councilor.org
| Source | Charles Brown |
| Date | 04/04/30/13:00 |
| Well said, nicely put, Chris,
Lesser evil , indeed. We do have an American tradition of rooting for the underdog. There's even a play called "Damned Yankees" where the devil helps the last place baseball team beat the New York Yankees for the championship. Charles From: Chris Burford The hegemonic coalition forces are not going to get encircled and be forced to surrender, but Fallujah is arguably the Stalingrad of this war - the advanced point that the invaders could not take, the point where they found their logistical, and in this case, particularly their political, lines of communication gravely over extended. They have run out of time and space. How to express it? In practice, ever since Sep 11 2002 everyone on any internet list I have seen has been remarkably self disciplined in what they write. Really it amounts to self-censorship. If one believes that ones own country is an aggressor, and aggressors should be punished, it is hard not to rejoice at a defeat for aggression. But how to express it tactically? Logically until the aggressors withdraw, every extra death of a coalition soldier adds to the pressure for withdrawal, but one cannot celebrate this in the middle of Time Square, without being shall we say, misunderstood. Also defeatism for the hegemons will not automatically mean revolution, though it could dent hegemony internationally very substantially over the next decade. So a progressive policy cannot necessarily be called "revolutionary" defeatism, and it must not come over that it is a good thing for ordinary soldiers to die in an imperialist war, out of some sort of moralistic blood atonement. I believe Lenin suggested that it is in this sort of situation that the term "lesser evil" is relevant. So to avoid getting outflanked by enemies, how should polticians like George Galloway in Scotland, or Kucinich in the States, comment on the public record about Iraq's Stalingrad? And how should we? |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho