On Sep 20, 2009, at 7:54 PM, nada wrote: > Shane (and Nestor), > I wasn't talking about 1945. I was talking about 1942, 43 and 44.
After Coral Sea and Midway Japan had strategically lost, just as the Germans had strategically lost after Stalingrad. The US occupation of the Philippines was part of its imperial strategy and had no *military* purpose. That imperial strategy--defined in Cairo in 1943 in the Unconditional Surrender doctrine of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill--was intentionally and unambiguously counterrevolutionary. How can the Allied use and counterrevolutionary manipulation of resistance movements led by "patriots" offset in the slightest degree the holocaust inflicted on the workers of Hamburg, Essen, Berlin, Hanover, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc., etc? > > When Marxists say "No to the Imperialist War" I wonder, and have > always wondered, what this means concretely? Or is it simply > revolutionary hyperbole with absolutely no on the ground meaning vis- > a-vis allied *imperialist* aid > to resistance movements, troop landings, etc? I think it's very, very > complex question. For revolutionary workers under occupation it meant fighting the occupation in every occupied country--the Germans in France as the British in Greece--using any aid offered from anywhere (like Casement in 1916) but never subordinating revolutionary objectives to conditions imposed by those helpers. For revolutionaries in imperialist countries it meant using any shred of democratic rights left to them to expose the imperial ends for which and the barbaric means by which the war was being fought--and, legally or illegally, to support every effort at proletarian class struggle despite the screams about hypothetical detriments to the "war effort." It most emphatically does not mean refusing to serve in the armed forces or carrying out sabotage--suicidal in some countries and counterproductive everywhere else. I don't see what's complex about that, beyond the inevitable complexity of every concrete reality. Shane Mage > This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it > always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, > kindling in measures and going out in measures." > > Herakleitos of Ephesos ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
