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The taint, 't'ain't no taint. Dig under the paint.<br>
<br>
Tis really simpler than that. Just check out it's name.<br>
<br>
The Nation must pay its tribute to the Moloch it worships.<br>
<br>
Anarchism challenges Moloch's raison d'etre not just his actions.<br>
<br>
...qui non est mecum contra me est et qui non congregat mecum
spargit.<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 10/05/2014 12:31 AM, David Green via
Peace-discuss wrote:<br>
</div>
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cite="mid:5842100.232540.1412440313582.JavaMail.yahoo@jws106127.mail.bf1.yahoo.com"
type="cite">
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<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1412440242576_2379">
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1412440242576_2391"><span
id="yui_3_16_0_1_1412440242576_2439">The Nation Magazine's
Tainted Liberalism</span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1412440242576_2385"> </div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1412440242576_2386">posted to <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
id="yui_3_16_0_1_1412440242576_2444"
href="http://www.marxmail.org/">www.marxmail.org</a> on
March 1, 2003</div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1412440242576_2387"> </div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1412440242576_2388">This article<b> </b>is
an attempt to get to the roots of the yearlong attack on the
antiwar movement by figures associated with the Nation
Magazine, both within and outside its pages. While this
campaign has chiefly been directed at Ramsey Clark and the
ANSWER coalition, there is little doubt that what is driving
it is animosity toward the radical movement in general.</div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1412440242576_2389"> </div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1412440242576_2390">There has been a
tendency, especially at the website of our friends at
Counterpunch, to understand this in terms of character
flaws. Whether you are dealing with Christopher Hitchen's
alcoholism or Marc Cooper's creepiness, it is understandable
that one might assign a disproportionate weight to such
factors. While these are certainly repugnant characters, we
are obligated to get at the ideological roots of this
128-year-old liberal institution, which in many ways are far
creepier than any individual journalist's tics or vices.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Largely owing to the well-oiled public relations
machinery of the Nation, nearly anybody who has heard of the
magazine knows that abolitionists founded it in 1865.
Naturally this would lead the average informant, including
myself until this investigation began, to assume that the
magazine was on the barricades fighting all sorts of
injustice.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>We get a hint of the real Nation from an article that was
included in the 1990 anthology titled "The Nation 1865-1900:
Selections from the Independent Magazine of Politics and
Culture." When my eyes first spotted editor and founder E.L.
Godkin's "The Execution of the Anarchists", I assumed like
any normal person that this piece was a 19<sup>th</sup>
century version of "Free Mumia". In the preface, however, we
learn that "Godkin wrote several pieces calling for the
hanging of the Chicago anarchists; the magazine, under his
editorial control, also opposed trade unions and attacked
socialists." Why this was the case appeared to be of little
interest to the anthologist who is content to reflect that
certain pages of Godkin's Nation make for "strange reading."</div>
<div> </div>
<div>In his characteristic take-no-prisoner prose, Godkin
states, "The notion that we must tolerate speech the object
of which is to induce people to break up the social
organization and abolish property by force, is historically
and politically absurd." </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Since editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel states that Godkin's
magazine was "claiming for itself the right of citizens in a
democracy to carp, protest, condemn, revile, applaud,
celebrate, prophesy and otherwise give themselves to the
articulate of their circumstances," one must wonder why she
omitted the qualification "except for anarchists."</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Indeed, throughout the Nation Magazine's first 35 years
or so, you would be hard-put to find a challenge to the
gathering dark clouds of reaction against black rights, the
labor movement, woman's suffrage or other causes. The
magazine spoke out against women having the vote (the
speeches of people like Victoria Woodhull were "shrill,
incoherent, shallow and irrelevant") and warned that the
eight-hour day would "diminish production."</div>
<div> </div>
<div>I.F. Stone deftly sized up the editorial outlook, which
