Michael Keaney wrote to Nestor:
> >Had Thatcher lost the
>war her carreer would have melt down.
>
>That is very probable.
<snip>
> >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....
>
>Well I guess that's me sorted out then. I had no idea I was such an
>imperialist for not backing Galtieri.
Have you heard of "revolutionary defeatism"?
***** From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 15:40:29 EST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Revolutionary Defeatism
Revolutionary defeatism is a phrase from Lenin referring to the duty
of Marxists in imperialist countries to oppose the war efforts of
their own governments (and thus in effect to encourage the defeat of
their countries' armies by their imperialist opponents, although the
actual slogans of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers were "Turn the
guns around!" and "Turn the imperialist war into civil war!"; Lenin
used the term defiantly and provocatively, to stiffen his comrades'
resolve in the face of the Second International's collapse into
national patriotism). Naturally revolutionary defeatists also hope
for the rest of what Doug wrote, but those points are beyond the
usual meaning of the term. Hal Draper as a Shachtmanite leader once
wrote an article titled "The Myth of Lenin's 'Revolutionary
Defeatism'," which was a tortured argument that Lenin didn't really
mean it, that it would have been contradictory for German workers to
advocate the defeat of Germany; British, the defeat of Britain;
Russians, the defeat of Russia, and so forth, as though those
outcomes were mutually exclusive of one another and of the
revolutionary project. Hal's real problem was his anti-Stalinist
discomfort in calling for the defeat of the U.S. in a hypothetical
war with the USSR; his article was a fundamental text for the Third
Camp, shortly before the main Third Camp leaders abandoned their
pretense and declared themselves in support of U.S. military
conquests. As a consequence of Hal's tutelage, many otherwise radical
Third Campers had great difficulty in taking a positive view of a
Vietnamese victory over U.S. forces, because they regarded both Ho
Chi Minh and the NLF as surrogates of Soviet "imperialism," against
which they were holding out their Third Camp alternative.
Ken Lawrence <http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9903/2082.html> *****
Yoshie
