The word "fascist" has been too much abused through use to refer to any extreme rightist tendency or state -- coming to be nothing but a generic term for all varieties of authoritarian states and anti-democratic tendencies and movements. It is not even a very useful term when applied to those who self-label as such.
In any case, I'm still waiting for someone to explain why u.s. leftists need to have any opinion on internal conflicts over which they can not possibly have any material impact. Leftists of course have _no_ power over anything in the u.s. today -- BUT at least in principle our activity MAY, at some point have impact both on domestic events in the U.S. AND on U.S. foreign policy. And our _only_ influence, even potential influence, on u.s. foreign policy is to oppose it, whatever it may be. There has not been a single u.s. foreign action since 1945 that did not make the world much worse for thousands or millions or billions of people around the world. (As far as I know, this is probably true of all the other major powers at this time: leftists in all of them, in respect to their foreign policy, should be shouting NO, period.) So discussion of events in the Ukraine is either (a) academic, which is defensible, or (b) pretend to be of political relevance, in which case it is at best idealist, at worse disruptive of left thought. Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