can best be described as laissez faire 19th century
liberalism, in an earlier anthology published in 1965 titled
"One Hundred Years of the Nation."</div>
<div> </div>
<div>"But to advocate laissez faire consistently and honestly,
as The Nation and Godkin did, was to adopt a lonely and
ineffectual attitude— hostile to the capitalist trend toward
monopoly, hostile to the agrarian cry for regulation of
railroads and business, hostile to the workers' attempts at
collective action. In England the advocate of laissez faire
marched in the triumphant ranks of the merchants and
manufacturers; in America he fought a hopeless rear-guard
action in the retreating forces of small business men,
rentiers, and the Adams family. The Nation under Godkin
attacked the Grangers, the Populists, the trade unions, the
single-taxers, and the Socialists, as well as the trusts,
the railroad barons, the tariff log-rollers, and the
stockjobbing financiers. But the second group was to
transform our economy and the first our politics until
laissez faire liberalism, once a revolutionary and
liberating force, became the slogan of reactionaries."</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Eventually Oswald Garrison Villard (abolitionist and
Nation editor William Lloyd Garrison's nephew) took over
from Godkin and pushed the magazine in a progressive
direction. In contrast to Godkin who complained that the
Paris Commune was expelling "the literary or educated class
from all places of trust and dignity," the magazine was
favorably disposed to the October 1917 Revolution in Russia
although refracted through the prism of native progressive
roots rather than a class perspective.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Drawing from what some might consider an
anti-intellectual tradition in the USA, the Nation has
tended to approach the class struggle from the standpoint of
morality rather than any kind of systematic methodology
based on social science, Marxism or otherwise. This has
often been reflected as a kind of championing of the
underdog, which reached a pinnacle in Carleton Beal's
travels with Nicaraguan rebel leader Augusto Sandino in the
1920s. This genre, which began with John Reed's "Insurgent
Mexico", is one part partisan reporting and one part
National Geographic travelogue:</div>
<div> </div>
<div>"On the following morning we ascended the Coco River,
breakfasted at the river settlement, and then forded
directly into the 'reten' of Colonel Guadelupe Rivera, a
grizzled soldier and wealthy 'hacendado' who had turned his
place, Santa Cruze, into a Sandino outpost.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>"More jungle then—humid, reeking. A soldier plucks twenty
dollars worth of purple orchids (New York quotation) and
sticks them in the band of his sombrero. Troops of screaming
monkeys swing past, stopping occasionally to grimace at us.
From the depths of the forest, mountain lions roar. [By the
time I got to Nicaragua in 1987, the lions had disappeared.
Lots of goats remained, however.] Huge macaws wing across
the sky, crying hoarsely and flashing crimson. We ford and
reford the north-flowing tributary, for endless hours we
toil across the Yali range, and finally drop down into
Jinotega in another night of driving rain over a road where
the horse roll pitifully, up to their bellies in mud." </div>
<div> </div>
<div>("With Sandino in Nicaragua, 3/14/1928)</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Unfortunately, the class struggle does not always pit a
plucky guerrilla band in white hats against a villainous
Uncle Sam in some kind of latter-day version of Robin Hood.
Far more often you end up with a much more complex drama
involving shades of gray. If your sole criteria for offering
solidarity to those struggling against imperialism is
morality blended with esthetics, it is very easy to lose
your way as editor Lewis Lapham points out in the March 2003
Harper's:</div>
<div> </div>
<div>"Reading Ignatieff [the reference is to a Jan. 5, 2003 NY
Times Magazine article by Harvard professor and "human
rights" expert Michael Ignatieff, where he advises that
"Imperial powers do not have the luxury of timidity, for
timidity is not prudence; it is a confession of weakness."]
I was reminded of a dinner-table conversation in Washington
in the middle 1980s at which an authoritative syndicated
columnist explained that he was 'depressed' by 'the quality
of the regime' in Nicaragua. Judging only by the tone of his
voice, I might have guessed that he was talking about a
second-rate wine or a Caribbean resort hotel gone to seed
and no longer fit to welcome golf tournaments. He wasn't
concerned about Nicaragua's capacity to harm the United
States; the army was small and ill equipped, the mineral
assets not worth the cost of a first-class embassy. Nor did
the columnist think the governing junta particularly adept
at exploiting 'the virus of Marxist revolution.' What
troubled him was the 'indecorousness of the regime.'
