[Peace-discuss] War with Iran

[C. G. Estabrook]

I'm using "left" in its standard journalistic sense, Mort, to mean one 
wing of the Congressional Democratic party (i.e., not the DLC and the 
Blue Dogs).  They deserve contempt for not being the opposition party 
they say they are, at a time when we have probably the most dangerous 
executive in US history.  Using that sense of left, the antiwar movement 
is liable to assume left = good and right = bad. But the left in that 
sense is there precisely to co-opt and betray the left that you praise; 
while on the right some paleocons have been principled opponents of the 
war.

I'm happy to abandon the journalistic uses of Left and Right and propose 
what seems to me a consistent way to use them.  (The problem is that 
adopting this usage means most people won't understand you.)  It's 
generally accepted that the terms arose fortuitously from the seating 
arrangements in the French National Assembly of 1789. But if we want a 
consistent usage, we might think of political positions ranged along a 
line according to how authoritarian or democratic they are. The further 
Right one goes, the more authoritarian the parties, and the further 
Left, the more democratic. (At the far Left end are the socialists, who 
want not just a democratic polity but a democratic economy as well -- 
investment decisions made not by corporations but by elections; but we 
now have to call ourselves "libertarian socialists" -- as I do -- to 
make that clear.) The Bolsheviks, then, were a right-wing Marxist party, 
as were all twentieth century communist parties in the Marxist-Leninist 
tradition, owing to their authoritarianism, and if we're being 
consistent, we can't refer to them as Left.  But our contemporary 
conservatives (especially the neocons) are also a party of the Right, 
being statist reactionaries.  --CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> Carl, the only thing wrong with your introductory sentence is that you 
> persist in identifying the "left", of which you are a part! (I think), 
> with the Democratic party leadership and its followers. Are not UFPJ 
> voices on the left? They have expressed strong condemnation of war plans 
> for Iran, etc.… In your eagerness to  show up and disparage the 
> supineness and cowardliness of much of the  "liberals/Democrats", you 
> overstep, I believe; there are multitudes on the "left" (read ZNet) who 
> offer compelling critiques of American imperialism.  We don't have to 
> rely on Buchanan, even if we welcome some of his analysis. --Mort
> 
> On Jan 9, 2007, at 8:01 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
>> [Here's an attack on the the administration's plans for Iran from the 
>> right of the American political spectrum -- not unfortunately from the 
>> left, where leading Democrats second the administration's position 
>> that "a nuclear Iran is unacceptable." --CGE]
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