an all around good guy.
January 4th, 2005 at 11:15 am
I don’t think anyone is really “pro-communist.” They are simply indifferent or neutral to the misery it brought to the world. They don’t see Stalinism as an equal to Nazisim in horror. That is my concern. The common comments I hear (I also heard in college from two of my professors) is that the USSR was not “real†communism. I personally see no difference between the sickle and the swastika. They are just nostalgic for some sort of alternative.
Nor do I think that anyone should look back favorably at the likes of Claude Cockburn, Paul Robeson, Che, or any other Soviet stooges that opposed America. Those figures share nothing with the Social Democratic Left.
Look, some really smart good people got consumed with hatred for Bush, for American capitalism, etc… and it has gotten the best of them. When you hate something SO much, it is easy to be neutral towards forces that have or do oppose what you hate.
My observations are from attending protest after protest for the last 6 years in the LA area. I stopped attending them during the pre-Iraq invasion because of the message of the ANSWER folk was so horrifying (the lead speaker at the Long Beach rally defended Saddam for Christ sake – and it cleared out half of the place).
There is no doubt that the majority of attendees at the Anti-war events are regular people just trying to express disapproval. But the Kooks are louder and more visible than dignified protesters. What do you think happened when the ANSWER speaker said, (This is a preface) “Saddam used the oil to benefit his people?†The rally cleared OUT. Do you think many of those regular people are going to want to come back and endure the awful stream of ANSWER speakers? Do you think that regular people enjoy being bombarded by RCP and Sparticist League selling kooky papers? The RCP bombard every event in LA that even has a hint of being towards the Left (LA Times Book Fest for gods sake). I even have noticed Chairman Bob screeds at the LB public library. They share the voice of the Left, that is a big problem.
All I am saying is that the ANSWER and other assorted freak show protestors are not only an embarrassment but a deterrent to the anti war movement. They always get the interview and coverage (a realization that drew Abbie Hoffman towards theatre).
I would love to see an anti-war movement organized by regular people and free of the circus freak show. Look at the marches in Selma, they were wearing suits! No puppets in sight.
I am a fan of The Coup and showed no “hostility†towards them. I just notice a bit of nostalgia that troubles me (the lyric “I am pro Cuba Viva†for one).
January 4th, 2005 at 11:31 am
“I personally see no difference between the sickle and the swastika. They are just nostalgic for some sort of alternative.”
In other words, you see no difference between the Soviet Union post-Stalin and Hitler? An interesting, if empirically worthless, theory.
And Josh conveniently forgets the fact that 1) the marchers in Selma and elsewhere in the civil rights movement were under frequent attack from ‘moderates’ of the time for making unenecessary trouble for the cause of civil rights by marching in defiance of the law and for breaking the law. Josh also forgets what Frances Fox Piven in *Poor People’s Movements* has so amply documented, namely that the civil rights movement actively did things that they *knew* would attract violence in order to embarrass the Kennedy administration nationally and internationally, thus forcing them to stop dragging their feet on the civil rights issue. And finally no matter how peaceful Martin Luther King was, when he declined to listen to the advice of ‘moderates’ and openly opposed the war against Vietnam, he caught tons of criticism as too ‘radical’.
None of that matters however, since Josh’s main source of information about who attends protests against war seems to come from Horowitz or Oreilly’s spin zone. Even CNN, the epitome of Hank Jackson centrism, doesn’t portray the marchers the way Josh does.
January 4th, 2005 at 11:43 am
Josh, reading your post reminds me that sometimes anti-sectarianism can be pretty damned sectarian too. Just wondering, did you have a nasty chilhood experience with a puppet? From the sounds of it they’re the source of all evil. As for style, you’re right. Protesters these days are ntohing but sloppy, maybe you should hook uo with the NOI they’re some well dressed bow tie wearing dudes. And Mr.Legere check out the Sontag thread, I’m interested in your reply.
January 4th, 2005 at 8:18 pm
Aren’t we all exhausted yet?
Hey, John, you can call me Rosebud. But only you, okay? I’m going to view it as a term of endearment. However, I’m glad Jim got you to clarify things. I was worried it was some arcane reference to Citizen Kane that all that champagne from New Year’s Eve was preventing me from adequately apprehending.
Michael Turner your Kampuchean-related comments are extremely insightful.
January 4th, 2005 at 8:28 pm
“Michael Turner your Kampuchean-related comments are extremely insightful.”
