[Peace-discuss] Michael Albert remembers.

[Brussel Morton K.]

Thanks for your remarks.  Obviously, we have here a question of  
nature vs. nurture; both play vital roles. Some resist the system,  
others fall prey to its worst aspects. Others fall in-between. The  
system (and what has gone before) is, I think Oglesby and Albert  
would say,  very important in bringing certain types to the fore.

I think you are overly hard on Oglesby  and Albert. I'm sure they  
would have answers to your questions along the lines I've sketched.   
Perhaps you should quiz Albert on this to see his response.

--mkb

On May 11, 2008, at 12:28 AM, C. G. Estabrook 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
>
>
> 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. …/
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------- 
>>>> -----