(np) Hitch-22

[Michael Bailey]

yup, good points.

and plus, the pacifist solution in any given case would not involve
enriching a bunch of war pigs

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 11:27 PM, Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com> wrote:
> The Civil War ( War Between the States, War of the Rebellion, War of
> Northern Aggression etc) was just that. The US didn't invade another
> country to stop slavery there. The slave holding states (with a few
> exceptions) made "pre-emptive" war on the industrialized north. Acting
> as the world's policeman is fraught with unintended and unforeseen
> consequences. What if Harry Truman told De Gaul to go to hell and
> backed Ho Chi Minh's independence movement? What if we didn't
> intervene to reinstall a corrupt Shah of Iran? American foreign
> intervention and adventurism, no matter how well-intended, has a bad
> track record. I don't share Hitchen's enthusiasm for sending in the
> Marines, maybe because so many people I know and love are or have been
> Marines.
>
> The Marsh Arabs benefited from the invasion and overthrow. The Kurds
> are a mixed bag. I doubt that most Iraqis are really better off with
> the chaos, violence and religious division that has taken place since.
> I don't buy it. Saddam was brutal (as are many other dictators) and
> violent toward his own people, but he was contained and there was even
> some autonomy for his Kurdish victims. He was in no position to
> threaten his neighbors.There were no "weapons of mass destruction"
> despite Bush's inability to pronounce "nuclear" .He would eventually
> die. A popular uprising was not out of the question.
>
> Now we have a lot of dead people and an Iran looking to its left and
> right and saying "Maybe we out to get a really big fucking bomb?"
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 8:36 PM, Michael Bailey
> <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>> he laments the lack of an international socialist movement to which
>> one can belong
>>
>> he applied for and received US citizenship (and thinks NYC swings more
>> than London do)
>>
>> thus I believe he believes in what believers might call the Church Militant
>>
>> and points to Marx's support of Lincoln's stand against slavery (or,
>> if that is inaccurate, how about, he supported Lincoln's measures in
>> the Civil War as being the only way to stop the spread of slavery in
>> the US)
>>
>> I read that Marx on the Civil War thing a couple years ago, someplace
>> funky linked to it so I wound up reading it by mistake, and it was
>> quite impressive!  To the point of making me wonder if pacifism had a
>> better way to solve that problem.
>>
>> I think he probably would want to go ahead and have the US change the
>> regimes in all those places you mentioned.
>>
>> Displays some good arguments, 's all I'm sayin'
>>
>> What I want to do, is backscatter pacifism so nobody ever deposed
>> Mossadegh, a-and the US just bought Cuba from Spain instead of going
>> to war, and let Allende be, and for gosh sakes no Iran Contra, etc
>> etc...
>>
>> A plan even less practical, for the moment, isn't it?
>> and how WOULD one eliminate slavery?
>>
>