Fwd: [stephen gowans] A Lost Cause?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> August 20, 2004
>
> A Lost Cause?
>
> By Stephen Gowans
>
> <http://www3.sympatico.ca/sr.gowans/lost.html>http://www3.sympatico.ca/sr.gowans/lost.html 
>
>
> George Carlin once remarked that there a lot of dumb people in the world, 
> and then there are people who don't, at first, seem dumb, but once you get 
> to know them, turn out to be fucking stupid, full of shit, or fucking 
> nuts.  This, I can attest, is a truer statement than anything you can read 
> in this, the run up to the US presidential election, by Tariq Ali, David 
> Barsamian or Michael Moore.
>
> Dan Quayle, said Carlin, was all three: fucking stupid, full of shit, and 
> fucking nuts. Which is what I've come to think of the socialists for 
> Kerry, Marxists for Kerry, Communists for Kerry, progressives for Kerry, 
> antiwar activists for Kerry and Michael Moore ditto-heads for Kerry, 
> who've piled onto the Kerry for President bandwagon. To steal one of 
> Carlin's other lines and adapt it to the moment, their reasoning for 
> backing Kerry stinks so badly it could knock a buzzard off a shit-wagon. 
> Indeed, the weakness of their arguments is surpassed only by their 
> doggedness in crafting even more risibly weak ones whenever the last has 
> been demolished.
>
> Part of me says there's nothing to be gained by harping on upon the sheer 
> idiocy of antiwar activists backing a candidate any genuine Left analysis 
> would show to be, as strongly as Bush, an instrument of war on Iraq (and 
> beyond) -- an analysis, by the way, that Kerry's advisors corroborated 
> when they said their guy would in all probability have ordered the 
> invasion of Iraq, even knowing what he knows today about weapons of mass 
> destruction.
>
> What's truly astonishing about all this is that the two major candidates 
> can now openly declare they would have invaded Iraq without even the 
> pretext of banned weapons to provide a moral cover for raw imperialism, 
> and any expression of outrage, much less of a desire to build an action 
> plan to do something about it, has been sublimated harmlessly into getting 
> out the vote for a candidate who would have done the same as the candidate 
> who's to be punished for doing what the favored candidate would have done 
> anyway. It's like setting Charles Manson free to capture Jeffrey Dahmer.
>
> Equally amazing, is that Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which smiles on 
> the faux war on terrorism, thinks the US bombing of Afghanistan was all 
> right, and is aimed at anti-Bush opponents of the Iraq war, is still 
> vigorously defended in soft Left circles, though the purpose of the film 
> is to bolster support for a presidential candidate who voted for war on 
> Iraq and says he would in all probability have ordered US troops to march 
> on Baghdad had he been president. Astonishingly, one supporter called the 
> Moore film a work of art (which makes one wonder whether he's spent too 
> much sitting before his computer in a dark basement banging out posts to 
> Internet discussion groups, slowly transforming into a mushroom ? or at 
> least someone with the artistic sensibilities of one.) Someone else, his 
> feet firmly planted on the ground, called the film what it is: a 
> pro-imperialist screed whose sole purpose is to get out the vote for 
> Kerry. For that, he earned the soft Left's undying scorn.
>
> If that's not reason enough to wonder whether the fucking stupid, full of 
> shit, and fucking nuts Quayle has plenty of company in the MoveOn 
> organization, the US Communist Party, left discussion groups, and Michael 
> Moore fan clubs, along comes the Democratic Socialists of America to 
> publicly endorse Kerry, after Kerry says he would have invaded Iraq had he 
> been ensconced in the White House.
>
> It's enough to send one scurrying to the archives to dust off Phil Ochs' 
> "Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, I'm A Liberal." Ochs once remarked in 
> connection with his song that of all the various shades of political 
> opinion in the United States, the shadiest of all is the liberal, to which 
> he may have added the Democratic Socialist, 10 degrees to the left of 
> center when it doesn't matter, and 10 degrees to the right when it does.
>
> Which calls to mind Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Robert Jensen, 
> luminaries of the soft Left, who are voting for Nader, not Kerry, because 
> by an accident of geography, neither lives in a state where the vote is 
> going to be close. Kerry's going to take Massachusetts, where the first 
> two live, and Bush is sure to take Texas, where Jensen lives, so all three 
> can tilt 10 degrees to the left, without upsetting the Kerry apple cart. 
> Meanwhile, they're making damn sure it's understood that anyone who lives 
> in a swing state should give Nader (or any other alternative) a wide berth 
> and hold their nose by voting for Kerry.
>
> Lurching ataxically from this miasma of self-righteous hypocrisy are the 
> people who play word games to deceive, claiming they're not backing Kerry 
> -- they're just voting for him! That's like saying you're not dealing 
> drugs, you're just manufacturing them in your basement and distributing 
> them to dealers. Look, unless you're General Motors, Raytheon or pull in a 
> cool million every year in salary, bonuses and stock options -- and can 
> therefore afford to pitchfork money into the Kerry campaign ? what really 
> matters to Kerry is your vote. No amount of dissembling, self-delusion and 
> rationalizing will make marking an X for Kerry not equal to backing him, 
> or not equal, by extension, to backing the continued occupations of 
> Afghanistan and Iraq, looming confrontations with North Korea ("we will 
> seek dismantlement, not a freeze"), Iran ("we are going to do more than 
> simply allow Iran to continue down the path it's on"), plundering the oil 
> producing regions of the world ("the degree to which were are dependent on 
> foreign oil is a vulnerability we need to try to alter") and God knows 
> what else, in the service of aggrandizing corporate America, its 
> beneficiaries and representatives. That hardly seems to be the kind of 
> thing anyone who considers himself politically Left should be backing.
