Salon News 4/20/99 The "progressives' war" Nothing shows how outdated our concepts of "left" and "right" are more than the confusing politics behind NATO's war in Yugoslavia. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Joe Conason [...] The great American socialist Eugene Debs went to prison because he openly agitated against the World War I draft. A similar impulse propelled Norman Thomas, who during the 1930s headed the remnant of the party once led by Debs, into a strange coalition known as the America First movement organized mainly by right-wingers opposed to U.S. involvement in World War II. Besides Thomas, who later changed his mind, many leftists in that era insisted that there was no principled choice between the totalitarian Axis and the capitalist-imperialist Allies, right up until 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland. Echoes of the old America First rallies can be heard today in the motley domestic movement against NATO, which draws together the likes of Patrick Buchanan and Noam Chomsky. From the right, Buchanan is, in fact, the proper heir of the fascist sympathizers whose isolationism defined itself as America First, a term he proudly uses in his current presidential campaign. >From the left, Chomsky, of course, represents a different ideological perspective, developed during the Cold War when the horrific conflict in Vietnam and other Third World countries depleted the legitimacy of the struggle against communism. Under the strain of those bloodbaths, the Western alliance cracked but never quite split apart. And the young activists who took to the streets here and in Europe during that era learned to be deeply suspicious of military force as an instrument of foreign policy.
