The Peace Crawl

Today is the day for the anti-Iraq War demonstration in DC.

There's a typically splenetic exchange in Marc Cooper's combox. Marc, it seems, thinks the speakers' list, studded with the usual celebrity suspects, along with the fact that the PR front woman for the march is a representative of the Communist Party USA (which I honestly did not know still existed), shows that whoever is responsible for these choices is "overtly dumb" and a "lunkhead." Marc wonders why.

Part of the answer is the fact that organizing one of these things is mind-numbingly dumb, especially when it's a "coalition" of fringe and front groups. Who has the motivation for showing up? It's people who might as well be selling the Watchtower at a Greyhound station by holding it up and hoping someone will buy. The Witnesses have God's telephone number, the sects have the key to history, and they've all set up a "Free Mumia" committee or whatnot. They're all trolling the coalition committees and at the demonstration will be trolling the crowd for recruits.

If you're just a citizen who thinks that Bush has blown the war, or starting it was a stupid idea, but you neither enjoy the thought of the U.S. losing nor think about being one of the 144,000 saved, you might show up. You won't be able to hear the speakers anyway, and if you do, they'll lose you soon enough with whatever flavor of cant they bring to the podium. What you won't do is find your way to the organizing committee, and insist on a sane speakers' list.

Michelle Malkin will have any easy time pointing out the prevalence of moonbats at the demonstration, of course, and on Monday the usual suspects will show up in their offices at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, and things will get back to normal.

Assigned reading: Robert Michels on the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and Hal Draper on the Anatomy of the Microsect.

Quaker Picnic Talk From an Unrepentant Marxist

Of course, some of us who have quaint ideas about right and wrong and international law might quibble over the right of the U.S. Marines to invade and occupy such countries, an act that Marine General Smedley Butler once described as a “racket”."

-- Louis Proyect

Louis Proyect, of course, self-defines as "The Unrepentant Marxist."

It's quaint that a Marxist revolutionary cites "right and wrong" and "international law" to support his criticism of U.S. policy.

If I remember right, in most varieties of the Marxist glass bead game, "right and wrong" is merely the expression of class interest, and "international law" the operating rules of the tyrants' cartel.

In this calculus, blaming a bourgeois government for violating international law is like blaming a rattlesnake for being venomous.

There's a whole tradition in this country, of course, of leftists trying to wrap themselves in the flag. "Communism," said Earl Browder, "is 20th Century Americanism," and when Stalin sent American Communists to die for the Spanish Republic, their expeditionary force was styled the "Abraham Lincoln Brigade." And who can forget the "Ballad for Americans?"

In 1935 the Comintern proclaimed a Popular Front policy that downplayed revolution and emphasized alliances with reformers and other leftists against the common menace of fascism. Embracing this stance with the slogan "Communism is twentieth-century Americanism," the CPUSA shifted to support of Roosevelt and sought a cooperative role on the left of the broad New Deal coalition. Communists achieved a limited but nonetheless significant presence in main stream politics through their participation in New York's American Labor Party, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, the End Poverty in California movement, the Wisconsin Farmer-Labor Progressive Federation, and the Washington [state] Commonwealth Federation. Two members of Congress, Representatives John Bernard (1937–1938) of Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party and Hugh De Lacy (1945–1946), a Washington State Democrat, became secret members. Two open communists won election to the New York City Council.

Communists also took leading although usually secret roles in numerous liberal-left advocacy groups such as the American League for Peace and Democracy, National Negro Congress, American Writers Union, and American Youth Congress. Communists had no role in founding the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), but in 1936, after secret negotiations, CIO leaders hired more than fifty communist organizers and brought into the CIO several small communist-led unions.

Source: here.

Years ago, a friend of mine, a "red diaper baby," told me of going to a Youth Congress in Russia. The slogan of the day was "Mir e Druzhba!" or "Peace and Friendship." They went around Mir-and-druzhbing. This, of course, was the language of a Quaker picnic, not class struggle.

A Learned, Fat Jew With an Accent

Marc Cooper, one of the more interesting lefties on the blogosphere, cut his political teeth translating for the Allende régime in Chile, upon his escape ending up neighboring Argentina in time to experience the horrid era of the generals.

In remembrance of the 30th anniversary of the coup that initiated this era, Marc has posted an account of his own brief but unpleasant encounter with the death squads of President General Videla in their green Ford Falcons. Marc's account is well-written and riveting. It ends, realistically, with Marc puking his guts out.

Marc's comboxes are inhabited by a band of lefties who like to fight the perpetual fights between different forms of left-wing purity--how supportive to be of the Democratic Party, guaranteed to be feckless and compromising or corrupt; or how much hope, mistrust, or disappointment to have in this or that foreign leader who spouts "progressive" or socialist rhetoric. Then there are a couple of conservative trolls who manage to evoke the intemperate side of the lefties.

The portly figure of Henry Kissinger was evoked this time. There is a predilection among some on the left to blame Kissinger (a perfect villain--a learned, fat Jew with an accent, half Peter Lorre and half Sydney Greenstreet) for the rise of the Latin American dictators of his era, notably Chile's Pinochet and the Argentine generals. The CIA, authorized to act by Henry, was behind it all, then, goes the refrain. Of course, the CIA is also incompetent insofar as it overestimated the power of the Soviet Union when it was about to implode, and managed not to notice that Saddam Hussein had junked his WMD programs well before the recent war.

Henry Kissinger, of course, was the preeminent advocate of realpolitik. Neither ideology nor human rights were his primary concern, but the balance of power. Hence, to minimize the effects of the loss of Vietnam, he courted China, notwithstanding Mao's bloody record. And to preserve "stability" in South America Kissinger was perfectly happy to reject the socialist Allende and to support General Pinochet.

The same people who denounce Kissinger of course reject the present war in Iraq, which was launched in the name of democratizing Iraq, and in the wilder dreams of its proponents, the entire Middle East.

There is a difficulty. If we are to avoid intervention even against a criminal like Saddam, the alternative is engage in diplomacy, a process that requires toleration of and dialogue with nasty régimes of right and left. We cannot limit ourselves to communion with saints, because these are hard to come by in the anarchy that is international affairs. (Neither can we lay claim to sainthood, pace the meme of American exceptionalism).

It was Jimmy Carter, successor to Kissinger's last boss, the late Gerald Ford, who began to make a policy fetish of "human rights," sometimes to the exclusion of what seemed at the time to be the national interest. Since then human rights, national assertiveness, and American exceptionalism have merged in strange ways, providing rationales for the bombing of Serbia and the invasion of Saddam's Iraq.

A Kissingerian realpolitik might have resisted the breakup of Yugoslavia and the impulse to democratize the Middle East with tanks. Although it no doubt would have encouraged the conduct of business as usual with the likes of Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, by avoiding war it might have led to better outcomes than we have seen.

Sacrificing self-dramatization to common sense. No "vision thing." Perfect for the part.