Friedman--War of Ideas, Part 1

[The Zanti Regent]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/opinion/08FRIE.html

I don't know who is more out of it Friedman or Dowd...

[bemildred]

1. Friedman, hands down. nt

[pasadenaboy]

2. Friedman is so over

his last good column was about 3 years ago. he went over the edge and never came back.

[wtmusic]

3. We simply are not kicking Muslim ass enough...

according the Friedman the Ethnocentrist.

:shrug:

[thebigidea]

4. here's the funniest bit:

"As my friend Dov Seidman, whose company, LRN, teaches ethics to global corporations, put it"

BWHAAHAHAHHAHAHA!

BWHAHAHAHHAHAHAH!

Ohhhh, too much.

[IndianaGreen]

5. What have socialists to do with capitalist wars?

The imperialist apologist Tom Friedman refers to the current world situation as "World War III — the third great totalitarian challenge to open societies in the last 100 years. Such nonsense!

What are we to do when our country beckons to join in this "holy crusade"? Well, if you are a socialist, you would reject the jihadism of the bin Ladens and the imperialism of the Bushes.

The "War on Terror" is a fraud! It is nothing but a pretext to expand global imperialism and impose American hegemony throughout the world.

The great revolutionary Leon Trotsky described a similar situation in 1914 when German and Russian nationalism swept the working classes in both countries.

CHAPTER VI
WHAT HAVE SOCIALISTS TO DO WITH CAPITALIST WARS?

What should we Russian Socialists say to the Russian workingmen in face of the fact that the bullets the German workers are shooting at them bear the political and moral seal of the German Social Democracy? “We cannot make our policy for Russia, we make it for Germany,” was the answer given me by one of the most respected functionaries of the German party when I put this question to him. And at that moment I felt with particularly painful clearness what a blow had been struck at the International from within.

The situation, it is plain, is not improved if the Socialist parties of both warring countries throw in their fate with the fate’ of their ,governments, as in Germany and France. No outside power, no confiscation or destruction of Socialist property, no arrests and imprisonments could have dealt such a blow to the International as it struck itself with its own hands in surrendering to the Moloch of the state just when he began to talk in terms of blood and iron.

<snip>

From the standpoint of the European proletariat it is equally harmful whether a slice of French territory is gobbled up by Germany, or whether France gobbles up a slice of German territory. More over the preservation of the European status quo is not a thing at all for our platform. The political map of Europe has been drawn by the point of the bayonet, at every frontier passing over the living bodies of the nations. If the Social Democracy assists its national (or antinational) governments with all its energy, it is again leaving it to the power and intelligence of the bayonet to correct the map of Europe. And in tearing the International to pieces, the Social Democracy destroys the one power that is capable of setting up a program of national independence and democracy in opposition to theactivityy of the bayonet, and of carrying out this program in a greater or lesser degree, quite independently of which of the national bayonets is crowned with victory.

The experience of old is confirmed once again. If the Social Democracy sets national duties above its class duties, it commits the greatest crime not only against Socialism, but also against the interest’ of the nation as rightly and broadly understood.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1914-war/part2.htm#CHAPTERVI

Leon Trotsky’s
The War and the International
(The Bolsheviks and World Peace)

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1914-war/index.htm

[Demeter]

6. Third World War is Bush against the US

If the oldest democracy falls into totalitarianism, who will pull us out?

[Beetwasher]

7. This is Friedman's Problem Right Here

"And 9/11 was about religious totalitarians, Islamists, using suicide bombing to try to impose the reign of the perfect faith, political Islam."

He thinks it's only the islamic fundamentalist nutjobs trying impose their religious totalinarianism on everyone else, when in fact, one could argue, that the majority of them are fighting the west because they feel threatened by the west's imposition of it's reign of the perfect faith, political christianity/rampant crony capitalism/corporate fascism.