Humanitarian "war" in Burma

I find it ironic that the US media is making such a big deal about Burma not letting foreign aid get in when the Bush Administration refused help after Hurricane Katrina.

Well, theres nothing various factions of the bourgeoisie love to do more than use bad press to make themselves look better, or to ratchet up the sanctions on one, and free up another.

That's exactly what I thought. Remember Castro offering to send aid to New Orleans? Classic.

Sometimes life is just too ironic for me.

Castro, hell, they turned down Germany! And someplace like Sri Lanka who wanted to return something to the US after the tsunami there.

I don't know if you're being tongue in cheek or not, so I'll take you seriously.

No, why would I? I certainly don't recognize the various gangsters, thugs, and despots that make up the rogue's gallery of the world's governments, so why should I care about the funny white lines they draw on the map to make themselves feel important, and that they defend from one another by sending working class people to the grave over?

No it's not. You're conflating a "nation's right" (a nation controlled, as you yourself admit, by a ruling elite) with "people's right" for self-determination, something vastly different.

We oppose the War in Iraq, and similar bourgeoisie wars, because they're a false choice between ruling elites and the flag on the shoulder of the soldier shooting you, NOT because of national boundary lines, or the claims of legitimacy that X government "has" in a specific area.

Fuck no I wouldn't support it, though I would oppose any attempts from other bourgeoisie powers to try and turn it into a field day. I would suggest that class oriented militants pick up guns against both idiots; I see no reason why we should "support" absurd nationalist, balkanizing solutions to what is a fundamental antagonism between classes, not ethnic, racial, or border groups.

Actually it didn't, and it doesn't, because unless I'm mistaken, it was DeGaul, not Hitler, who cracked skulls open in May 1968. Again, you are setting up a false choice; that one segment of the bourgeoisie is "better" than another, a dubious distinction since I can think of no faction of it that doesn't have blood all over its hands. This is not surprising; the peculiar obsession of European leftists of the SWP-ilk with raising fascists up on a mark higher than other assholes, and the image of WWII as a "Good War" have mixed together to create a ridiculous situations where the BNP is a bigger target and more "evil" than the casual velvet butchers apron of New Labour.

...is supporting a counter-revolutionary idea that the problems a specific geographical area has is because "it" does not "control" its territory, as opposed to the real beef, that the working class (or the peasants) don't have real control vis a vis either their native plantation lords or their colonial overseers. As evidenced by what has resulted from the numerous "national liberation" struggles of the past century, it should be clear to everyone that the color of one's ruling class nor the flag it flies means jack shit.

And either way your labor, your taxes, and your person are ripe for use in butchering others, regardless of which state you lived in, or are you suggesting that the misadventures of the British Army is qualitatively different than that of the PRC in recent memory? Or that because we have TV and take away dinners that all if peachy keen in the developed world?

But thats beside the point. Anarchists are not in the business of arguing lesser-evilism or making arguments for bourgeoisie governments. They do that well-enough on their own, thank you, and we shouldn't be concerned whom is "nicer" to us, in an attempt to buy off our anger. This is not to presume the same level of working class strength or potential for revolt across all countries, but to acknowledge that the reformist or liberal character has little to do with said revolutionary potential.

You obviously lack the ability to understand the systemic and totalizing nature of bourgeoisie governments, no matter how they are arranged boundary wise, and regardless of how one may individually appear nice they all reinforce each other in toto no matter how much they try to get one over on each other. Its why every national-liberation movement turns onto its own people after the colonizers are booted out; a national front is the birthplace for petty tyrants and the new power elite. If you want real examples, witness the Ireland after the treaty, the move by the Viet Minh to shoot other left groups in order to "impress" the French at the bargaining table, and for the Kuomintang to recruit Japanese regiments to then turn inward on the Communists (or further back, the selling out of the Shanghai Commune by the Communists in an attempt to broker an anti-imperial front across China). I refuse to acknowledge nationalist groups that will do nothing but seize power and turn the once colonial guns against libertarian groups.

I seem to recall Rudolph Rocker's Nationalism and Culture drew a stark picture of the inverse relationship between a healthy social culture--a national culture, i suppose some would say--versus the degree of nationalism (flag waving militarism). Though I'll concede it has been a while since i read it, and I was new to political discourse at the time, that is what I recall taking away from it.

What on Earth are you talking about? Marx supported the Franco-Prussian war because he felt it would hasten the development of capitalism and the workers movement in Germany. He also wanted the Bonapartist regime in France smashed precisely because he thought it was holding back the workers' movement.

Incidentally, it was the experience of the Paris Commune - which initially sprang from France's defeat - that convinced Marx that the era of progressive national wars was over in Europe. From that point, workers could no longer even engage in defensive wars but had to defend their own interests against "their" bourgeoisie.

As for the rest of your reactionary nonsense, Sean Siberio has already offered an excellent rebuttal which I feel no need to expand on except to say "workers have no country".

I think he was a little bit more on the fence than that. He pointed out that a smashing of the Bonpartist regime would probably be a net gain, but that observation I don't think meant he supported the war. I just got done reading a good article about this recently here [url=http://www.workersliberty.org/node/4567]

Well he's simply saying that true national liberation is also worker liberation. The rest of the article goes into how the working classes are the only truly patriotic classes, echoing what Bakunin said -- i.e. bourgeois nationalism is opportunistic, working class patriotism goes thru hell and high water. Which is exactly what that article Randy wrote for the Capital Terminus Collective.

I think this issue is critically important, especially considering the fool's gallery of idiots like Tariq Ali, or the SWP dupes at Lenin's Tomb, whom are holding up Islamist forces in Iraq as examples of "Resistance" against America while they throw acid on women's faces. It opportunistic as shit to just ride the coattails of every single person that slaps the word "liberation army" onto their names and decides to whiz some bullets by American (or other countries for that matter) soldiers.

Its disturbing mostly because any sort of military-oriented humanitarian intervention would do little, or nothing, for the people suffering from the cyclone, but it WOULD plunge the country into a tense military standoff. A friend of mine once joked when she said that countries like America intervening for "humanitarian reasons" is like the teacher who stops a bully, and then when the kid walks out the school gates, he gets jumped by said bully while the teacher clocks out. Like the teacher, America (or other countries, like Iran in relation to Iraq, or Syria in relation to Lebanon) frankly don't give a shit what happens to the people in Burma, or Kosovo, or anywhere else; just as long as they can keep it contained, and more importantly, it happens AFTER they leave the area.

I wouldn't be surprised if America started picking up the cause of various tribal groups in the region, such as the Karen, in an attempt to destabilize Burma. I can see kind of a similar situation to Viet Nam being developed with the Hmong, amongst others, being wooed onto the side of the American's with small amounts of money, some training, and a cache of old Soviet weapons.