[Peace-discuss] Michael Albert remembers.

[John W.]

On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 12:28 AM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:

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


This is one of your more interesting questions, Carl.  I wonder if you've
ever really grappled with it, in all its complexity.

John Wason



> 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. …/
>>>
>>>
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