Reply #3: Sorry, but as long as the Left remains stuck on the Vietnam... [View All]

[newswolf56]

analogy, it will never develop an adequate analysis of what is happening today. Vietnam was ultimately an expression of capitalism's bottomless terror of Communism: the Vietnamese were no threat to America or Americans until we invaded their country. From the Middle East we have a very real threat -- witness not only 9/11 but the (Iraqi organized) attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 -- a threat that has been manipulated by the most malevolently devious administration in U.S. history to further the oligarchy's post-Soviet, post-New Deal agenda of concentrating wealth and dis-empowering the working class everywhere on the planet.

In Vietnam we faced NO threat (other than -- say again -- the one we manufactured by our own presence). In the present situation we face TWO threats: (1)-the external threat of Jihadist terrorism (a threat that dates from the very birth of Islam and is 1,376 years old); and (2)-the internal threat of the global oligarchy as it seeks to reduce all working people to chattel. The reality of (1) is proven unequivocally by history, modern and otherwise. In the context of (2), note how the oligarchy has already manipulated the Jihadist threat into a rationale for effectively suspending constitutional rights: this clears the way for the violent suppression of the labor and economic protest that is sure to characterize the future, as the oligarchy continues its methodical dis-empowerment of workers and concentration of wealth -- for example as in skyrocketing fuel prices and outsourcing. As the consequences of this huge take-back become ever more ruinous, the oligarchy (in the person of the Bush Administration) will undoubtedly find further rationale to impose additional restriction, leading eventually to unabashed tyranny.

Indeed in this context the Vietnam analogy actually serves the oligarchy because it blinds the rest of us to what is really happening.

Unfortunately, the American Left savagely purged all its intellectuals during the New Left-Old Left schism of the '60s, so the likelihood today's Left will develop the requisite analysis is probably nonexistent outside of DU: the only website in the nation where these issues are being properly discussed.