[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Hold On to Your Humanity (by Stan Goff)
Hold On to Your Humanity: An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq by Stan Goff (US Army Retired) Dear American serviceperson in Iraq, I am a retired veteran of the army, and my own son is among you, a paratrooper like I was. The changes that are happening to every one of you--some more extreme than others--are changes I know very well. So I'm going to say some things to you straight up in the language to which you are accustomed. In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, then based in northern Binh Dinh Province in what was then the Republic of Vietnam. When I went there, I had my head full of shit: shit from the news media, shit from movies, shit about what it supposedly mean to be a man, and shit from a lot of my know-nothing neighbors who would tell you plenty about Vietnam even though they'd never been there, or to war at all. The essence of all this shit was that we had to stay the course in Vietnam, and that we were on some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad Vietnamese, and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside of Oakland. We stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were dead and lots more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were dead. Ex-military people and even many on active duty played a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt. When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of trench war followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this suffering country presents a threat to the United States? But then I remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened the United States. Including me. When that bullshit story about weapons came apart like a two-dollar shirt, the politicians who cooked up this war told everyone, including you, that you would be greeted like great liberators. They told us that we were in Vietnam to make sure everyone there could vote. What they didn't tell me was that before I got there in 1970, the American armed forces had been burning villages, killing livestock, poisoning farmlands and forests, killing civilians for sport, bombing whole villages, and commiting rapes and massacres, and the people who were grieving and raging over that weren't in a position to figure out the difference between me--just in country--and the people who had done those things to them. What they didn't tell you is that over a million and a half Iraqis died between 1991 and 2003 from malnutrition, medical neglect, and bad sanitation. Over half a million of those who died were the weakest: the children, especially very young children. My son who is over there now has a baby. We visit with our grandson every chance we get. He is eleven months old now. Lots of you have children, so you know how easy it is to really love them, and love them so hard you just know your entire world would collapse if anything happened to them. Iraqis feel that way about their babies, too. And they are not going to forget that the United States government was largely responsible for the deaths of half a million kids. So the lie that you would be welcomed as liberators was just that. A lie. A lie for people in the United States to get them to open their purse for this obscenity, and a lie for you to pump you up for a fight. And when you put this into perspective, you know that if you were an Iraqi, you probably wouldn't be crazy about American soldiers taking over your towns and cities either. This is the tough reality I faced in Vietnam. I knew while I was there that if I were Vietnamese, I would have been one of the Vietcong. But there we were, ordered into someone else's country, playing the role of occupier when we didn't know the people, their language, or their culture, with our head full of bullshit our so-called leaders had told us during training and in preparation for deployment, and even when we got there. There we were, facing people we were ordered to dominate, but any one of whom might be pumping mortars at us or firing AKs at us later that night. The question we stated to ask is who put us in this position? In our process of fighting to stay alive, and in their process of trying to expel an invader that violated their dignity, destroyed their property, and killed their innocents, we were faced off against each other by people who made these decisions in $5,000 suits, who laughed and slapped each other on the back in Washington DC with their fat fucking asses stuffed full of cordon blue and caviar. They chumped us. Anyone can be chumped. That's you now. Just fewer trees and less water. We haven't figured out how to stop the pasty-faced, oil-hungry backslappers in DC yet, and it looks like you all might be stuck there for a little longer. So I want to tell you the rest of the story. I changed over
[Marxism-Thaxis] Ralp Dumain on Harry Wells on the History of Logic
A former student of the Marxist philosopher Harry Wells sent me a paper Wells distributed in his course, before McCarthyism caught up to Wells: Wells, Harry K. Historical Origins of the Logic of Classification and the Logic of Genesis. Oneonta, New York, Dept. of Philosophy, Hartwick College. October 1961. 53 pp. Based on chapters 6 7 of the author's 1950 dissertation Process and Unreality. Contents: Introduction: Stages in the Science of Logic Chapter 1: Logical and Ontological Principles: Laws of Thought and Laws of Being Chapter 2: Plato and Heraclitus Chapter 3: Aristotle's Logic of Classification Chapter 4: Hegel and Aristotle Chapter 5: Hegel's Logic of Genesis Conclusion: The Logic of Genesis and the Twentieth Century Crisis in Thought This is my capsule review. (1) First, I'm impressed with the distinction between laws of being (ontological view) and laws of thought (propositional view), and the historical relation posited between them. It is interesting to see the views of Jevons and Cohen and Nagel. My own position on formal logic has always been propositional, not ontological, but apparently this is at variance with many other philosophers throughout history. Wells poses the question, whether one can maintain ontological and propositional perspectives at variance with one another (p. 9-10). He seems to think that this won't work. I don't know. (2) It's interesting that he identifies the logic of genesis with Marxism and Existentialism, both philosophies exiled from mainstream western philosophy. I don't know what else to say about this, though. (3) The chapter on the ancient Greeks is fascinating, particularly the war of Plato against Heraclitus and Plato' dubious ontological motives. Similarly interesting is Aristotle's logic of classification. (4) The summary of Hegel's logic of genesis is also of great interest. (5) I am unhappy with the conclusion, though. First, the posited connection between logic and the sciences disturbs me. Secondly, the historical development of both. I can see the hiatus between the development of logic in Aristotle and the redefinition of the subject in Hegel's time. However, the connection between the development of logic and the development of the sciences is not at all clear to me. (6) Wells claims that science emerges from classification at the beginning of the 19th century. Also that logic, outside of Hegel, never caught up. But I see two great omissions. First, there is the development of modern physics from Galileo and Newton on. This is hardly a taxonomic science. Secondly, the development of physics is congruent with the development of the calculus, which is hardly a formalism of stasis. This is all completely missing from Wells' survey. (7) The next question would be the relation between logic and mathematics (calculus). Well, we know that calculus could not overcome its logical contradictions until well into the 19th century, but I'm not aware that logic itself was basically revised during this period. Mathematicians had to tolerate contradictions until they could overcome them. Calculus did not deal with qualitative change, of course, but it did learn how to overcome the logical contradictions of motion. (8) Logic itself began to evolve late in the 19th century, both with new formalisms--Frege, etc.--and with developments in the foundations of mathematics. The criticism of formal logic overlooks all of these developments and is hence way out of date. (9) All the sciences of course have developed way beyond taxonomy for a long time. They seem to have gotten along without any major preoccupations with logic, although there have been conceptual crises yet to be resolved. For example, quantum mechanics yielded attempts to apply three-valued logic to apply to indeterminate states, not to mention the (dialectical?) principle of complementarity. There might be an interesting conceptual crisis to which a new conception of logic might apply, but I'm not aware that any particular innovation has definitively taken root. Wells' examples (p. 49-50) are rather lame in comparison to these problems. (10) The question of why Hegel is completely overlooked by modern logic is well worth asking. G.H. von Wright gives some credit to Hegel even though Hegel is not part of his purview. But modern logic involves a number of developments of conceivable relevance to dialectics, not just in foundations of mathematics, but in many-valued logics, tense logic, paraconsistent logic (which admits contradictions), etc. Whether these can be considered the old static logics is debatable, but either way they should be investigated and compared to Hegel's logic and determined whether they adequately convey genesis and not merely classification. In logic there have also been opposing schools of ontological thought from the atomism of Russell to the holism of Quine. (11) Some of these
