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

[Morton K.Brussel]

My 2¢:

Satire, irony, is a dangerous thing, a two edged sword. How often do 
people miss the point?

To say that identity politics can be unbalanced, even extreme or 
diversionary,  is not to say that the issues involved, women's rights, 
racism, gay rights, animal rights, antisemitism, Palestinian rights, 
Indian rights, etc., are not issues to be handled seriously and with 
respect.  I expect that you would agree to that. mkb

On Jan 3, 2005, at 7:54 PM, C. G. Estabrook 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
>
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