>
> The other part of me says go ahead and vent. There's no need to be 
> diplomatic, for diplomacy wasted on a lost cause is, itself, a lost cause. 
> And as to the charge that I'm simply undermining the desirable goal of 
> Left unity, it might be asked in what service this unity is to be put: 
> lining up behind a party and candidate that are as irrevocably instruments 
> of aggression and exploitation as the other major party and candidate ? in 
> other words, Left unity in support of Right politics? That's like saying 
> Christians must put their differences aside to line up behind a policy of 
> atheism.
>
> It should be clear to anyone who wants to spend a few moments reflecting 
> on the undignified, and I should quickly add, ongoing surrender of the 
> soft Left to capitalism at home and abroad, that US Marxists and 
> Democratic Socialists and Communists and progressives and anyone willing 
> to suffer through the sermons of Michael Albert (the Pope of the Church of 
> Noam Chomskyism, as one wag dubbed him) decided long ago that whoever the 
> Democrats picked as their presidential candidate -- even if it was the 
> ghost of Benito Mussolini -- would get their support come November. And 
> ever since they've been rationalizing a decision whose roots are sunk deep 
> in emotion and has nothing whatever to do with reason.
>
> It dawned on me one day that no matter how much like Bush Kerry is, there 
> will always be some difference between the two, which, no matter how 
> infinitesimal and insignificant, will be used to justify a vote for Kerry. 
> If their foreign policies are alike, Kerry supporters will seize on some 
> difference in social policy. If their social policies are the same, 
> Supreme Court appointments will be cited as an important distinguishing 
> feature. If Kerry says he'd make the same Supreme Court appointments as 
> Bush, something else will be found. Which isn't to say there are no 
> differences between the two; only that some difference will be used to 
> justify the decision Kerry-supporters made long ago to back the Democrats 
> come hell or high water. All they're doing now is trying to convince 
> themselves they're not fucking stupid, full of shit, and fucking nuts for 
> doing so. Hence, the lame rationalizations, including Noam Chomsky's small 
> policy differences can equal big real-world differences paralogism (the 
> small difference between Bush and Kerry can translate into important 
> implications), so approvingly cited by those who'll vote for a candidate 
> who would have invaded Iraq to punish the incumbent who did. An example of 
> how small policy differences can equal big real-world differences is 
> presumably given in this: Bush would continue the occupation of Iraq by a 
> coalition of the willing under US leadership, and Kerry would continue the 
> occupation of Iraq under US leadership with NATO along for the ride, if he 
> can convince the alliance to go along.
>
> It also dawned on me that soft Left backers of Kerry are using a cascading 
> system of justification that resembles the very same one used by Bush and 
> Tony Blair to justify the takeover of Iraq. Here's how it works: You make 
> a policy choice (invade Iraq or vote for the Democrats) and then come up 
> with a reason for doing so that has the advantage of plausibility (Saddam 
> won't give up his banned weapons or Kerry wouldn't have sent troops to 
> Mesopotamia). When critics shoot it down, or circumstances prove you 
> wrong, you invent a new one. When that reason is shown to be full of 
> holes, you come up with another, and so on. Eventually, you'll run out of 
> reasons, whereupon you can simply declare with great conviction, "Knowing 
> what I know today, I'd still do what I did." The events of the recent past 
> say most people will regard this as perfectly acceptable, indeed 
> admirable. Accordingly, if soft Left Kerry-supporters could be convinced 
> that Kerry and Bush are equally instruments of the same socioeconomic 
> system to the same degree (which they are) they would still say, "Well, 
> all the same, I'm voting for Kerry because I think he's the lesser evil," 
> which could mean that all in all they're pretty comfortable with the way 
> things are, but for a few tweaks they'd make here and there.
>
> It's clear soft Left support for Kerry is solid and impervious to reason. 
> Trying to soften it is like trying to persuade your teen-age daughter not 
> to go out with the three-timing, porno magazine photographer she's enrapt 
> with. The heart trumps the mind. The difference however is that your 
> teen-age daughter will eventually learn. Soft Left supporters of the 
> Democrats never do. This should be kept in mind by people who say: 
> "There's no point arguing with them. They've made up their minds, and all 
> you'll accomplish by belaboring the point is to alienate them. They'll 
> learn."  All of this is true enough, except the last point. They won't 
> learn, and the evidence is they've never learned. An intelligent 12 
> year-old not weighed down by infatuation with the myth that the Democrats 
> are the lesser evil, or more preposterously, a potentially progressive 
> party, could figure out that the Democrats have always, as much as the 
> Republicans, been as irrevocably committed to exploitation and aggression 
> at home and abroad, and, on occasion, more so. For example, Kerry is 
> opposed to Bush's plan to drawn down troops in south Korea, because?well, 
> the time is drawing near, he says, when we might have to give the north 
> Koreans a good shit kicking, for (gasp!) arming themselves to deter Uncle 
> Sam from giving them a good shit kicking. And it doesn't take a genius to 
> see that the Democratic presidential candidate of 2004 is as inextricably 
> a part of corporate America and its interests, and as unabashedly 
> committed to its aggrandizement at the expense of Iraq, Iran, Syria, 
> Sudan, north Korea, Cuba, emerging great power rivals, and the people of 
> the United States, as George W. Bush and his cabinet are. Which means what 
> soft Left supporters of the Democrats really are is infatuated, which is 
> to say, blind and silly, or if you prefer, fucking stupid, full of shit, 
> and fucking nuts.
>
> Are they a lost cause? At this point, the answer's pretty clear.