IlllllllllllllI

Jan. 18, 2012 at 4:32pm with 45 notes

On Glenn Greenwald’s White Privilege and Idiotic “Non-Partisanship”

Some Democratic loyalists have explicitly argued that contrasting Obama with Ron Paul on these issues is warped because issues of war and civil liberties are, at best, ancillary concerns, whileothers have gone so far as to claim that only racial and/or gender bias — white male “privilege” — would cause someone to use the Paul candidacy to highlight how odious Obama has been in these areas.

From “Who are the victims of civil liberties assaults and Endless War?”, Glenn Greenwald

No, goddammit. Deliberately misrepresenting the argument. While male “privilege” (how ugly to put it in quotes, as if it doesn’t exist) doesn’t cause someone to view Paul as a possible counter to Obama’s destruction and oppression, it allows them. When a candidate says that they will remove certain burdens that affect the nation as a whole, while greatly increasing burdens felt by minorities, the poor, women and their allies, then minorities, the poor, women and their allies will naturally find this candidate to be grotesque. To be able to ignore these concerns, to not see Ron Paul as a threat, directly targeting you because of your social status, ethnicity and gender, is the fucking definition of white male “privilege”.

A step further, the sneering self-congratulations of opposing the same policies across two administrations, refuses to ask the pertinent question: what undergirds the these two broad camps, left and right, against the war? In Paul’s case, opposition to federal meddling in private affairs is rooted in the same John Birch paranoia, that the government is out to get you, stemming from a small moment in history when the government was actively enforcing (some small piece of) the will of the oppressed onto their oppressors. Similarly, his isolationism is, like all isolationism, rooted in a xenophobia that sees a foreign, and in Paul’s case, a racialized taint. Instead of repeating the same mindless journalistic cliche, highlighting a member of the political opposition who opposes a regime on the terms with which it identifies, you have, or had, an opportunity to point out the other strain of opposition to the war, the one you cite in Martin Luther King, Jr., which refuses to see questions of war as rooted in national sovereignty, but instead in solidarity with the poor. While flirting with the enemy can satisfy your ego as some intellectually honest warrior, unbound by party in your pursuit of justice, there remains an important and necessary difference between leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperial struggle, and the crypto-and-not-so-crypto-racist, sexist class war, which gleefully trades State-shaped war for the destabilizing violence of international capitalism.