The Dirty War of the Tough-Minded Liberals Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky & Nader By MARK HAND
About two weeks ago, I reviewed Diana Johnstone's Fools' Crusade, an excellent book that takes a critical look at U.S. and European intervention in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Johnstone explains how a large number of people on the political left fell so deeply for the propaganda campaign to Hitlerize the regime of Slobodan Milosevic that they were willing to support NATO's brutal weeks-long aerial bombardment of Serbia.
Soon after writing the review, I came across an op-ed piece in the Washington Post by E.J. Dionne that proved Johnstone's thesis was not exclusively applicable to the period of Yugoslavia's breakup. Certain left-of-center opinion-makers are as feverish for U.S. wars of conquest in the 21st century as they were for the military campaigns against Serbia in the 1990s. In the post-9/11 world, liberals have forgotten that, as Johnstone explains, "humanitarian intervention was the standard pretext for all the Western imperialist conquests of the past."
In his column, Dionne confers high praise on a new book edited by George Packer entitled "The Fight Is For Democracy," which contains writings by what Dionne calls a "gathering of tough-minded liberals." What makes these liberals so tough-minded? In Dionne's mind, a tough-minded liberal (TML) is someone who's not afraid to give the U.S. military a green light to wage war under certain circumstances. In other words, the TMLers support invading and pillaging countries as long as the invading and pillaging is performed in the name of American democracy.
Dionne locates rhetorical gems in Packer's book that he believes prove certain liberals "are ready to criticize their own side." Here, Dionne distorts the debate over U.S. foreign policy occurring on the left. Since when did Noam Chomsky and others of his libertarian socialist bent switch to the Democratic Party's side? I would suggest that Dionne's American empire-loving liberals are as far apart ideologically from the legions of Chomskyites as members of Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert's regime, who used the German Freikorps to kill Rosa Luxembourg in 1919, were from the leftist revolutionaries of post-World War I Germany.
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/hand10202003.html
--
The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
