I'm not interested in hashing out (increasingly weirdly irrelevant) distinctions between left, right and center, though I'm allergic to interpretations of leftism as fundamentally pacifist, when the roots of 'the' left (because there were many, as Ted recently pointed out) lie at least in part in armed opposition to fascism. Recall the message Woody Guthrie taped to his guitar. And one reason that letter to the Bundezkanzler is so flawed is that I imagine all those 200,000 people who signed it also see themselves as opponents of fascism, and not advocates of appeasement. "Even the legitimate resistance against an aggressor is at some point in an intolerable disproportion." Really?
For these reasons and regarding recent Nettime exchanges, I'm in agreement that we're "looking for another possible politics" (Podinsky) and also that "the western lefts... need to rethink their relationship to the state and, in particular, to the use of force." (Byfield.) Not an entirely new phenomenon, and certainly blatantly clear during those terrible years when Bosnia was being hammered while NATO countries sat by and watched as the atrocities mounted. (In fact they did worse than watch: they imposed an arms embargo, which had the effect of denying the side without arms the right to defend itself. One Bosnian-American artist who I know, who bears the mental scars of trying to defend Sarajevo with antique light weapons as heavy metal rained down all around, wrote to me at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine "If we'd had 1% of the support the Ukrainians are getting, we could have pushed them back.")
Podinsky, with respect I would note that Daniel Herman's analysis and Haberman's are quite different. They don't represent the same or even a similar view. Habermas's analysis is nuanced and in keeping with the facts as we know them or think we know them. It's far more sophisticated than that Scholz letter. Whereas actually I find a lot of Herman's argumentation to be quite contestable, despite all those links. But I don't propose to get into a blow by blow about this, even though the larger thrust of his argument boils down to leaving the Ukrainians to deal with their giant predatory neighbor more or less alone. (Sarajevo again.)
Rather I would just make an observation. If we deplore abuse of mass media to sell war and the tools of war; and the corruption and profiteering of the arms industry; and the enemy-projection and self-perpetuation of a grotesquely money grubbing national security state; and racism, imperialism, the subjugation of other nations and on and on; and if we actively work to highlight those mechanisms and work to fight against them in the context of the USA, NATO, etc.... If we do all that, then what good are we if we refuse to recognize when these phenomena occur elsewhere? Because if we see it only where we've been conditioned to see it, and ignore it elsewhere despite ample evidence, we're not analysts or political scientists but ideologues.
Best wishes,
Michael
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Michael Benson
Kinetikon Pictures