Re: Re: A Day When Mahdi Army Showed Its Other Side
On Nov 30, 2006, at 12:51 AM, Jim Straub wrote:
The aspect of this I notice right off the bat is how Doug et al’s
“god they’re all horrible” attitude, while consistent, has the air
of fiddling and shrugging while around the world a lot of people
are fighting and dying in some very serious battles that eventually
will be won or lost for better or worse.
Not exactly. I’ve said more times than I can count that it’s good
that Hezbollah kicked Israel out of Lebanon, that the resistance in
Iraq is making life difficult for the occupiers, and that Iran is
perfectly justified in wanting a nuclear bomb. But I follow what I
think is a pretty standard Trotskyist line, honed from all my years
of reading Workers Vanguard: support for resistance to imperialism
shouldn’t extend to prettifying the agents of that resistance - in
this case, mainly a bunch of authoritarian theocrats. Yes their rise
is in large part a result of the destruction of the secular left, but
the cheerleading we see for the theocrats in certain circles is a
sign of the exhaustion and disillusionment of the Western left. While
I certainly understand the exhaustion and disillusionment, and spend
a good bit of the day suffering from it, I don’t feel the need to
embrace the empire’s latest enemies simply because they chant “Death
to America.”
Doug