Not only Brad DeLong but also Mike Kearney. OK, politics is a long
exercise in patience... As Toussaint Louverture said: "La France
entiére vient contre nous!"
Will answer to just two basic assertions here, which are the only
ones that matter. As to condemnation of "militarism", won't return to
the issue any more. I reserve to my own people the right to resort to
military means (or any other) to put an end to this abject era of
imperialist exaction and social crime that Argentina is passing
through since 1975 at least..
1) Thatcher's use of the Argentinian war over the Malvinas (Falklands
is a wrong name, sorry, it is as if you explained a Palestinian that
Israel is the name of his/her own land) in 1982 and the duty of an
English progressive.
If, as Tam Dalyell has shown, Thatcher prepared the war in order to
win her elections, the duty of a socialist or a progressive in
England would have been to support Argentina. Had Thatcher lost the
war her carreer would have melt down. But British Leftists (with
exceptions, some of which I am proud to be friend to) preferred to
hide their pro-imperialist soul by adducing that this war against the
sovereign rights of a Third World people was, in fact, a war against
"tyrant Galtieri". In so doing, they immediately ranked with the
Thatcher they said to defend.
For an imperialist "progressive" it is absolutely unimportant whether
the armies of a semicolonial country are aiming at their own
population or at the invading armies of the imperial powers. For a
true progressive, this "slight" difference is full of meaning. And it
certainly was full of meaning for us here in Argentina, who were tear
gassed on March 30th 1982 and were surprised to see that, by a chance
of History, the same regime adopted a progressive position on the
basic issue of sovereignty that marks the essence of being a Third
World nation. I am convinced that many in the Western Powers will
"explain" away, with the shallowness of an empyricist sociologist
from Harvard or London, that we Argentinians were goaded into a
frenzy of nationalism by a decaying military regime, just as the
lower strata of their own countries saw themselves intoxicated with
(this time, yes) chauvinistic militarism. This is very logic, they
are taking care of the backs of the imperialists, they are "Her
Majesty's opposition". The problem, however, is that precisely
because they are members of an imperialist community they exert a
strong pressure on people in the countries under military and
economic attack from their own ruling classes. Cultural imperialism
is the name of this, and it is a basic weapon in the arsenal of Meggy
Bloodihands. Ah, the strange roads by which the Empires are built....
2) Malvinas and East Timor. I am very suspicious, indeed, of the
situation in East Timor. Will not extend on this, because this is an
issue I know little about and because I know that the Eastern
Timorese have been waging a protracted and tremendous war for their
own rights. There are two things that I have in clear, however, and
they are that (a) East Timor exists as an independent area of the
Malay world because at the moment of decolonization it was in the
hands of the Portuguese empire, in fact the most putrid of all
colonial empires (yes, most putrid than the British empire, which is
a lot of rot indeed, but well, the metropolis itself was, since the
Treaty of Methuen, a virtual colony of England!). Had in 1945 East
Timor been in the hands of these other "great civilizators", the
Dutch, then there would have never existed an East Timor issue, and
(b) it is becoming more obvious with the days that the outcome of
this "humanitarian" intervention by Australian troops in Indonesian
internal affairs to defend the East Timorese has created a new
protectorat in the Asia-Pacific area, at the same time that it has
boosted Australian imperialist militarism high.
The Malvinas are not the same thing as East Timor. The population in
the Malvinas are the result of forcible eviction, by a British fleet,
of the legal and recognized Argentinian settlement there. Argentina
has never surrendered to the joint American-British invasion of the
islands in 1833, nor have we ever denied the right of the
transplanted populations of the islands to become full Argentinians
with due respect to their cultural traditions provided they ceased to
consider themselves a Plantation. On this, we shall be inflexible,
and in the end we shall win. This issue is a basic question for our
politics, and a good standing on the Malvinas issue may turn a rogue
into a sometimes unexpected revolutionary.
FYI, when Galtieri, the _majestic General_ of Haigh and Reagan,
discovered that he had been trapped by his supposed friends, he
faintly discovered that in order to go ahead and win the war he had
to mobilize the most progressive forces in the country, he had to
organize a militant national front, he had to return the basic
control of economy to the hands of the State, he had to confront in
the arena of the Foreign Debt, he had to cleanse the Army of butchers
(being one himself!), and he almost made some of those moves: in
fact, the Argentinian Foreign Relations Minister gave a 180 degrees
turn to our foreign policy, siding with Castro and other progressive
regimes that were supporting us in the effort. That is why Galtieri
was overthrown by the truly reactionary (though formally
"democratic") generals Bignone and Liendo (the son of the later has
been the lawyer who drafted most of the labor legislation in the
"democratic" governments that followed the Proceso, particularly
those of Cavallo and now of Machinea).
I do not have the time today to further expand on the political and
social analysis of an army in a semicolonial country, nor is PEN-L
the place to explain these things, but list members may search the
archives of Lou Proyect's Marxism list or the archives of the
Leninist-international list, where I have repeatedly touched on this
issue.
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
