Q:First of all, I suspect it's even more foolish to judge a person's position based on a short quote found on an animated gif. Also, why do you imagine she's not including Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia? I doubt she was refering to the United States alone, or any single event. No, I suspect she had a more long-view historical perspective than that. There are nuanced and well argued leftist positions against pacifism that she's refering to. Judge those, not a pull quote.
I’m not really judging her whole position, but rather the use of rhetorically powerful but historically dubious assertions. Given that most people reblogging the GIF aren’t ever going to see Dorhn’s full position, I think it’s somewhat fair game to address it in its own right. My commentary on the picture was intended to spark a broader conversation (which hopefully can include a more robust version of Dohrn’s view), one that all the reblogs seem to lack.
I can understand that there are arguments to be made against pacifism, and they are worth addressing. However, if we expand the definition of society such that a single ‘society’ can include capitalist and command economies of the fascist and (perhaps bastardized) communist persuasions, as well as very widely ranging cultural norms and practices, then I think we’ve stretched it past the point of usefulness. Just because no individual society can be precisely demarcated from all others, it doesn’t follow that we can just lump societies that are very different together under the same banner.
I’d like to hear Dohrn’s argument in more detail, but the mere presentation of this rhetoric without more of the basis behind it doesn’t do a whole lot of good.