Nicaragua was in bad taste."</div>
<div> </div>
<div>One wonders if Lewis Lapham might have been referring to
Michael Massing, who wrote an article titled "Hard Questions
On Nicaragua" in the April 6, 1985 Nation Magazine. It is a
catalog of alleged Sandinista misdeeds ranging from press
censorship to tilting toward the Soviet bloc. Showing a
naiveté about the Carter administration that borders on
outright maliciousness, Massing states that "Unlike
Allende's Popular Unity government, the Sandinistas came to
power at a time when the United States seemed prepared to
live with revolution in Latin America." With such good-will
coming from the grinning Georgia farmer, the ideology-driven
Sandinistas had to go and spoil the whole thing by tilting
toward the Kremlin.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Stunned and appalled by Massing's piece, Alexander
Cockburn offered the following rejoinder in his April 20
"Beat the Devil" column:</div>
<div> </div>
<div><span>"Standing side by side with Reagan, Massing charges
that Nicaragua provoked the United States by forging
military ties with Cuba and the Soviet Union, as though
Nicaragua had no cause to look for external support. -He
proposes that 'progressives in this country need to
develop a more nuanced analysis of the United States' role
as a superpower.' What is this nuanced analysis? Massing
explains that the left should recognize that, 'however
unjustly, the United States regards the Caribbean Basin
as its backyard and stands ready to enforce that claim.
Accordingly, revolutionary governments would, renounce
any military relationship with the Soviet bloc and pledge
not to assist revolutionary forces in the region. In
return, they would receive a pledge of nonintervention.'"</span></div>
<div><span> </span></div>
<div><span>Cockburn described Massing's proposal as "among the
most shameful and silly" ever to appear in The Nation<i>.</i></span></div>
<div><span> </span></div>
<div><span>With all due respect to Alex, whose column was
shortened to one page after repeated outbursts of this
kind, Massing's proposal was in line with the magazine's
foreign policy punditry for most of the century. Except
for those rare instances where you are dealing with
sainted martyrs like Sandino, the Nation has tended to
view world events far too often from the angle of State
Department liberalism. (It should be pointed out however
that these same movements can often lose favor with their
liberal well-wishers after taking power and being forced
to rule draconically under siege-like conditions produced
by US economic blockade and military intervention. This in
fact was what happened with the latter day followers of
Sandino.)</span></div>
<div><span> </span></div>
<div><span>In contrast to a figure like Augusto Sandino, who
never tasted power, Juan D. Perón not only exercised
power, but also had a huge impact on the daily lives of
working people in Argentina. Since the US State Department
had labeled the populist leader as the Adolph Hitler of
Argentina, it was no surprise to discover an article in
the February 26, 1946 Nation titled "Perón: South American
Hitler." </span></div>
<div><span> </span></div>
<div><span>Written by Stanley Ross, who was a correspondent
for the AP in Buenos Aires from 1943 to 1945, the article
finds Nazis under every bed. For some reason, the Hitler
of Argentina seems inexplicably popular with the workers.
