[R-G] War, What Is It Good for?

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://montages.blogspot.com/2007/11/war-what-is-it-good-for.html>
War, What Is It Good for?

Pacifists say, "Absolutely nothing." Their slogan is "War Is Not the
Answer," for all times and all places. It's a lame slogan, if a
well-meant one, on which younger right-wingers have zeroed in, looking
for an easy target. Protest Warrior claims that the group invented a
counter-slogan:

"Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism,
WAR HAS NOT SOLVED ANYTHING."

The Right's counter-slogan is, however, as lame as the pacifist one
that it attacks. Rightists, who would have been Copperheads or on the
Confederate side in the era of the Civil War in the United States, and
who would have supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War, can't take
credit for solving slavery, fascism, and Nazism. Besides, what put an
end to Communism (aka state socialism) wasn't war but the decision of
the Communist Party elite (see David M. Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution
from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System, Routledge, 1997).

But it is a little sad to think that, among slavery, fascism, Nazism,
and Communism, only the last vanished from the pages of history
without being militarily defeated by an external enemy. State
socialism created its own grave-diggers, the bureaucratic power elite,
but capitalism hasn't. Historical materialism must account for this
problem and propose a new solution.

--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>