Why we on the left fight, and refuse reconciliation

As his father lay dying, a thought came to him: I am not very young anymore, but I'm alive, and I can do stuff.  What the fuck ever happened to the rebels?

They had gone last week to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington.  It's shit, he said.  The problem with the war had nothing to do with a personal failure of reconciliation to be resolved in a personal way.  People who are truly alive will stake their lives on something, and then they don't look back, and it's not in question.  “Either that war was about something that mattered, or it wasn't.  If it wasn't, we can go to the Christmas party and kiss and make up with everyone we fought against so bitterly. But if it was, and I think it was, then we remain on opposite sides, you who support fascism, I who fight it.  The difference here is not between a conflict and some kind of harmonious agreement that is correct because it’s happier, because people ought to be in agreement and harmony.  But there is one important difference between us: those in my generation who were determined, and still are, to fight against the social forces that you support, we don’t want to sacrifice our fathers for our cause, but you, the fathers, did want to sacrifice your sons, and that is an evil that cannot be tolerated.

This is also the difference between feminism and patriarchy.  It is a difference that gets obscured when women who have some social authority are actually fighting not the rulers but their own social equals or inferiors just because they are men.  The problem of tyranny has lots to do with patriarchy, but nothing necessarily to do with gender, and anyway, if there are men exercising a tyrannical authority on a parental model, there are women who do that, too.  That’s what’s most wrong with liberalism: it’s not against any form of domination but only in favor of a group of people who are identified as its victims, who then claim to fight its beneficiaries, but they are not against the domination at all; they want it and only want it to work for them.  

In the end, I think people who realize that they are part of a system that is based on something not that different in essence from slavery, either they rebel or they don’t.  If not, then their most interesting potentiality is only to die, and that’s sad.  But what we want, and this is how we are different from people like you, is not to just fight against what opposes us.  We do fight it, but in order to win, not in ambivalence or cowardly compromise or resignation to being defeated.  And then, having defeated our oppressors, we go elsewhere and do something else and forget about the people who were so wrong.  Either a revolt or revolution is possible or it isn’t.  If it’s only a personal affection or psychological stage, then it is not.  In that case, there’s nothing really to live for, and you can only just make your compromises with whoever or whatever dominates, take your pleasures, live your life, and grow old and die, and basta.  By my accounting you won’t have lived at all.  But someone who never even wanted to rebel, except maybe in the dishonest way that patriarchs like you did, which is to punish their sons who would rebel as the sole form of aggression they can understand and tolerate, those people live lives of quiet desperation and that is, in the end, merely sad.”