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Recent
Stories
June
20, 2003
Gary
Leupp
Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
June
19, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Bush Plays the Racial Profiling Card:
It's a Smokescreen
Brian
Cloughley
Punch-and-Judy in the West Wing:
The Powell-Rice Show
David Lindorff
What's Next?
Mark
Jacobs
A Serious Conversation: a Former Foreign Service Officer on Diplomacy
in the Age of Bush
Alfredo
Castro
Bloodbath in Colombia: The Army and the Death Squads
Saul
Landau
Lying, Flag Waving and Redefining
Conservative Values
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/19
June
18, 2003
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
Elaine
Cassel
Dark Star Chambers: Secret Trials,
Nameless Defendents, Veiled Threats to Defense Lawyers
Col.
Daniel Smith
Iraq's WMDs: Integrity, Ethics and
Intelligence
Chris
Fagen
Ignoring the World's Bloodiest War
Rick
Fantasia and Kim Voss
Bush's Low Intensity War on Labor
Sam
Hamod
Theater of Deception: Bush, Sharon,
Abbas
M.
Shahid Alam
Illuminating Tom Friedman
Jon
Brown
Greens & Dems: a Reply to Publius
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/18
June
17, 2003
Dr.
Susan Block
Sex, Lies and WMDs
Elaine
Cassel
Scalia, the Rumsfeld of the Supremes
Roger Burbach
Brazil Under Lula
Dan
Bacher
The WTO's War on Salmon
Peter
Phillips and Jason Spencer
Entertainment Media 2003
Nuclear
Age Peace Foundation
The Challenge of Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century
Wayne Madsen
Outting Ashcroft's Latest Hypocrisy
Larry
Kearney
Starlight
Steve
Perry
The Bush Administration
Lies Marathon, Day 3
June
16, 2003
Frida
Berrigan
Death in Aceh: US Weapon Aid the
Repression
Publius
Candidate Dem and Citizen Green
Tarif
Abboushi
Roadmap or Roadkill?
Rep. John
Conyers
Bush's Deceptions about Iraq Threaten Democracy at Home
Julian
Samuel
A Review of Pilger's The New Rulers of the World
Uri
Avnery
The Children of Death
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies,
Part 2
June
14 / 15, 2003
Edward
Said
A Roadmap to What and Where?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pryor Unrestraint: Killer Bill Pryor's
Mad Quest for the Federal Bench
David Lindorff
Rumsfeld v. Belgium
Jennifer
Loewenstein
Suicide's Most Willing Accomplice
Lee Sustar
US Tax System: Rigged for the Rich
Ben
Tripp
Of Dissidents and Dissonance
William
S. Lind
Lies, Damned Lies and Military Intelligence
Joanne
Mariner
Rebellious Judges
Gila Svirsky
A Macabre Alliance
Mickey
Z.
Where We Are
Chris Floyd
Metaphysics as a Guide to Murder
Noah
Leavitt
Peru as Our Crystal Ball?
Yves Engler
and Bianca Mugyenyi
The G8 and Africa
Dr.
Gerry Lower
Dear Rudy, Let's Get Those Damned Liberals
Ted Dace
A Review of Kovel's The Enemy of Nature
Adam
Engel
Midnight at the Apocalyptic Pancake
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Greeder, Albert, and O'Hayer
Website
of the Weekend
AEI: Starts Wars; Creates
Poverty
June
13, 2003
David
Vest
Bush
Roadmap to What?
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Reloaded?
John
Chuckman
The Man Who Wasn't There
Jason Leopold
Six Months Before War White House Silenced Critics of WMD Intelligence
Michael
Leon
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media
Negar Azimi
Ashcroft's Cruel Version of America
Saul
Landau
Shiite Happens
Hammond
Guthrie
Then and Now
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/13
June
12, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology
Ahmad Faruqui
The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day
War
Wayne
Madsen
Unfit for Office: Time for Rumsfeld to Resign
Laura Carlsen
Hunger and Security
Tarif
Abboushi
Warm and Fuzzy in Aqaba
Ray
McGovern
Deceived into War: Reflections of
a Former CIA Analyst
Steve
Perry
Counting Bush's
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June
21, 2003
Gitlin: The Duke of
Condescension
Return
to Sender
By TODD CHRETIEN
Letters to a Young Activist,
Todd Gitlin,
Basic Books, 2003, 174 pages, $22.50.
