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

[David Green]

Interestingly, I came upon a C-span broadcast the
other night of a huge "Women's Conference" in
California,  in which Jamie Lee Curtis introduced the
Gropinator by praising him for promoting her to the
top of the billing in True Lies, with the rationale
that it was a family movie. Arnold then introudced his
wife, Maria Shriver, as a champion of women's
equality. She proceeded to flatter herself shamelessly
as an example for other women to emulate.

On the other hand, I recall that Todd Gitlin (and
others of his ilk) took his post-60s frustrations out
on "identity politics" with an argument that had
little to do with what AWARE should stand for.


--- "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>
wrote:

> 
> 	"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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>
http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss
>