ClassWarNotes
Taking the fight for justice to Bush and the Republicans. By Joel Wendland - send comments.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Is war a Left or Right Issue?
On a recent post on his blog "Lenin Lives"
(http://leninlives.blogspot.com), Thomas Riggins describes Hillary
Clinton's recent announcement that she doesn't support full withdrawal
of U.S. troops from Iraq as a "move to the right."
The specifics of Clinton's statement aside for the moment, I want to
take issue with Riggin's metaphor of left and right.
Sure, it might be nice to classify easily and neatly all opponents of
the war as "left" but that simply doesn't reflect reality. A great
many are people who would bristle at being described as leftist or
even as liberal. Many are conservative.
Indeed, if only leftists were opponents of the war, it would never
end. I think that has been proven time and time again.
What's my point? Well rhetoric such as left and right on this war
issue is neither accurate nor helpful. Millions of people are going to
have to speak up and demand an end to the war, and not all of them are
going to be true-blue leftists. Not all of them are even going to be
"left of center." Many are going to be staunch conservatives.
Thus, it is more accurate to characterize Clinton's remarks as a step
backward rather than a step to the right. Rather than characterizing
the war in left and right terms, let's talk about it in terms of
forward (toward ending the war and occupation) and back (escalation or
delaying the withdrawal).
Should people move to the left? Personally, I'd like everyone to be on
the left, but that isn't realistic. But can millions of people help
Ms. Clinton, Congress, and Bush move forward by bringing the war to an
end? Yes. Do they need to be leftists to do so? No
Political and cultural commentary based on a world view shaped by the works of Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Averroes, Maimonides, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Sartre and Bertrand Russell "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious."-Wittgenstein
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