[Peace-discuss] Michael Albert remembers.

[C. G. Estabrook]

Albert's paragraph makes a little more sense in context.  He's talking about the 
slow and stupid struggle to political awareness of the chattering classes in 
America in the mid-1960s, after more than a decade of post-WWII brainwashing 
(metonymically called "McCarthyism").

Albert uses Oglesby's speech to illustrate the progress: "We began to realize 
that it wasn't just bad people. It was bad institutions."  But a bad institution 
doesn't exculpate the people in it: just the opposite, unless they're being 
struggled against.

An institution is a patterned way of doing things, though reasons for it and 
even its procedures are often tacit and hidden. It is of course vital to analyze 
and expose them, so that we can ask, "Is that what we really want to do?" -- 
whether we're talking about the unconscious influences on behavior to which 
Freud directed us or the hidden workings of the economy that Marx noted.

As has been said, modern views of the world are "hermeneutics of suspicion" -- 
suggestions for methods of interpretation, based on the insight that things are 
not what they seem (cf., in addition to Freud on psychology and Marx on 
economics, Einstein on physics and Chomsky on linguistics) -- and particularly 
so in the modern social world.

But the ignoring of those patterns, which the early SDSers were slowly 
struggling against, had not happened without protest.  As usual, the poets got 
there long before:

	I wander thro' each charter'd street,
	Near where the charter'd Thames does flow
	And mark in every face I meet
	Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

	In every cry of every Man,
	In every Infant's cry of fear,
	In every voice: in every ban,
	The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

	How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
	Every blackning Church appalls,
	And the hapless Soldier's sigh
	Runs in blood down Palace walls.

	But most thro' midnight streets I hear
	How the youthful Harlot's curse
	Blasts the new-born Infant's tear,
	And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
  	(William Blake, "London," 1794)

Feudal exploitation was obvious, but that human relationships were instrumental 
was rejected; capitalist exploitation is hidden, but we take for granted the 
notion that human relations are instrumental: under capitalism, we're all 
salesmen, said Marx. That's why Blake's contemporary, Kant, found it necessary 
to raise to the level of the primary moral exhortation to "treat humanity, 
whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same 
time as an end and never merely as a means to an end" -- but he was swimming 
against the vast tide of modernity.

In the previous paragraph, Albert quotes one of the Existentialists of the 
post-WWII period, who were in fact asking the right questions for the time, 
those of freedom and responsibility.  "We were never more free than under the 
Occupation," said Sartre, who spoke of "bourgeois bad faith," by which he meant 
the excuse that we could do nothing else but go along -- resistance was futile, 
we're defined by the system.

Perhaps I was wrong to think the answers to my rhetorical questions obvious. The 
Nuremberg tribunal was not wrong to condemn the German leaders for launching 
aggressive war, which it termed "the supreme international crime [i.e., worse 
than terrorism] differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within 
itself the accumulated evil of the whole." We are not wrong to praise the heroes 
who fought for their people's freedom in apartheid South Africa.

It is necessary for us -- rich, privileged and free beyond the dreams of the 
vast majority of humanity -- to reject the comfortable servitude to which our 
rulers' hatred of democracy (quite reasonable, because it threatens their power 
and privilege) reduces us. We're supposed to be isolated in front of our TV 
screens (or computers), scared to lose our jobs (or health care), and 
consequently discouraged from getting together, talking to one another, getting 
the information we need, and making decisions that have effect.  That would be 
democracy -- not pulling a lever for a pre-selected candidate every few years.

Most of humanity really is oppressed -- "defined by a system" that says submit 
or die.  But the American leaders of the 1960s weren't (nor were the German 
leaders of the 1930s); nor in another way was Mandela -- nor are we. --CGE


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