Cold Comfort From Joe HillMaimon Schwarzschild

Don’t mourn, organize!, said Joe Hill.  My own feelings run more towards Don’t organize, mourn!  Perhaps there are a few signs of hope after a very bad night.   The landslide victory of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative is a good thing.  The fact that relatively sane Democrats like Joe Lieberman helped give the Democrats their margin of victory, in the House as well as in the Senate, may or may not turn out to be significant.  Not, I predict; but I’m not the house optimist.

Is this election a surrender note from the United States?  There are ugly currents around the world, and they will surely see it that way: not unfairly, I think.  When America was defeated in Vietnam, also largely because of domestic politics, the results were horrific for millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and elsewhere in southeast Asia; and there followed a decade and more of Communist surge, in Africa, in Central America, and elsewhere.  This was also when European public opinion conclusively turned “neutralist”.  (It’s a grim joke that yesterday brought back Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas, along with La Pelosi & Co.)  But it was the Communists who were defeated in the end: internal moral and economic collapse, and Ronald Reagan, brought them down.

Will today’s forces of barbarism in the world give up so obligingly?  Forgive me if I doubt it.  Iran now has a green light to make its nuclear bombs, and to use them – so long as it doesn’t use them directly on the United States.  The Iranian nuclear “final solution” in the middle east would be the beginning, not the end, of a long and ugly story for the rest of the world.  The United States can be discounted – or so it might now (reasonably enough) be thought.

The America of the 1940s or 1950s would have seen these people off – the Islamists, the turbanned mullahs in Teheran, Hugo Chavez – without much hesitation and without much difficulty.  In reality, they are all of them weaker than the USSR and China of Khrushchev’s and Mao’s era.   But post-1960s America may be a different story.  Yesterday’s festivities aren’t encouraging.