[PEN-L:30517] RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: american solipsism redu x

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:30514] Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: american solipsism redux

I wrote:>>right. [agreeing that personalities are secondary]  If our goal is to fight Dubya's war against Iraq, it's wrong to be too conscious of some author's checkered past. During the Vietnam war, for example, it would have been a mistake to exclude someone from the movement because he or she supported the US in Korea or some other conflict.<<

Louis:> This does not make sense to me. George W. Bush says that he is going to war  against Iraq because of 9/11. This is not the same thing as somebody supporting the Korean war and opposing Vietnam. If somebody wrote an outspoken defense of the war in Afghanistan, as Cooper did, I would not invite him to speak at a rally. Of course, Cooper detests the people organizing such rallies so it is a moot point.<

do you organize rallies, deciding who to invite to speak?

It seems to me that the effectiveness of a rally might actually be _increased_ if there's a speaker who favored a previous imperialist adventure but who now says that he's against the current adventure. More concretely, that shows that even folks who agree with the vast majority of U.S. citizens -- i.e., that the war against Afghanistan was a Good Thing -- are opposed to the current war against Iraq.

It depends on the kind of rally -- and the kind of movement -- we want. If we want to have one that has a very clear and "correct" line, we should exclude people who have sinned (politically) in the past. On the other hand, if the idea is to have present a bunch of different people with different viewpoints that are willing to unite against the war (including Democrats, maybe some Republicans & libertarians, liberals, Catholic priests, etc., etc.) in order to simply oppose the war, to save some Iraqi and other lives, then the sinners might be welcome.

The second kind of rally seems more likely to be successful, at least in terms of size -- though we have to avoid the trap of limiting the nature of the speakers allowed in order to please the Big Names who we invite. Further, if we look at the most recent past, we can see that the movement against capitalist globalization was pretty successful despite the fact that they didn't exclude various groups and personalities from their demonstrations, etc.

Of course, this is a big debate. Back during the US war against Vietnam, there were some who argued strenuously for the second (broader) type of rally, saying that "Out Now" was a sufficient slogan. But there were some reasonable arguments against them. I can't settle this question here or now.

>>While we might want to be conscious of someone's checked past, that consciousness shouldn't blind us to future possibilities. That's one reason why I think it's a mistake to create "enemies lists" ("Cooper, Hitchens, etc.") Another is that the _true_ enemies are not on the (broadly defined) left as much as in the Bush League.<<

 
> Actually, it is Cooper and Hitchens who have been creating the enemies list. Using the bourgeois press, they have been slandering their opponents on the left as insufficiently devoted to secularism, the stars-and-stripes and Salman Rushdie's novels. For a nifty reply to Hitchen's latest screed in the Boston Globe, read Edward Herman's reply at:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=2370<

But I never see them creating enemies lists on pen-l, so I can't talk to them.

I definitely think it's good to counter slanders.

Jim