[Peace-discuss] Letter to Editor

[Ricky Baldwin]

Hey folks- 

Carl is right, of course.  But the most interesting
part of this exchange, to me, is the way even the
pro-war folks can claim to be the defenders of the
value of human life:

"No slave that ever lived was worth the life of one
American soldier," Seiter says the antiwar folks say
-- and actually if I recall, some did say something
similar.  It's a nasty strain of opposition to war
that - I think I mentioned recently - was a major part
of the anti-imperialists' opposition to the Spanish
American War and persists in antiwar movements to this
day (to a much lesser extent). 

In a way it's an extension of Carl's point, that we
should never think of history as white hats and black
hats (so to speak).  Some of the antiwar sentiment
during World War II was pro- or proto-Nazi, and there
are a lot of Americans today who oppose the current
wars because they value the "safety of American
soldiers" over "a bunch of radical
Arabs."  I don't think they are the majority, and
certainly aren't the majority of activists/organizers,
but they are there.

And there are other kinds of racists, too, like, if
folks recall him, Mr. "Hippy Joe", who warned us not
to trust "the Jews in AWARE".  And it's true that in
Europe some of the outcry against war in Iraq is
motivated by lingering hatred of Jews, still very much
alive in France, Germany, Austria, etc.

So what's my point?  I guess I have a couple.  (1) I
think it's worth trying to understand where the other
side is coming from.  Seiter may be disingenuous, I
don't know, but I remember knowing very sincere but
misguided people who thought the opposition to NAFTA
was racist (don't let the damn Mexicans take our
jobs!) - and some of it was.  But NAFTA was still
wrong, and it was still right to oppose it, because it
was bad for all North Americans - US, Mexicans,
Canadians - except of course some big capitalists and
their lapdog politicos :-)

So that's the other point: (2) I think an important
response to Seiter would be, to reiterate, to directly
challenge - again - and keep challenging, as we have
been - the idea that the war/occupation is an American
sacrifice to help the poor little brown people of the
world who couldn't possibly manage their own affairs
without us.  Like NAFTA, the war and occupation are
bad for Americans AND bad for Iraqis.

Not news to any of us, really, just a little thinking
out loud.  I can't write letters to the editor from
here, but maybe I'll write up something for the IMC
...

Ricky

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

> Although Seiter thinks he's presenting a reductio ad
> absurdum,
> I think he might be right.  
> 
> It may be as much a mistake to make Lincoln a hero,
> just
> because slavery was wrong, as it is to make Bush Jr.
> a hero
> because Saddam was a tyrant.  It's certainly a
> mistake to see
> both (Lincoln v. slavery, Bush v. Saddam) as
> either-ors that
> exhaust the possibilities.  
> 
> The radical Republicans ca. 1860 would have said
> (probably
> did) "You're either with us or with the slavers" --
> that's
> what Lincoln's rhetorical genius allowed him to say
> in the
> Gettysburg speech -- and there's no more reason to
> believe
> that than there is to believe its modern analogue.
> 
> See the anti-establishment portrait of Lincoln in
> Gore
> Vidal's novel of the same name, perhaps more
> accurate than
> the historical consensus.  A recent scholarly study,
> Ethan S.
> Rafuse's "McClellan's War: The Failure of Moderation
> in the
> Struggle for the Union," presents the politics of
> those who
> were opposed to the slave-holding aristocracy as
> well as to
> the radical Republicans.  William Appleman Williams,
> the major
> revisionist (and anti-Vietnam war) historian of a
> generation
> ago, pointed out that those Republicans represented
> the
> interests of, e.g, wealthy Midwestern landowners.  
> 
> In fact the Civil War called upon poor people to die
> in a
> contest between two elites who disagreed on how to
> exploit
> labor -- slavery or the wage contract.  In some ways
> wage-laborers in the North were treated worse than
> slaves. 
> (E.g., to drain the pestilential swamps around New
> Orleans,
> Louisiana slave-owners imported Irish laborers from
> the North:
> a dead slave was a major loss, but you could always
> rent
> another Irishman.)  Marx wrote to Lincoln to
> congratulate him
> on the defeat of slavery, but only because he
> believed it
> clarified the class struggle. 
> 
> I can imagine being a member of an anti-war movement
> in the US
> a century and a half ago.  It's not too much of a
> stretch to
> see those who arranged Lincoln's nomination as the
> neocons of
> the time, mutatis mutandis.  Like the neocons, they
> represented one end of the elite policy spectrum;
> one might
> even argue that they divided the Whigs as the
> neocons have
> divided the Republicans.
> 
> As Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself --
> but it
> does rhyme. --CGE
> 
> 
> ---- Original message ----
> 
> On 30 May 2006 Brian Dolinar
> <briandolinar at gmail.com> wrote:  
> 
> >Don't miss this...
> >
> >Anti-war critics could take aim at Lincoln
> >Tuesday May 30, 2006
> >
> >Carl Estabrook (May 8 letter) predictably
> demagogued my
> letter. My
> >comment directed toward Estabrook referenced his
> hypocrisy in not
> >generating a ballot referendum calling for the
> impeachment of
> >President Clinton.
> >
> >I am not impressed by whatever lip service
> Estabrook may have
> paid to
> >purported Clinton war crimes either on his radio
> show or
> through his
> >letters to the editor. It is action, not words,
> that counts.
> >
> >If anti-war ideologues were consistent in their
> moral views,
> there was
> >no greater warmonger worthy of impeachment than
> Illinois' own
> Abraham
> >Lincoln.
> >
> >President Lincoln "illegally and immorally" invaded
> other
> sovereign
> >states of the South using South Carolina's
> bloodless bombing
> of Fort
> >Sumter as a pretense for war. No war for cotton,
> Mr. Lincoln!
> >
> >President Lincoln spied on Americans, he lied about
> not going
> to war
> >over slavery, and he suspended the Writ of Habeas
> Corpus. If
> he had
> >simply trusted in the Anaconda plan, war could have
> been averted.
> >
> >These so-called facts prove Lincoln was the worst
> president
> of all
> >time who sent 618,000 American soldiers and untold
> tens of
> thousands
> >of civilians to their ignoble deaths. And for what?
> For the
> good of
> >America? To free the slaves? Bah, humbug.
> >
> >No slave that ever lived was worth the life of one
> American
> soldier.
> >Not in our name.
> >
> >I'll be accused by some of comparing apples to
> oranges, and
> maybe they
> >are right. Given the anti-war left's own purported
> concern
> for the
> >safety of American soldiers fighting "a bunch of
> radical
> Arabs," how
> >much more grievous was Lincoln's "evil" when it was
> Americans
> fighting
> >Americans? Lincoln lied, and Americans died!
> >
> >HENRY SEITER Jr.
> >
> >Urbana
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>
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> 



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