[Peace-discuss] Michael Albert remembers.

[Morton K. Brussel]

An extract from a memoir, which I found interesting. Michael Albert  
is one of the most astute analysts of our present predicament. His  
article/interview in the current Z-Magazine is preciously pertinent.  
The complete "memoir", from Z-Net is at

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17592


…I was particularly affected, I remember, by reading a path breaking  
speech SDS president Carl Oglesby gave at a 1965 Washington antiwar  
rally. What Oglesby said then, which I read a couple of years later,  
was at the heart of my political emergence and that of the New Left  
more widely. Picture this young fellow speaking from the Capitol  
Building in Washington DC, to thousands of angry young people.  
Envision him offering views his audience had never heard before. "The  
original commitment in Vietnam was made by President Truman, a  
mainstream liberal. It was seconded by President Eisenhower, a  
moderate liberal. It was intensified by the late President Kennedy, a  
flaming liberal." Oglesby asked us to "think of the men who now  
engineer that war—those who study the maps, give the commands, push  
the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge,  
Goldberg, the president himself." He highlighted the obvious. "They  
are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all  
liberals." Oglesby told us that the U.S. aim in Vietnam was ...to  
safeguard what they take to be American interests around the world  
against revolution or revolutionary change...never mind that for two- 
thirds of the world's people the twentieth century might as well be  
the Stone Age; never mind the melting poverty and hopelessness that  
are the basic facts of life for most modern men; and never mind that  
for these millions there is now an increasingly perceptible  
relationship between their sorrow and our contentment. …
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