Doug wrote:
>Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>Now what do you think the
>>responsibility of U.S. leftists is in respect to Cuba?
>
>To stop the goddamn embargo and do our best to reduce the level of
>hostility in word and deed.
Is this _really_ obvious to all American leftists (loosely defined)?
Especially the part about doing "our best to reduce the level of
hostility in word"? About Cuba, _perhaps_, but about other countries
(e.g., North Korea, Iraq, & Yugoslavia) which have been also subject
to the "goddamn embargo"?
Carrol wrote to Doug:
>Could you perhaps consider as at least a hypothesis
>worth exploring that what you call heretic hunting or stating the
>obvious is part of a very reasonable tradition of ensuring that the
>other persons in the room aren't going to feel it their moral obligation
>to go over to the other side.
Much more damagingly than defections here and there, I think that
"the center of the left," so to speak, has moved to the right over
the last decade or so (with regard to left responses to racism,
imperialism, capitalism, etc.). We readily recognize this phenomenon
when we look at electoral politics (e.g. the German SPD and Greens),
but the same rightward drift has been happening in the non-electoral
field as well. Compared to the rightward drift of "the center of the
left," individual defections are harmless (in fact, clear defections
may do the left much good, like that of Eugene Genovese) though the
two phenomena are probably due to the same causes.
I mentioned political responsibility of U.S. leftists to remove the
burden on countries like Cuba on which the weight of U.S. imperialism
falls because I don't think that such responsibility is obvious to
all leftists any longer (if it ever has been).
Yoshie
