[A-List] Fw: "UNPATRIOTIC OPPOSITION"

["Christopher Black" <bar@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "davidpet" <davidpet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "david peterson" <davidpet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, January 13, 2003 5:36 PM
Subject: RE: "UNPATRIOTIC OPPOSITION"


>
>
>    Le Monde diplomatique
>
>    -----------------------------------------------------
>
>    January 2003
>
>                        APPOINTMENT WITH WAR
>
>                       Unpatriotic opposition
>      _______________________________________________________
>
>    WAVES of radicalism come every 30 or 40 years in the United
>     States. Now that a new one is upon us, thanks to President
>      George Bush's threatened invasion of Iraq, observers are
>     comparing it to the last. During the Vietnam war, it took
>    three years, until 1968, of massive US military intervention
>      before large-scale national protests got underway. This
>    time, 200,000 people descended on Washington and surrounded
>     the White House on 26 October while 80,000 more marched in
>                           San Francisco.
>
>                                              by DANIEL LAZARE *
>      _______________________________________________________
>
>      They were protesting against a war still in its talking
>      stages. Where college members of Students for a
>      Democratic Society (SDS) were the driving force in the
>      1960s, when conscription was still in force, today's
>      antiwar movement is far more broadly based. Opponents of
>      the Vietnam war were a beleaguered minority until the
>      early 1970s. But now opposition is running at 37%,
>      according to a recent poll, and could go higher should
>      the US encounter more trouble in the Gulf than the
>      Pentagon anticipates (1).
>
>      Bush may seem strong, but he is actually starting out
>      weaker than Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon during the
>      Vietnam era. His Iraqi adventure is a high-stakes gamble
>      in which many things could go wrong. Iraq could put up an
>      unexpectedly stiff resistance, the entire region could
>      rise in revolt, post-invasion Iraq could descend into
>      anarchy and, crucially, the US economy could take a steep
>      dive.
>
>      If these things happen, today's minority could easily
>      turn into tomorrow's majority, and Bush's (unelected)
>      presidency could crash as his father's did in 1992.
>
>      There is one similarity between the 1960s antiwar
>      movement and today's: its shaking-out of the liberal
>      intelligentsia. During the Vietnam war, ageing social
>      democrats like Irving Howe lambasted students for
>      violating cold war anti-communism by enthusing for Ho Chi
>      Minh. Today, ageing veterans of the 1960s are lambasting
>      the new antiwar movement for similar ideological sins.
>
>      Hardly a week goes by without a prominent liberal
>      blasting the movement for its lack of patriotism, its
>      hostility to mainstream American values, or its blanket
>      opposition to US military power. If the ex-Trotskyist
>      writer Christopher Hitchens is to be believed, America is
>      torn between those who favour a showdown with Saddam and
>      those who "truly believe that [US Attorney General] John
>      Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden" (2).
>
>      Either you're with the United States or you're with
>      al-Qaida, as both Hitchens and George Bush see it, and
>      Hitchens is determined to be with the US.
>
>      Others who have attacked America's nascent antiwar
>      movement include the leftwing feminist, Ellen Willis, and
>      Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, author of
>      a highly regarded study of rural populism, who accused
>      the antiwar movement for failing to recognise that in the
>      US the masses are patriotic and the globe-trotting
>      bourgeoisie is not. As far as the US is concerned, Kazin
>      wrote, "Karl Marx's dictum that the workers have no
>      country has been refuted time and again" (3). If antiwar
>      activists wish to connect with ordinary Americans, they
>      must prove themselves more patriotic than the president.
>
>      Todd Gitlin, a former SDS president turned New York
>      University sociologist, recently warned that the antiwar
>      forces were heading for "a gigantic ruination" because
>      they had allowed radicals to take control, and if such
>      elements were not purged, the leadership would atrophy -
>      this warning came days before the massive October
>      turnout.
>
>      David Corn and Marc Cooper, staff writers for the liberal
>      weekly The Nation, have criticised the movement's "far
>      left" leadership for, among other things, defending Cuba
>      and denouncing UN sanctions that are conservatively
>      estimated to have caused the death of 500,000 Iraqi
>      children.
>
>      Why is there so much hostility? The liberal-social
>      democratic outburst is best understood as yet another
>      stage in the Democratic party's disintegration. The
>      process began around November 2000 when the Republicans
>      used strong-arm tactics to gain control of the White
>      House, and then accelerated after 11 September, when
>      congressional liberals, terrified of being labelled
>      unpatriotic, closed ranks behind Bush's policy of
>      "ceaseless warfare to rid the world of the evil-doers".
>
>      Now the Democratic party's liberal and social democratic
>      wings are collapsing as well. The process is the
>      culmination of ideological trends over many years. A
>      generation ago student radicals believed with Herbert
>      Marcuse that the American working class had become
>      hopelessly bourgeois. Today, those radicals, now greyer
>      and paunchier, still believe the working class to be
>      hopelessly bourgeois; but now, instead of condemning
>      that, they see it as a good thing
>
>      Since there is no alternative to bourgeois society, the
>      left's job is to support it while seeking to smooth out
>      the rougher edges. This has meant reinventing the left as
>      a loyal patriotic opposition and never inveighing against
>      US imperialism, even though that it is now more open and
>      unabashed than at any time since the invasion of Cuba in
>      1898.
>
>      But if anti-imperialism is forbidden, it is nonetheless
>      what a significant segment of the US population feels,
>      thanks to the enormous human toll caused by UN sanctions,
>      Washington's outrageous manipulation of the UN Security
>      Council and the Bush administration's cynical attempts to
>      blame Saddam Hussein for 11 September. The result is an
>      enormous contradiction that many Marxist and semi-Marxist
>      organisations and parties are hastening to exploit.
>
>      One such group is the Workers World Party, a
>      ex-Trotskyist splinter group that was the main force
>      behind the October demonstrations; another is the
>      Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist sect chiefly
>      responsible for the Not In Our Name campaign, an attempt
>      to prevent Bush from using popular outrage over September
>      11 to fuel his anti-terrorism campaign.
>
>      The most important radical in the US today, however, is
>      Bush, whose war on terrorism is roiling global politics
>      and propelling the US far to the right. In
>      revolutionising international relations Bush is also
>      revolutionising the opposition, forcing the antiwar
>      movement to become as radical as he is.
>        ____________________________________________________
>
>      * Journalist and author of The Frozen Republic: How the
>      Constitution is Paralysing Democracy, Harcourt Brace, New
>      York, 1996
>
>      (1) "Poll: Most support war as a last resort," USA Today,
>      26 November 26 2002.
>
>      (2) Christopher Hitchens, "Taking Sides", The Nation, 14
>      October 2002. Since then he has stopped writing for The
>      Nation.
>
>      (3) See Ellen Willis, "Why I'm Not for Peace", Radical
>      Society, April 2002; also Michael Kazin, "A Patriotic
>      Left," Dissent, autumn 2002.
>
>
>
>                                       Original text in English
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