"Dalai Lama" - Alex Chilton
I hear he never swats a mosquito, that's cause he's a follower of Buddha
I am generally a fan of Freddie DeBoer and was happy to see him start blogging at Balloon Juice because he's an interesting lefty voice who deserves a bigger audience. But I must say I thought this piece -- denouncing liberals who are celebrating bin Laden's demise -- was intellectually weak. Essentially, DeBoer seems to be making a couple of claims -- one, that the kind of deeply moral pacifism embodied by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. is somehow inherent in the radical leftist project, and two, that one can't really hold out King or Gandhi as heroes if you aren't willing to walk the walk as they walked it. Or as Freddie put it:
I feel about these liberals trying to square the circle of holding MLK to be a hero while supporting remorseless celebration of human death the way I feel about neoliberals who listen to Dead Prez. Feel however you feel, but please, recognize the incongruity, and perhaps look for new heroes.
Both premises seem to me to be fatally flawed and puerile.
I believe that non-violence can be both an effective political strategy in certain circumstances and an admirable moral stance as well. King and Gandhi were deeply moral men, but they were also canny political strategists who used non-violence provocatively, in ways calculated to bring about violence from their opponents, in the process laying bear the ugliness of those doing the violence and shaming those on whose putative behalf the violence was being done. It was an immensely effective tactic. I do not think, however, that non-violence is always a winning strategy -- it would have failed miserably in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, among other places -- and I don't think it is even the sole moral strategy. I believe, as have many people on the left throughout history, that there are circumstances in which violence is justifiable and efficacious. I think the bin Laden killing is one such example, but American history is replete with examples, from the Revolution to the Civil War to World War II where the interests of liberty were in fact coupled with violence -- of fairly frightening proportions at that. And anyone who is a labor guy like Freddie is must know that although unions were more often victims of violence, we have on occasion deployed violence to our advantage and, I would say, entirely righteously. (A friend of mine was a lawyer for a union involved in one of the last successful strikes of national significance back in the 1980s and he described his strategy as opening enough legal space for the members to use violence to break the company's entirely thuggish strike-breaking activity -- l admired his sang froid and really wouldn't lose sleep emulating his tactics it in similar circumstances.)
In short, I'm a leftist and not a pacifist.
I also would take issue with the notion that one cannot take someone as a political hero without buying every aspect of his/her political or moral program. I am a huge and sincere admirer of King's and I believe his non-violent tactics were extremely well calculated to the time and place in which he operated -- and particularly well calculated to an environment in which eventual reconciliation would have to occur. On the other hand, would Freddie find the Nelson Mandela who as a young man embraced armed struggle as a necessary road to ending Apartheid to be wanting? Yes, we idealize Mandela now as a man of peace and reconciliation, but the Africa National Congress he led in the 1960s embraced the necessity of violence to bring about justice -- were they wrong in so doing?
Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln -- both heroes of mine -- fought wars with unrelenting aggressiveness demanding that their opponents capitulate fully before they would know peace -- is this supposed to be inherently unacceptable to those on the left?
The world is a complicated place and our political heroes are just people -- filled with both wisdom and heroism as well as folly and cowardice. One can admire FDR for all that he did and still recoil at the internment of the Japanese and his lack of boldness vis a vis segregation; one can find Churchill to have been both an extraordinarily inspirational figure in the days of the Blitz and a depressingly old world one when it came to the empire at the end of the war; LBJ brought us the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the Great Society, and the fucking Vietnam War; and you could go on and on. John L. Lewis was a visionary who may have done more for working Americans than any man who ever lived, but he was also a capricious autocrat who brooked zero dissent.
Part of being political person is to embrace ambiguity, a sense of the contingent, the tactical, the ephemeral, and even the dubious. One can strive to be a secular saint, I suppose, but that doesn't strike me as the path that will necessarily deliver what we want to those whom we support. Life is complicated and painted in shades of gray.
What do you all think?