Waiting for the phone to ring
Yesterday I emailed a short letter to the editor of the Windsor Star and today I was hoping they would phone to confirm for publication. But this call was from the organizer of Saturday's local anti-war demo.
She wanted to know if I could come and speak on behalf of the Haiti Solidarity group. For a moment I was tempted but then I politely declined, explaining I was on the other side when it came to Iraq and Afghanistan. Bewildered but still friendly, she said we should talk about it sometime and said goodbye. Most, maybe all, of the other group members are anti-war but it seems they all have other commitments for the weekend. No one seems to have told her about my eclectic politics.
As I finished Johnson's piece the phone rang again. It was Seymour. I'd promised to dig up an article by Marty on imperialism after Lenin. I was happy to let him know I'd found it. I added I would like to send him the Johnson speech too, since it touched on many of the issues we've been discussing in recent months. Johnson, I reminded him, had written a history of the third camp and wasn't Seymour a third camper? No, Seymour denied, his position came from Lenin's "revolutionary defeatism." How is it, I asked, that I could hang around you guys for 35 years and only now be hearing these terms. I read my letter to him and he wasn't impressed. We argued for quite a while and then ended the call on a note of mutual frustration.
I googled revolutionary defeatism and found this article by Hal Draper. Now I know why my letter will not convince the Leninists.
It's getting late and the Star never called so I might as well blog it:
My friends in the antiwar movement will be demonstrating this weekend, demanding Canada and the US get their troops out of Afghanistan and/or Iraq. Instead of joining them as I did in decades past I am going to lift a glass in celebration of the overthrow of the Taliban and the regime of Saddam Hussein. I do so in solidarity with the people in those two countries who are relying on Nato and Coalition troops to aid them in the pursuit of peace, freedom and democracy.
If this seems to my old friends a strange position for a socialist to take, I suggest they read Karl Marx on the American Civil War. He took the side of an unpopular American president who ran roughshod over civil liberties while conducting a brutal conflict that tore families and the country apart. The end of slavery then, and the end of totalitarian and fascist states today, are worth fighting for.
Posted: Thu - March 16, 2006 at 11:52 PM
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Published On: Sep 12, 2007 03:13 PM