Yoshie wrote:
On 1/16/07, Marvin Gandall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I don't know what's being disputed here. I'm not championing Fatah as a
party of the left any more than I would the contemporary ANC or the
Sandinistas
To my knowledge, the ANC before the fall of Apartheid and the
Sandinistas while their revolution lasted never went down to the low
of Fatah. Can an organization that is supposed to be opposed to the
Israeli occupation take Tel Aviv's and Washington's support and
subvert the elected leadership of their own people and be still
considered "the left"? If so, what does "the left" mean? It really
means nothing, and we might as well give up meaningless terms like
that.
=========================
What was qualitatively "lower" about the armed struggle waged by Fatah and
the PLO against the Israeli occupation as opposed to the armed struggle
waged by the ANC against the apartheid regime and the Sandinistas against
Somoza? Wasn't the role played by Arafat and the other underground Fatah
leaders an honourable one prior to their assumption of "government"
responsibilities under the Oslo accords?
As far as the present is concerned, how sharp a line can be drawn between
Abbas' Fatah, Mbeki's ANC, and Ortega's FSLN? Abbas is under much greater
internal and external pressure than either Mbeki or Ortega, so his decisions
are apt to be much more controversial and contested and more widely
discredited. But given the parallel evolution of the three former resistance
movements, if it were Fatah governing South Africa or the Sandinistas
governing Palestine or the ANC governing Nicaragua, I don't think you'd see
much difference in the policies and direction each would pursue in these
different national contexts. You could probably add Sinn Fein to this list.
The problem is that the resistance movements historically supported by the
left in Palestine, South Africa, Nicaragua, Northern Ireland and elsewhere
always found themselves militarily stalemated and under political pressure,
including from a large part of their own base, to reach some accomodation
with their adversaries - one which inevitably fell far short of their
objectives, and put them in office under conditions which were bound to
compromise them in terms of what they could deliver to their people and
often corrupted them politically and personally, all these developments not
being unrelated to each other. Others on the left lists, however, see this
evolution quite differently and more subjectively: as movements betrayed by
sellout leaderships which would have taken a different course had they and
not them been responsible for the outcome. I doubt it, but there is no way
of establishing this one way or another. It's all speculation, a good deal
of it born of frustration with the historical record.
We agree that the "left" is so vague and elastic a concept as to be useless
for analytical purposes, and has confused more than clarified our own
discussion.
