[Peace-discuss] Anti-war vs. identity politics? (fwd)

[C. G. Estabrook]

	"Over the past year, there has been evidence enough that our whole
	project in Iraq is hopelessly flawed, that our Western armies --
	when they are not torturing prisoners, killing innocents and
	destroying one of the largest cities in Iraq -- are being
	vanquished by a ferocious guerrilla army, the like of which we
	have not seen before in the Middle East."
	--Robert Fisk of The Independent

	Shortly after 9/11 secretary of war Donald Rumsfeld was asked how
	we might know when we had won the war on terrorism:
	"...I say that victory is persuading the American people and the
	rest of the world that this is not a quick matter that's going to
	be over in a month or a year or even five years. It is something
	that we need to do..."

There seemed to be a distressing tendency to *oppose* anti-war and
anti-racism work at last night's AWARE meeting.  (After the meeting,
someone remarked, "Wars come and go every ten years or so, but racism is
always with us.")  That seems to me a great mistake.  The Global War On
Terrorism, as the administration calls it, is not caused by racism, but
racism is surely bound up with it.  (A local television station broadcast
last night a remarkably racist war movie, "True Lies," starring the now
governor of California, and I've heard no comment about it.) The
government for which we're responsible may already have killed 100,000
people in Iraq since the declaration of the GWOT -- and several times that
number in the previous Democrat administration.  The huge (and hugely
ignored) torture scandal was possible only because of the racist attitudes
officially encouraged towards Iraqis/Arabs/Muslims. And the threat of the
GWOT is open-ended -- perhaps including the very survival of the species
(as Noam Chomsky argues in his recent "Hegemony or Survival").

Al has suggested that I disparage "identity politics," and he's correct:
"We disparage something by conceding its claimed merits but regarding them
as trivial," says a usage guide.  Identity politics (IP) was a fall-back
that in its extreme forms substituted trying to change how society spoke
for how it behaved.  The Victorian era had a bad conscience about sex
(viz., the exploitation of women and children) and masked it with a
prudery about how one spoke about sex.  The late 20th century had a bad
conscience about various exploitations and covered it with a prudery about
how one spoke of such things.

IP arose as the political enthusiasms of the 1960s and 70s subsided in a
wave of disappointment at the perceived impossibility (or undesirability)
of their achievement.  The point of difference was universalism.  Many in
those years had looked for a transformation of society that would
"establish justice, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings
of liberty" for all.  When the notion of a universal transformation based
on class was given up, various self-identified groups -- blacks, women,
native Americans, etc. -- took its place.  In some ways IP was a counsel
of despair, the Sixties' project having been abandoned, and it's no
accident that it paralleled the rise in the academy of Post-modernism, an
anti-universalism that discovered constant covert self-interest --
"skepticism over against grand narratives."  (Pomo itself at its worst was
hypocritical, allowing one the pose of a radical without necessitating any
career-endangering action.)

IP in many of its groupings ("the getting-ours segment of the Movement,"
as some feminists called it), like Post-modernism, was anti-democratic
(and therefore not a Left movement at all, under a consistent definition
of the Left), because it no longer regarded "mainstream society" as the
potentially revolutionary subject, but rather the source of oppression. It
nevertheless presented itself as the residuary legatee of the Sixties, and
therefore part if not all of what was left (so to speak). I admit that it
remains a principal part of what is generally (if confusedly) considered
the Left.

The errors of IP hardly imply that racism is no problem or that it can be
safely ignored.  But it does have to be properly assessed and understood
-- and certainly not descried where it doesn't exist (as I believe we were
doing last night).  In the absence of a good analysis, the best will in
the world to accomplish social progress will usually fail: it will only do
good by accident.  The important thing is to call things by their right
names, to see what's really going on -- to become accurately AWARE of our
situation.

Regards, CGE