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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (67490)	1/21/2003 4:00:33 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Mike, We are at such different places I'm not at all certain just how to talk with you. I could have cared less about the fellow traveler argument in the 60s. If someone was a body to use, we used them. If they wished to talk about politics as a Marxist, a Communist, a Stalinist, an Ayn Randist, I could have cared less. If they did the work, fine. We weren't naive. I think of it as a kind of hard headed realism. We needed bodies and folk who cared deeply enough about civil rights, meaning ending white oppression of blacks, period, to be willing to do anything from putting stamps on envelopes to winding up in southern prisons. Or on dark roads in the middle of a Mississippi night. I think you brought up SDS earlier. Until the late 60s it was pure native American idealism, political savvy, and the like. Even after the takeover, forget the name of who it was, we weren't dealing with subversion; just a political agenda that alienated everyone. No self respecting spy or whatever would have gotten close to them. The soviet/communist threat you talk about was not a threat of subversion in the 60s (I'm trying to keep from arguing about the 50s--I don't think it was in the 50s either but am not going to argue that point because, while this is OT, that is way OT); it was of a cataclysmic nuclear conflict or the Checkoslavakian problem (don't know just how to label it, the one in which a country began to exercise some freedom vis a vis occupying Soviet troops only to be squashed in 68). As for not being fooled by Stalin, that was done quite effectively in the 30s. By the 60s, he was dead. I've met few folk who declared themselves communist who approved of Stalin's tactics and several who left the party because of the 56 invasion of Hungary (Edward Thompson, for one). As for what the neocon agenda is in the absence of a bipolar world, it's quite beyond me. Michael Lind has an interesting argument in his new book Made In Texas about Bush's affiliations with the further right in the South and the neocons. When I get a chance I'll try to find a version of the argument in one of the many essays he puts on line. I've not made up my mind on his argument but I'm working on it.