Imagine A "young activist" who picks
up Todd Gitlin's new book, seeking useful advice from the former
president of the premiere antiwar student organization of the
1960s, Students for a Democratic Society. They will be surprised
to find that history's two most dangerous people are not members
of Bush's cabinet, but rather the Russian revolutionary Lenin
and 2000 Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader. (Noam
Chomsky comes in a distant third).
Running throughout the condescending
prose and sloppy fact-checking in Gitlin's Letters
to a Young Activist lies the assertion that any challenge
to the Democratic Party is either the product of youthful folly
or crazed sectarianism. His central historical contention about
the 1960s movements is that everything was going fine until people
starting thinking that real social justice required some type
of revolution or looked to Lenin--who he describes as an "intellectually
dishonest" monster--for ideas.
For instance, Gitlin claims that "the
Black Panther Party hijacked the black liberation movement"
and slanders the urban Black rebellions that broke out after
Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination as "the momentary
exultation of looters, arsonists and snipers." Gitlin also
harbors a rather ambiguous attitude to the McCarthyite anti-Communist
witch trials, which he calls a "mixed blessing."
Having smeared any attempt to challenge
U.S. capitalism at its roots, Gitlin staggers on into the realm
of the absurd. "If antiwar militancy can take credit for
driving Johnson from office in 1968," writes Gitlin, "it
must...shoulder the blame for nudging some voters towards Nixon,
who proceeded to extend the Vietnam War for five years and expanded
it to Laos and Cambodia, killing more than a million people."
Playing fast and loose with the facts,
Gitlin tells his young activist reader--who he prefers to call
a "social entrepreneur"--that had the antiwar movement
supported Democrat Hubert Humphrey (who personally helped escalate
the war for the five previous years as Johnson's vice president)
for president in 1968, "he would have phased out the war."
Thus, the lesson is, if you don't vote for the Democrats, you
are morally responsible for Nixon and Pol Pot.
After a chapter claiming that racism
is fading away and Black students only "proclaim their marginal
identity" as a way of filling an existential void, Gitlin
attacks activists organizing for justice for Palestinians against
Israeli apartheid. In other chapters, he assails anyone who won't
salute the American flag, chastises "feminist zealots [who]
were sometimes indifferent to children" and calls for the
left to join in the war on "Islamic murderers."
But the real point of Gitlin's whole
enterprise is to draw a straight line from his version of 1960s
history to today: A vote for Nader or any third-party candidate
was (and would be again) a vote for Bush because "you either
vote Democratic, or submit to the rule of the Republicans. "The
Democratic Party is the inescapable field where we either win,
lose or draw."
Gitlin advises young activists not to
be intimidated by their political opponents--but this is precisely
what his book aims to do. He contemptuously dismisses any attempt
to build a genuine radical political party as "narcissism
wearing a cloak of ideals."
Give this book a read as a brief to prepare
for the liberal Democratic war against anyone who dares to challenge
the "lesser evil in 2004" reasoning. But at $22.50,
Gitlin's 161 pages aren't worth it. Steal this book.
Todd Chretien
writes for the Socialist
Worker. He can be reached at: ChretienTodd@aol.com
Today's Features
Elaine
Cassel
Bush Plays the Racial Profiling Card:
It's a Smokescreen
Brian
Cloughley
Punch-and-Judy in the West Wing:
The Powell-Rice Show
David Lindorff
What's Next?
Mark
Jacobs
A Serious Conversation: a Former Foreign Service Officer on Diplomacy
in the Age of Bush
Alfredo
Castro
Bloodbath in Colombia: The Army and the Death Squads
Saul
Landau
Lying, Flag Waving and Redefining
Conservative Values
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/19
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