[Peace-discuss] Michael Albert remembers.

[Brussel Morton K.]

He's making the important point that it's the system that defines  
these men.  Oglesby, in making a point which Albert took to heart,  
may have gone overboard. However, the argument is analogous to what  
Marx said of capitalism and its gross, even vile, excesses—it's the  
system.

I suppose I oughtn't to have used the dangerous word "precious". I  
used it because of the rather touching frankness with which Albert  
writes of his formative years. --mkb


On May 10, 2008, at 9:41 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> "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. …/
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------- 
>> ---