ed miliband
6th July 2010, 13:28
I'm arguing with a guy who thinks Hitchens is the shit and Orwell would have supported the war in Iraq because it liberated the Iraqi people from Ba'athism. He also claims to be a socialist and says that everyone on the Kurdish left supported the 'liberation' of Iraq.
I approached it from a proletarian internationalist point of view to which he accused me of supporting fascism and tyranny for not supporting the invasion. He then more or less said nobody in the west is proletariat, that they are all members of the bourgoisie...
He keeps going back to people like Nick Cohen, George Orwell and Hitchens, and acts as if my approach is crazy and a scourge on the left.
Here are some quotes:
So essentially you would not fight. You are then completely and utterly in favour of allowing Saddam Husseins regime to continue terrorising and torturing its population. To continue in its mission to completely exterminate an ethnic minority and persecute the Shiite Muslim majority. As well as the countless and barbaric human rights abuses, and the Iraqi state being used as a shelter for some of the worlds most wanted terrorists?
So what? Economic interest was quite obviously not the driving force behind this war. Neither was capitalism. II point you as i point everyone to the history of US foreign policy in Latin America during the 20th century, and indeed the entire world.
Why did the USA establish a democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why spend trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on a war to establish a state run by its people? You will note that it is a complete break with previous wars and interventions that were fought for economic and capitalist expansion. Those previous interventions would be the assassination of democratic leaders and installation of men like Saddam, tyrants who could hold the population under brutal control for entire decades. They would form no barrier at all to American produce and economic dominance etc..
During the Bosnian war, the majority of the left wing were umming and awwing about intervention to save the Bosnian Muslims who were being ethnically cleansed by Serb ethno nationalists. It was not your chomskies or your Kleins who were calling for the destruction of the Serbian fascists. It was prominent Neo conservatives who would late occupy high positions when planning the liberation of Iraq.
But there was no oil in Bosnia, there were no resources or scope for any substantial economic impact. The Neo cons were not even in power. So why did they so vehemently call for the salvation and emancipation of the Bosnians, who fought as part of a real resistance akin to the Spanish civil war. Who fought against fascism for freedom and liberty, with crests combining the symbology of all religions and creeds, of all ethnicity's untied in one common purpose.
The left didn't lose its way during the liberation of Iraq. It lost its way back in the early nineties when it employed dogmatic arguments like yours to justify ignoring the 40,000 bosniaks who had just been slaughtered raped and tortured in Srebrenica.
I at least am fully confident in the fact that i am consistently against totalitarianism. You are merely a member of an ignoble tradition amongst sections of the left that were always willing to sacrifice the principles of democracy and liberty should they collide with the need to keep one's anti-Western, anti-capitalist and specifically anti-American credentials in a pristine condition. George Orwell identified it and stood against it, so does Christopher Hitchens and others like Nick Cohen.
As Hitchens says to anybody with views like yours. You just can't stand the fact that Iraq is now ruled by a pro-Western, pro-US, democratically elected, secular, socialist Kurd with an agreeable sense of humour, rather than an anti-Western, fascist, genocidal, resource-stealing dictator and his brutal sons.
And so on....
I think I know how to approach it, but help would be apprectiated.
I approached it from a proletarian internationalist point of view to which he accused me of supporting fascism and tyranny for not supporting the invasion. He then more or less said nobody in the west is proletariat, that they are all members of the bourgoisie...
He keeps going back to people like Nick Cohen, George Orwell and Hitchens, and acts as if my approach is crazy and a scourge on the left.
Here are some quotes:
So essentially you would not fight. You are then completely and utterly in favour of allowing Saddam Husseins regime to continue terrorising and torturing its population. To continue in its mission to completely exterminate an ethnic minority and persecute the Shiite Muslim majority. As well as the countless and barbaric human rights abuses, and the Iraqi state being used as a shelter for some of the worlds most wanted terrorists?
So what? Economic interest was quite obviously not the driving force behind this war. Neither was capitalism. II point you as i point everyone to the history of US foreign policy in Latin America during the 20th century, and indeed the entire world.
Why did the USA establish a democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why spend trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on a war to establish a state run by its people? You will note that it is a complete break with previous wars and interventions that were fought for economic and capitalist expansion. Those previous interventions would be the assassination of democratic leaders and installation of men like Saddam, tyrants who could hold the population under brutal control for entire decades. They would form no barrier at all to American produce and economic dominance etc..
During the Bosnian war, the majority of the left wing were umming and awwing about intervention to save the Bosnian Muslims who were being ethnically cleansed by Serb ethno nationalists. It was not your chomskies or your Kleins who were calling for the destruction of the Serbian fascists. It was prominent Neo conservatives who would late occupy high positions when planning the liberation of Iraq.
But there was no oil in Bosnia, there were no resources or scope for any substantial economic impact. The Neo cons were not even in power. So why did they so vehemently call for the salvation and emancipation of the Bosnians, who fought as part of a real resistance akin to the Spanish civil war. Who fought against fascism for freedom and liberty, with crests combining the symbology of all religions and creeds, of all ethnicity's untied in one common purpose.
The left didn't lose its way during the liberation of Iraq. It lost its way back in the early nineties when it employed dogmatic arguments like yours to justify ignoring the 40,000 bosniaks who had just been slaughtered raped and tortured in Srebrenica.
I at least am fully confident in the fact that i am consistently against totalitarianism. You are merely a member of an ignoble tradition amongst sections of the left that were always willing to sacrifice the principles of democracy and liberty should they collide with the need to keep one's anti-Western, anti-capitalist and specifically anti-American credentials in a pristine condition. George Orwell identified it and stood against it, so does Christopher Hitchens and others like Nick Cohen.
As Hitchens says to anybody with views like yours. You just can't stand the fact that Iraq is now ruled by a pro-Western, pro-US, democratically elected, secular, socialist Kurd with an agreeable sense of humour, rather than an anti-Western, fascist, genocidal, resource-stealing dictator and his brutal sons.
And so on....
I think I know how to approach it, but help would be apprectiated.