En relaci�n a Re: [CrashList] Self Determination- Support It!,
el 24 Aug 00, a las 7:19, aaron hoffer dijo:
>
> >
> >I understand that you can feel it intangible. In my own country it is
> >so visible that it has been carefully erased from the political
> >dictionary. It takes less than a minute to trace back the origin of
> >every and each of our tragedies to imperialist domination. This is
> >our only, grim and undesired, privilege as a Third World country.
>
> Nester, you are of course correct. It is those of us living in
> the industrialized nations that have a hard time seeing imperialism as
> more than a theoretical concept.
Don't worry. Here we have a hard time seeing imperialism as less than
a nameless host of disjointed empirical facts. Only that the weight
of those facts is increasingly overwhelming.
> What I was trying to get across, is
> that many in the underdeveloped world have more immediate life and
> death struggles to attend to, and in order to fight the bigger fight
> it may be necessary to take down one imperialist puppet regime and
> settling, for the time being, with another "boot licker" who is less
> brutal.
This is reasonable. But the problem is that if it is not _we
ourselves_ who take the puppet down, it is worse than if we let him
there. The substitution of formal constitutional governents for the
Junta, in Argentina, is a good example of what I mean. Now we are
worse off, not better off, due to many reasons. But the worst of all
them is that the system imposed by the Junta reached almost ten years
of extra life because people had been slumbered into the idea that
the reason why our fate had turned so dark after 1976 was absence of
"democracy".
> This in turn gives the breathing room necessary, for the
> people to take on the larger battle.
Again an Argentinian example: this was possible when, after the
massive upheavals of 1969-1971, people here gained their right to
vote for a President of our free choice. We Argentinians chose a
moderate president, General Per�n (for a third term), in 1973, and
many did so to gain our own breathing room. But if this was even
possible, it is because we fought against imperialism in the first
place. The two years of "bourgeois democracy" under Per�n were
diametrally the oppossite of the ten years of "bourgeois democracy"
from Alfon'sin to De la R�a since 1989. But the former was a
"national" (that is, antiimperialist) democracy, while the latter is
a "colonial" (that is imposed by imperialism) one.
>
> >
> >Those of us lucky enough to be living in " the belly of the
> > > beast" need to be building movements that focus on the long term
> > > dismantlement of this horrendous system. At the same time I think
> > > we need to be supporting those in the periphery and semi-periphery
> > > to fight against those that make their lives intolerable, even if
> > > that means they may, temporarily, continue to be dominated by
> > > imperialist forces[which I think in its modern sense is synonymous
> > > with corporate-financial globalization].
> >
> >This is the basic mistake. Only the corporate-financial globalization
> >makes our lives intolerable. Please give me examples and I will show
> >how, in each case.
> >
> The only example that comes immediately to mind is South Africa.
> South Africa is undoubtedly under the boot of western imperialism. At the
> same time the victory over apartheid was a major victory for the
> people and allows the population to focus on the deeper roots of their
> oppression.
But it was not due to corporate-financial power that South Africans
shook apartheid from their shoulders. It was _against_ it. Your
example makes me think that I did not understand you well. If you
mean that under the current circumstances any reasonably constituted
government in a Thrid World country must know that the power of
imperialism is immense and that it will have to negotiate a path
across a dark and dangerous wood, then we agree. What I wanted to
stress (and I still do) is that no "democracy" can be imposed from
abroad, either by corporations or by good willed citizens in the
First World.
> I also think that sanctions on Iraq should be lifted even
> if they would be thrown into the waiting arms of the French, Russians
> and the major oil companies. The misery the Iraqi people are enduring
> is to horrific and must be stopped.
Again. The Iraqui are struggling themselves against the sanctions. In
this case, again, it is Third World people who are struggling, and
you are giving a support that is, of course, most welcome. I
understood you were proposing some kind of support to interventionism
by First World states in the Third World, in the name of democratic
rights and so on. The true face of this is, for example, Colombia.
>
> >It is up to those of us in the
> > > core to create the conditions so that all of of humanity can break
> > > these repressive chains.
> >
> >Yes, but while you don't we owe to ourselves the duty to go on our
> >own struggle. And, of course, we do not deserve to be liberated by
> >"others". Humankind, as Tahir hotly asserts (suppossedly against my
> >own views) is a unity and liberation of humanity a unified struggle.
> >But this unity is not a seamless, monolithic unity. The problem lies
> >in the fact the previous sentence points to.
> >
>
> If we can change things in our home countries enough that we take
> the boots off the throats of those struggling against imperialism in their
> own countries then that would be enough.
Ah, again in agreement. Glad to realize that.
> Unfortunately the education
> and will of the first world citizens is a long way from being at the
> point where this is feasible. So until then we struggle together,
> separately.
>
> Take care, Aaron.
Same to you,
N�stor Miguel Gorojovsky
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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