> At 05:42 PM 4/20/99 -0400, Louis wrote:>Congratulations, Michael > [Tomasky], you've become the Max Shachtman of the 1990s!< > > For those who don't know, Max Shachtman was a follower and friend of Leon > Trotsky's who broke with the latter when the USSR invaded Finland in 1940 > and Trotsky defended that invasion. . . . Louis thinks, or wants somebody else to think, that he rebuts Tomasky's remark: "Your kind of thinking--that the U.S. by definition can do no good overseas--would have kept us out of WWII and given Hitler Europe" by saying the U.S. did not enter WWII to save the Jews, but to take over the world economy. Then he, with helpful historical explication by JD, tries to paint Tomasky as a future ex-leftist by wrapping Max Shachtman around his neck. The simple rejoinder is: why the U.S. entered WWII is not as important as the fact that entry contributed to preventing a greater Holocaust victimizing even more Jews, Slavs, gypsies, etc. The concept of somebody or something proceeding from one motive but serving another, as a byproduct, continues to elude people. This goes back to my brief dissertation on Good and Evil as a mode of analysis. We seem to divide the world into Black and White Hats (or Big Black Hats and little black hats) in order to determine which actions to condemn and which not, rather than proceeding in reverse of that sequence. The real throwback here is not Tomasky/Shachtman, but Louis et al. to the Trots who opposed U.S. entry into WWII, or to the CP-USA when it condemned all trade unions but the ones it organized itself. The other gambit follows from the difficulty of condemning critics of primitive anti-imperialism as not of the left, since we are as much of the left as anyone else here, if not more. So we are regaled with predictions by a number of people that we will depart from any semblance of leftism in the future. In other words, more comedy. Regarding the predictions of future apostasy by all non-believers, well I had a vision after a particularly strong dose of green mustard on my sushi, and *I* saw the future. Louis is the best-selling author of "Kosher Latino Loving"; Henwood's newsletter has switched its coverage to neural network stocks; Yoshie is president of the MLA, whose membership has dwindled to 3, and orders the execution of Camille Paglia for unspecified crimes against the humanities; Perelman is pouring sand out of his boot; Walker is threatening to write a book; Carrol is grumpy; Devine is writing e-mail and grading papers; Nathan Newman is the first Jewish president of the U.S.; and I'm winning the U.S. Open (Seniors' Division). mbs
