Eeek, Commies! And Quakies too!! And both working together to make trouble right here in Charles River City!!!

I stumbled across People's Weekly World , which seems in general to be a time capsule left over from the palmier days of Marxism-Gorbachevism. In particular, how about this?

After months of administration stonewalling, Defense Secretary Robert Gates tried to pacify congressional opposition, telling the House Armed Services Committee on Feb. 6 that the U.S.-Iraq agreement would not include any commitment to defend Iraq militarily and would not specify permanent U.S. bases. That did not impress Joseph Gerson, director of programs at the American Friends Service Committee in New England, which is working on an anti-military-bases campaign. Gates assures us the U.S. military presence in Iraq is “not permanent,” said Gerson, “but neither is the Great Wall of China or the pyramids in Egypt, and they’re still there.” It is important to remember that Bush’s original goals in Iraq were not only to gain control over Iraq’s oil but also consolidate long-term control over the entire region’s oil and geopolitics, Gerson told the World. The Bush administration is planning for 14 long-term military bases in Iraq, he said. The aim is to “turn Iraq into a virtual unsinkable aircraft carrier for the U.S.”

That sounds very like the Bad Old Days, doesn't it? Naïve "religious" dupe passes on what Scientific Socialism has discovered in the laboratory, the alone true material and economic bases of bourgeois aggression: It's the oil, habibi, the oil!

If it sounds like the old snake oil, the reason may be that it simply is the old snake oil: the People's Weekly World does not plead the Fifth Amendment, it boldly announces "working-class news and opinions since 1924" on its masthead. Perhaps putting one's boldness in all-lower-case is an oblique acknowledgement of 1989 and 1991, however.

(It is easy enough to understand what Comrade J. Gerson holds against the Great Wall of China, but what on earth can the subversives hope to gain by getting the pyramids out of Egypt?)

Happy days.
























One can understand easily enough why the comrades and fellow travelers should agitate and propagandize against the Great Wall of China, but what is it that they hope to gain by getting the pyramids out of Egypt?

Dr. G. appears to be no mere dupe or fellow traveler but positively a ringleader: His program work focuses on challenging and overcoming U.S. global hegemony: its preparations for and threats to initiate nuclear war, and its military domination of the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East.

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But seriously, this comrade's political analysis is feeble. Like far too many other anti-Crawfordites, Dr. G. thinks he knows exactly why the aggressors aggressed -- "Bush’s original goals in Iraq were to consolidate long-term control over the entire region’s oil and geopolitics" -- when he is only wildly guessing. Or perhaps in this case, when he is rehashing his scientific socialism by insisting that some material and economic factor must be what's really going on, no matter what superficial appearances may suggest.

In the real world, of course, the cowpokers' motivations were a mystery to themselves in March 2003 and remain largely a mystery five years deeper into the Big Muddy, even though we've had a couple dozen different rationales for the aggression proposed by militant Republican Party extremists themselves after the WMD jazz had to be abandoned.

Had they ever sat down and clear-headedly tried to work out plans for Long-Term Control, as fantasists fantasize, they would have behaved differently. They might have been intelligent enough to work out that if they aspired to hegemony in the Middle East mainly in the paths of petroleum and Jewish Statism -- which I suppose is in some sense the "real" or "objective" "fact" of the matter -- there was no need to invasionize the former Iraq at all. Hegemony was doing a good deal better with old-fashioned sinkable aircraft carriers down through 2002 than it has been doing since, after all.

That point is not facile Monday-morning quarterbacking, either, because any hegemonite with half the brain needed in a Secretary of War (or a quarter of the brain that Dr. Gerson mistakenly attributes to the Crawford crew) would have seen as much in advance. Dr. Albright would have seen the bushogenic quagmire coming, for example, although the reasons why Mr. Rumsfeld did not are not primarily IQ-related. Mizz Madeleine might conceivably have sinned also, just to make herself feel good after the Pentagon/WTC attack, even though her brain told her that redecorating Mesopotamia could not be as cheap and painless as her glorious triumph in Kosova.

Hormones matter too. Hormones matter preëminently, even: "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions." Mr. Hume is a sounder guide to human events than Dr. Marx or Dr. Gerson. The collapse of the Lenin-Gorbachev racket will have had at least a little to do with the doctrinaire insistence on crudities like "It's the oil, habibi, the oil."















Speaking of Great Walls, Comrade Gerson admits (well, almost admits) that he is trying to smuggle in outside agitators and subversion under pretext of violating the Jeffersonian separation of Christojudaeanity and Democracy:

Dr. Joseph Gerson has served the American Friends Service committee since 1976 and is currently Director of Programs and Director of the Peace and Economic Security Program for the AFSC in New England. His program work focuses on challenging and overcoming U.S. global hegemony: its preparations for and threats to initiate nuclear war, and its military domination of the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East.

Now who, I ask you, can be so naïve as to believe that the comrade cherishes theological objections to "U.S. global hegemony," as if he was John Wesley solemnly deciding that Predestinate Election won't quite do?