Ross reports that, "The most recent decree, ordering all
concerns to raise wages approximately 30 percent, was
received with wild acclaim even by those workers who hate
the Colonel." One supposes that he would have earned their
love by slashing their wages in half, as was the custom in
Latin American countries not groaning under fascist rule.</span></div>
<div><span> </span></div>
<div>Meanwhile, another progressive Colonel over in Egypt was
also getting on the magazine's shit-list. Now for a
consistent anti-imperialist, the confrontation between
Nasser and the West over control of the Suez Canal might
have seemed a straightforward deal. Apparently, the Egyptian
people did not pass the Nation Magazine's litmus test for in
a January 5, 1957 editorial titled " The Statue Is Not For
Bombing" they are censured like wayward children:</div>
<div> </div>
<div>"The Egyptian mob that dynamited an eighty-foot statue of
Ferdinand de Lesseps that marked the entrance to the harbor
at Port Said might have been better advised to build a new
and loftier monument to this imaginative adventurer. Had it
not been for de Lesseps, and the backers of his daring
project, the future of the Egyptian people might be less
bright than it is today. The bright promise of this future
can be lost, if the Egyptians and their dictator, Colonel
Nasser, fail to exhibit the wisdom, self-restraint and good
sense that alone can preserve the fruits of a victory which,
they did not win for themselves. Victories that have been
won unassisted usually command a, price that has a sobering
effect on the victors; those that come cheaply often have
the opposite effect. If Colonel Nasser pushes his luck too
hard, too fast and too far, he will forfeit the gains the
Egyptians have registered to date. Much depends, however, on
the guidance and tact which the world-community can bring to
bear on Cairo through the U.N. and its agencies and
officials. The Egyptians are negotiating a treacherous
waterway, with dangerous shoals and currents, which leads
from a freedom without power to a position of responsibility
based on power and achievement. Having intervened in Egypt's
behalf, the world community has a special obligation to
prevent the Nasser regime from succumbing to vagrant
daydreams of dominion or empire."</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The careful observer will of course notice that just like
today's liberals the Nation is anxious that the
"world-community" and the U.N. civilize the Iraqis of their
time. If diplomatic pressure did not suffice, they of course
could depend on old-fashioned bombing and shooting,
sanctified by the blue-helmeted men who had taught the
ornery North Koreans their lesson only a couple of years
earlier.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>It is not too hard to figure out how the Nation Magazine
might have developed such an antipathy to one of the
greatest anti-imperialist struggles of the 1950s. If the
most important criterion is the stability of world commerce
and the continuing availability of natural resources,
obviously you would view Colonel Nasser and similar figures
as a threat.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>In 1952, shortly after Mossadegh had been voted into
power in Iran, the Nation took it upon itself to persuade
the secular nationalist to pay proper respect to Western
powers. In the aptly titled "A New Deal for the Middle East"
(the magazine was an institutional pillar of FDR's 4 term
presidency), long-time editor Freda Kirchwey describes the
Godfather like deal being put forward by London and
Washington. The US would grant a $10 million loan and
Britain would withdraw the economic sanctions imposed a year
earlier in exchange for a favorable deal involving Shell and
all the other gangsters. "But," Kirchwey wrote, "reports
from Teheran give little reason for optimism." He might be
better advised in fact to cut a deal where he gets part of
the pie rather than the whole thing. Missing entirely from
this equation is the right of the Iranian people to decide
to do with their own resources. Within a year Mossadegh,
whom the Nation would eventually dub a "dictator", would be
overthrown by a young leader they characterized as
"well-meaning" and "progressive." His name? Reza Shah
Pahlevi.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>On June 25, 1955, Sam Jaffe, their "roving correspondent"
in Southeast Asia, filed a report on "Dilemma in Saigon:
Which Way Democracy" that is filled with the kinds of
self-flattering illusions satirized in Graham Greene's "The
Quiet American" as well as fulsome praise for the dictator
Ngo Dinh Diem:</div>
<div> </div>
<div>"In Saigon there is one man with a solution. But he
admits it must be put into effect quickly or all will be
lost. I am not permitted to give his name, but he is an
American official who works around the clock attempting to
whip the Diem government into shape. He has a deep belief in
America and its great past, which, he reminds you, was the
result of its success in throwing off colonial rule. He also
has a deep belief in the Asians. He feels strongly that our
Asian foreign policy should not be to support any one group
or government but the will of the Asian peoples.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>"He speaks of concrete plans now under way in Vietnam for
the reconstruction of the country. These include the
resettling of over 800,000 refugees. Land will be granted
them and money given them to build new homes—if needed, more
money can be obtained through a low-interest loan. He speaks
with enthusiasm, of the work being done by TRIM, the
American Training Relations and Instructions Mission under
the able command of Lieutenant General John W. O'Daniel, in
helping the Vietnamese build and maintain a strong military
force. He hopes for much from the teams of Americans under
USMO, the United States Operations Mission, who go into the
Vietnamese countryside to ascertain the wants of the people.
