Re: [Marxism] [Three Way Fight blog] Defending My Enemy's Enemy

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Matthew Lyons is co-author (along with Chip Berlet) of /Right-Wing 
> Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort/, as well as numerous essays 
> and articles about repression and the far right in America (see: 
> http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lyonsm/bibliography.html)

Berlet is basically a slightly more tolerable version of Morris Dees.

> Among the statements on the Lebanon war I've seen so far from U.S. leftist
> and anti-war groups, most condemn the Israeli attacks against the Lebanese
> people but say little or nothing about Hezbollah's politics.

What is the point? When Haile Selassie was standing up to Mussolini's 
fascist invaders, should the left in the 1930s have "made the record" about 
how rotten the Dergue was? I tend to believe that these kinds of ritual 
condemnations are not really meant at advancing the liberation movements 
but in order to curry favor with middle-class opinion in the USA or Great 
Britain.

> The Spartacist League takes Workers World to task for "prettifying"
> Hezbollah in this manner, and notes that during the Cold War both the
> United States and Israel "fostered the growth of Islamic reaction as a
> counterweight to Communism and secular nationalism."

Be careful with Spartacist League literature. I have seen people who got 
into the habit of reading it grow hair on their eyeballs.

> I know it's not popular to say nice things about the Sparts, but on this
> issue they take a good position and Workers World takes a bad one.

If politics were about "positions", we'd be living under socialism since 
1903 or so.

> Three-way fight politics is still a new and primitive analytic tool, but I
> think it's an important framework for discussion and a helpful corrective
> to oversimplifications that are common on the left.

No, it is not. New Politics Magazine has been promoting this "analytic 
tool" for 40 years at least.



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