[Peace-discuss] Michael Albert remembers.

[C. G. Estabrook]

I don't think the problem is "precious" but rather Oglesby's exculpation (if 
that's what it is) of the leaders of the American government in the Kennedy era 
(and Albert's strange praise of it).

Marx analysis' of the hidden nature of capitalism and its historical nature is 
of permanent value, but he knew perfectly well that people "make their own 
history": he added (in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852),
"But they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected 
circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted 
from the past."

But are leaders therefore exculpated, as Oglesby seems to suggest? Was it the 
system that defined the German leaders in the 1930s, and if so was Nuremberg 
wrong to condemn them?  Was it the system that defined the ANC leaders in 
apartheid South Africa, and so it's wrong to praise them?

What system are you and I defined by? Or are we somehow freer than Kennedy & 
friends?  --CGE


Brussel Morton K. wrote:
> 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. …/
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>