[Peace-discuss] Michael Albert remembers.

[C. G. Estabrook]

"Preciously pertinent"? How do you mean that, Mort? Particularly, how do you
understand this paragraph?

I knew Carl Oglesby slightly and liked him.  I possess probably one of the few
extant original copies of his book, "The Yankee and Cowboy War."  But this
comment is jejune (understandably -- it was 1965).

Kennedy, Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge and Goldberg were certainly liberals by
the standards of the time. But they were not honorable mean, except in the
deeply ironic sense in which Antony uses the term in Shakespeare's play (and
that Carl may have been thinking of, at least subconsciously: an educated native
speaker of English cannot use the term "honorable men" without reference to
"Julius Caesar").

They were mass murderers, and if they were not moral monsters, then there aren't
any, ever.  --CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> 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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