By Khadijah Umayyad

I myself am an ardent reader of antiwar.com and have spent untold hours listening to the Scott Horton show. As my initial post on WWI historical revisionism might indicate I take war-revisionism, historical and theoretical, to be of great importance to breaking down a primary buttress of the nation-state ideology: “national defense”. That being said I see very little of use coming from the left on antiwar, simply because most of them are basically more-radical social democrats and liberals who will simply toe the popular line in a modified form. Liberal-tarians like Glenn Greenwald are rare, perhaps even rarer than right-wing anarchists, and they continue to be surprised when the readership of Salon and Mother Goose immediately stops calling things ‘fascist’ when a Democrat is doing them. I think if they could really grasp the nature of politics and political reasoning – as power gaming, social signaling and mating rituals – they would abandon political leftism altogether and simply become anarchists. Look at Paul Gottfried’s excellent article Is a Left-Right Antiwar Coalition Possible? for an evaluation of the possibilities.

I think there is some possibility for a coalition of interests with the left, but not within or oriented toward the existing political and ideological paradigms. Only the anti-liberal left displays serious discontent with the politics of the American state and its anti-racist/anti-sexist totalitarian agendas, and they are a marginalized minority within leftist circles. So long as the left remains staunchly liberal they will remain staunchly useless and counter-productive.