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Louis Proyect wrote:
> I think that Anatol Lieven is terminally cynical but he does have a
> point here--namely that American spooks see the wisdom of what Russia is
> doing. However, it is dubious that the "moderate" (whatever that means)
> opposition is not a serious military force. Otherwise why would Russia
> be carrying out a "shock and awe" operation against it:
Indeed, an opposition that has held out so long against so many different
forces is like the man who wasn't there, and wasn't there again today, but
they wish, they really wish, he would go away.
Meanwhile Lieven's standpoint on Syria reflects his longstanding attitude
towards world politics.
Anatol Lieven is a serious author of various works, but a supporter of
free-market capitalism whose standpoint is that everything would be fine if
the big imperialist powers (not what he calls them) just played together
nicely. To achieve this, he wishes that Russia were allowed its role as one
of the big powers. His cavalier attitude to the Syrian struggle against
dictatorship is similar to the attitude he put forward earlier towards the
Chechens: as small peoples, they're irrelevant. So now he praises the bloody
Russian policy in Syria, and regards it as the realistic policy for world
imperialism.
Back in 2000, I reviewed his 1998 book "Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian
Power". I pointed out that "From the title of the book,one might assume
that Lieven didn't just oppose the Russian war on Chechnya, but was gloating
with malicious glee as the last rites were being read for the Russian
nation." Indeed, some people took the book that way. But I pointed out that
his standpoint was actually quite different: his criticisms of the then
Russian fiasco in Chechnya and of the Russian state were intended to help
strengthen what he called Russia's "present very weak and qualified
'imperial' identity." He might "honour the courage and tenacity of the
Chechen people", but he basically found their fate irrelevant. With respect
to policy, I wrote that his concern "was with Western policy towards Russia;
he doesn't want the Western powers to create a backlash in Russia by refusing
it entry to the big power club. Thus there is nothing at all [in his book]
about Russia's failure to recognize the right to self-determination having
created the bloodbath in Chechnya; and even less than nothing about what
stand the workers of Russia should have towards the policies of their
exploiters. Lieven's concern is simply to regulate the relations among the
big powers, and Chechnya was not a big power. He opposes those unregenerate
Cold Warriors who want to continue the struggle against Russia into the
present, but his standpoint is simply that Russian imperialism is as
legitimate as Western imperialism. As for the Russian bourgeoisie (not his
term, of course), which he repeatedly denounces as 'compradors', he simply
wants them to become patriotic."
(http://www.communistvoice.org/24cChechnyaLieven.html)
It is a sad commentary on how far the advocates of non-class anti-imperialism
have fallen that, in the name of anti-imperialism, their standpoint isn't
much different from Lieven's. It is a policy of imperialism in the name of
anti-imperialism.
-- Joseph Green
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