Jim Devine wrote: > > Carrol Cox wrote: > > I haven't been following this thread and do not know the background. > But > > some things (for any u.s. left) are axiomatic and do not depend on > > analysis of specific situations. A u.S. leftists holds without > > qualification to the demand: No U.S. Troops abroad. > > I hate to bring up a counterexample which fits with that "e-mail > discussion law" (there's a better name but I don't remember it) about > all discussions eventually getting to this... but don't almost all > U.S. leftists make an exception to this "without qualification" axiom, > i.e., the fight against Hitler?
Actually, I no longer think this is necessrily an exception. Joh Mage, incidentally, believes that the USSR would eventually have defeated the German invasion and that this would have been preferable to the actual outcome of the war. The assumption is that Hitler's Germany represented some sort of ultimate and irreversible force for sheer evil. Something like Orwell's vision of perfect evil in 1984. I'm not convinced. It is pretty obvious that even before the war ended the U.S. had begun to impose dreadful costs on the world's peoples. The militarily pointless mass bombings of German and Japanese cities. The maneuvering to place the USSR in as difficult a position as possible. The crushing of popular forces in Germany under the occupation: forces that had survived 12 years of repression under Hitler, whose security police were apparently less efficient than those of the U.S. I won't go so far as to flatly deny that WW2 was an exception to my rule -- but I won't say it wasn't, either. The Nazi regime would not have lasted forever, and while it's replacement would not have been democracy it would have been a more ordinary tryanny, not a bd counterweight to the u.s. rampaging about the world as has been the case. Carrol Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
