To "Marxists" living in their anti-nationalist Disneyland, on the current European crisis

Dear "Marxist" friends who oppose all sides in the current European conflict:

I have heard the story about the world to come that is free of domination by states and exploitation by capitalists, a world without nations or long days in factories and other inconveniences. I believe this story has its truth as a possibility that is sufficiently immanent in the existing order of things that we can hope and work for it, someday.

However. If I lived in a country that, like my own United States, is in some ways very palpably not the happiest place on earth (that may be Disneyland: they did use the expression, and earthly paradises have been imagined, and their images sometimes imagined with force and enforced with some imagination), and if that place, for a country is not only a kind of institution or set of such things, but also a place, where people live, or try to, - if that place were invaded and its men, women, and children put to the sword, I would want to fight to claim some of the life in this world, never mind the world to come, that is suddenly and concretely endangered.

That doesn't have to mean we would forget those wondrous dreams. I hold them to be as real as the prophecies of Isaiah and the dreams of people with imagination who believe that what we hope for can also matter, and greatly. One thing at a time.

I was against the great war of my youth, America's war in Vietnam. "Our" country was the aggressor in that conflict, and men, women, and children were killed, often in ways that were horrifyingly violent.

I admire the Ukrainians who are fighting for their country as I admire the Vietnamese men and women who fought then for theirs.

I know that causes with which I can sympathize are often supported by people whose ambitions are less than perfectly noble. But that is not news and should not shock us or change our judgment.

There were Trotskyists in the day who thought the US and its 'capitalist' allies should stay out of World War II, which was just a war between capitalist 'imperialists'.

Stupidity can infect the noblest and most interesting political theories.

At the end of Rossellini's Paisa, set in Italy after the American and British invasion and during the partisan war that started after the fascist regime was toppled, an American soldier says of the Italian partisans, "These men aren't fighting for the British empire, they're fighting for their lives." That the British and American 'imperialists' were on their side might well be regarded, if only in the context, as something of a detail.