Their reports are filled with the need for schools, bridges,
communications, hospitals, sanitation, and the many other
necessities of life that might stem the tide of communism."</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Perhaps it would be too much to expect the Nation
Magazine to have simply recognized the USA had no business
in Indochina whatsoever in 1955. But one would think that by
1966, when the antiwar movement had reached massive
proportions, that they would have gotten out of the business
of meddling in the affairs of the Vietnamese people, even
under the auspices of that fabled "world-community" alluded
to in the dressing down of the Egyptian masses above.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>While the Nation no longer wrote puff pieces for the
Vietnamese puppets, it was not above suggesting that
solutions to the country's problems could be imposed from
the East River of Manhattan. In Russell Leng's February 28,
1966 "Vietnam: What Role for the UN? Strategy of a Truce",
we learn that peace is possible if the Security Council can
get its act together. Leng is forced to admit that the
cash-strapped world body may not have the authority to do
the sorts of things it once did: "What was possible in
Korea, and even in the Congo, will not be possible in
Vietnam." Considering the fate of Lumumba and the four
million Korean casualties (out of a total population north
and south of 40 million), perhaps that was not such a bad
thing.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>And what would be the concrete aim of the United Nations?
Leng suggests that a workable peace settlement might include
"the successful integration of the Vietcong into the
political structure of South Vietnam." In other words, the
Nation Magazine was suggesting that the UN would be a better
agency for accomplishing the goals of the Johnson
administration, but without once considering the possibility
that the goals themselves were colonial in character.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>That very same year a huge anti-Communist bloodbath took
place in Indonesia. For reasons unfathomable to anybody
familiar with the country's sorry history subsequent to that
terrible event, the Nation Magazine found a silver lining in
that dark cloud. Alex Josey, a "free-lance correspondent in
the Far East for the past eighteen years, filed an article
in the November 28, 1966 Nation titled "Hope After
Massacre." It concludes on the following Panglossian note:</div>
<div> </div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1412440242576_2378">"As I flew back to
the efficiency, the modern comfort and the comparative
security of Singapore, I tried to imagine what role
Indonesia could be expected to play in Asian affairs in the
foreseeable future This country of 100 million people is
potentially among the richest in the world, but it is
encumbered with a run-down, state-controlled economy, with
between 2 million and 5 million civil servants (nobody
really knows), and with more than halt a million in its
armed forces It desperately seeks a domestic political
formula and economic sanity. If there is to be progress in
these fields, the generals and the politicians will have
their hands full for some lime to come. Relations with China
will probably deteriorate, those with the Soviet Union and
the West, including the United States, will most likely
improve, Japan will move much closer. The non-Communist
world may be relieved that Indonesia has been rescued, on
the brink, from communism And, by now, thanks to Radio
Jakarta and the controlled papers, most Indonesians may
share this view without knowing exactly why. But the truth
is that the abortive coup, whatever if was, the awful
massacres, Sukarno's containment and the new army regime
have left Indonesia very much as it was before. With,
however, one important difference: there now is hope."</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Let us conclude with a brief observation. For many of us
in the radical movement who were introduced to the Nation
Magazine in the early 1980s as part of a search for a
reliable source of information and analysis that was not
tainted by dogmatism, the recent drift into red-baiting and
anti-antiwar advocacy might at first seem like a departure
from the Nation's anti-imperialism track record. I was
prompted to look into the Nation Magazine's archives only
after repeated assaults on the peace movement by figures
such as David Corn, Christopher Hitchens, Marc Cooper and
Eric Alterman who has stated openly that he would support a
USA invasion of Iraq, even under terms dictated by Bush.
This is not a magazine we can rely on. The most urgent task
for the left is to develop a mass-circulation alternative to
the Nation Magazine that relies on the grass roots rather
than liberal millionaires. Such alternatives are taking
shape right now with the Counterpunch web and print
editions, but much more is needed with the survival of the
human race at stake.</div>
</div>
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