YEs, they are indeed. Interesting how no substantial rebuttals have come from henry jackson dems or swift boat republicans as a result. they never seem to have a good enough grasp of history to rebut michael’s points on Cambodia.
January 5th, 2005 at 1:46 pm
Rosebud (hey, it does sound nicer than rosedog, and fits Topanga as I fondly remember it)
All… I find the squabbling about body counts to be rather upsetting. The gulag denial I read is very much like holocaust denial – same sort of logic and same sort of dodges. Likewise the attempt to minimize Saddam’s internal death toll. In the world of murderous governments, the USSR, Communist China, Cambodia and Saddam, and the Nazis seem to be record holders.
Folks, the gulag was evil, very evil. And it was often used selectively against ethnic groups, including Jews . The gulag continued under all Soviet leaders, not just Stalin. It was a method of control of dissidents. There is no question but what some gulags were run as death camps. That the Nazis had a more direct system of killing absolves the gulag operators not the slightest. That the Nazis attempted the literal extermination of “races” (Jews, gypsies) and “defectives” (mentally ill, homosexuals) does not make the human horror any worse. Not also that eugenics (which was part of the Nazi justification) was a progressive cause earlier in the 20th century.
Everything we are discussing here is evil on a scale never seen before the 20th century. All of the high level evil was performed by totalitarian regimes, mostly communist with the exception of the Nazis and who knows what obscure regimes in smaller countries – especially in Africa. Naziism and Communism are very similar, and it showed in their lack of respect for “others.”
This discussion has prompted me to plan to read more about Cambodia. I have read enough to know that what I am reading here is hardly a full picture, but I certainly know much less about the subject than I do about Vietnam or the USSR.
And today the slaughter continues..
Right now, in Zimbabwe, horrible things are happening, akin to the Ukranian massacre. Is anyone marching about that?
Iranians are hanging teenagers for speaking out or having sex.
The list would be very long if I continued, although today much of the wars, massacres and ethnic cleansing are around the edge of the Muslim world and are related to religious conquest.
This discussion is not a coherent narrative because it has touched on deep subjects with many branches. I would love to see some of these subjects as primary topics (if marc is interested). Given Marc’s personal history, I’d like to know more about the truth of the Allende/Pinochet eras in Chile.
January 5th, 2005 at 1:50 pm
OT – but here are two quick evils I wanted to mention, because evil seems to be becoming the direction of the thread. Marc, should you choose to delete these, I’ll understand.
The first, the Soviet Smallpox Conspiracy, is almost toally unknown, and is desribed at http://www.tiny vital.com/BlogArchives/000022.html and thus shouldn’t take up space here. But note Mr. Gorbachev the Peacemaker’s role. Because of the spam filter, you will have to take the blank out of the URL to access the article.
The second is that as far as I know, Russia and the US are still at hair trigger (launch on warning) nuclear alert. We are only slightly safer than at the height of the cold war, and probably in more danger of nuclear anhilation than in the Cuban Missile Crisis – every day! This is insanity.
January 5th, 2005 at 4:56 pm
“The gulag denial I read is very much like holocaust denial – same sort of logic and same sort of dodges. Likewise the attempt to minimize Saddam’s internal death toll. In the world of murderous governments, the USSR, Communist China, Cambodia and Saddam, and the Nazis seem to be record holders.
Folks, the gulag was evil, very evil.
–So, do you care to refute Turner, or can’t ya do him better with the facts?
January 3rd, 2005 at 4:42 pm
Saddam-loving Communists
Sadly, the title for this post is not sarcastic. Marc Cooper brings the unfortunate, if not all that surprising, news — originally reported by Al Jazeera — that Ramsey Clark is joining Saddam Hussein’s legal defense team. Clark was an…
January 6th, 2005 at 11:58 am
Ramsey Clark will defend Saddam
Via Marc Cooper– one of a regretably small number of antiwar leftists with both eyes open– comes the news that former US attonrey general turned…
November 29th, 2005 at 12:59 am
[...] In the recent past I’ve written rather harshly about former Attorney General Ramsey Clark who, once again, finds himself in Baghdad as part of Saddam Hussein’s defense team. The right-wingers call him a traitor. Some intelligent leftist critics call him the best friend of war criminals. I, on the other hand, just think the poor old guy is visibly addled. [...]
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