Here's a bit more about the Author of your article: Surely there is a place a bit more to the 'center'....
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Marxist professor of sociology at State University of New York
“We as Americans have to hope America will lose [the war in Iraq]. If we win, we have to expect more wars, more destruction.”
In November of 2004, just as U.S. troops were laying siege to the terrorist stronghold of Fallujah, Michael Schwartz, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, was leading a crowd of anti-war protestors rooting for an American defeat. “We as Americans have to hope America will lose,” Schwartz bellowed . “If we win, we have to expect more wars, more destruction. Iran is next, Syria is next, and this is only the beginning.”
The remarks, which echoed similar comments by professors Nicholas DeGenova, Robert Jensen, John Pilger, Ward Churchill and others, were hardly spontaneous. Writing in the Asia Times in late September 2004, Schwartz entreated the “international community” to side with terrorists in Iraq in opposing the then-incipient U.S. offensive on Fallujah. Cautioning that “even the most ferocious Iraqi resistance may not be sufficient to deter the coming November offensive,” Schwartz wrote, “the Iraqis need and deserve the support of the international community; the best (and least destructive) deterrent against this impending onslaught would be the threat of uncontrollable worldwide protest should the U.S. attempt to level either Fallujah or Sadr City.”
In defense of this forthrightly anti-American position, Schwartz sought to portray the terrorists beheading Iraqi, American and other foreign infidels, in Fallujah as gallant “revolutionaries” fighting a rearguard action against “brutal” American tactics. Schwartz went so far as to parrot terrorist propaganda, dismissing the “cover story” that U.S. military forces were targeting legitimate terrorist targets, a charge he purportedly substantiated by noting that “hospitals report daily that the vast majority of the casualties are civilians.” Schwartz declined to note that the majority of those casualties were caused not by U.S. forces but by the terrorist “insurgents” whose cause he urged the world to embrace.
This too was not a novel argument for Schwartz. In August of 2004, writing in TomDispatch.com, a far-left site run under the auspices of The Nation Institute, Schwartz inveighed against the U.S. offensive in Najaf, condemning the “agony” of the American campaign against the Shiite guerrillas of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and bemoaning “the death and destruction it is wreaking on an ancient and holy city.” The overheated rhetoric was a logical leap from Schwartz’s claim, in June of 2004, that the “Bush Administration plans to remake Iraq as an agent of American policy in the Middle East.”
If Schwartz seemed to have little difficultly maintaining a constant stream of radical theorizing, one explanation is that he is well practiced in the craft. Throughout his 30-year career as a professor at Stony Brook, he has cultivated a colorful array of radical interests. A contributor to Marxist journals like Science & Society, Schwartz, who counts “Marxist sociology” among his main research interests, has also authored books on everything from radical theory (Radical Politics and Social Structure, 1976), to assaults on the American business community (Power Structure of American Business, 1985), to fusillades against his ideological opponents (Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda).
Over the years, Schwartz has been well compensated for this output. For instance, in 1986 he was awarded a $125,000 grant by the National Science Foundation. The grant allowed him to bring his Marxism-inspired fixations to bear on the study of the “causes of industrial decline.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the sociology courses offered at Stony Brook bear the imprint of Schwartz’s Marxist obsession with class conflict. In fact, there is a course called “Stratification” that purports to investigate the “causes and consequences of the unequal distribution of wealth, power, prestige, and other social values in different societies.” Special seminars in the Stony Brook sociology department, meanwhile, regularly take as their subject issues like “Advanced Topics in Marxist Theory.”
At present (as of April 2005), Schwartz is finishing a book titled The Rise and Fall of Detroit, which chronicles the history of the United Auto Workers trade union from 1900 to 1990. (In an ostensible show of solidarity with the working class, the Harvard-educated Schwartz (PhD 1971) is also listed as an affiliate faculty member with the Center for Study of Working Class Life, a Stony Brook facility that promotes “multiple forms of scholarship, teaching, and activism related to working-class life and cultures.”
The Center is headed by the Marxist economist Michael Zweig. In addition, Schwartz regularly lends his signature to causes espoused by labor union activists. In September of 2001, for instance, Schwartz’s name appeared backing an intemperate statement, authored by New York City labor activists, that opposed the U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan on the pretext that the “United States and its allies have already inflicted widespread suffering on innocent people in such places as Iraq, Sudan, Israel and the Occupied Territories, the former Yugoslavia and Latin America.”
As a corollary to his books, Schwartz has his own pulpit at Stony Brook: he serves as the faculty director of a Stony Brook institution called the Undergraduate College of Global Studies. Informing students that its function is “preparing you to be a citizen of the world,” the College of Global Studies has its own unique conception of proper citizenship. One indication as to what this may be comes from a November 2004 conference sponsored by the College of Global Studies. Presented under the title “Could You Be Drafted? Forum on the Draft,” the conference featured a gallery of leftwing speakers. Among them was Michael Foley, a professor of history at the City University of New York and the author of Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War; Brother Clarke Berge, an activist and Protestant chaplain at Stony Brook; and Anita Cole, a member of the Center on Conscience and War, a non-profit group that champions the “rights of conscientious objectors.”
Michael Schwartz was also there. In typically tendentious fashion, Schwartz began the forum by asserting that the introduction of a military draft was not only possible but, indeed, imminent. So desperate was the beleaguered American military for additional manpower, according to Schwartz, that the U.S. government intended to enact a draft—which Schwartz called a “ticking time bomb”—in the spring of 2005. “This ticking time bomb will go off next spring,” Schwartz declared. However, spring came and with it elections in Iraq that U.S. victories made possible, and without a draft. |
