Hi Brumar89; Re: "Bilow, you're amazing."
Yes.
Re: "There isn't any propaganda here. It's just an article from 1946 which is reminiscient of recent articles about Iraq. The article is legit. And it is irrelevant who posted it- whether man or woman, Republican or other, in the oil biz or not, what city they live in, etc."
I'm sure you're telling the truth here, as far as your own feelings go. But other people do care, and that is why in the past 24 hours the Heck Exploration company removed their incriminating PO Box and phone number from their website. Here's the old site:
216.239.57.104
Here's what the site looks like now:
heckex.com
So no matter how you feel about this, the simple fact is that the rats are scurrying away from me as fast as they can.
Re: "Finally, you deign to discuss the article."
I talked about it at great length yesterday, but you didn't reply to that part of my post. Here's my post: #reply-19417293
Re: "Well, its hard for either of us to know how widespread the viewpoint expressed by Dos Passos was in 1946 as neither of us has a memory of those times."
John Dos Passos was a big name writer back in 1946. People who've never heard of him are, as far as that part of history goes, illiterate. If you had known who he was, you wouldn't be blithely quoting his crap.
The fact is that Heck Exploration knew exactly who Dos Passos was, but when they put up that link on the blog, they didn't bother to inform anyone that Dos Passos was a pinko because it would have reduced the strength of their message, which was that the German occupation went badly. Instead, what they told you about Dos Passos was this:
"Maybe the author of the main article, John Dos Passos, was the Robert Fisk of his day. Maybe Henry Luce had it in for Harry Truman. This is a discussion for more knowledgeable people than me. But what I really wasn't ready for in an article in Life Magazine six months after the end of World War II was a line such as this:"
By putting their introduction this way, they avoided responsibility for knowing who Dos Passos was. But the fact that they are not some girl named Jessica, but instead are an oil exploration firm with close ties to the Bush administration indicates that they certainly have typed "john dos passos" into google and found out who he was. If they had found out that Dos Passos was a man who knew what he was talking about, they'd have given that information to you. Instead, what they did was to withold information from you, which is a form of propaganda.
But why don't you go over to the local library and read what the letters to the editor in response to the Dos Passos article were? I'll bet that they won't surprise you.
Dos Passos was the kind of nut that has always been a part of any society and should be ignored. He was not famous for being a military, economic, business or political expert, but instead was just a novelist. A fantasy writer. He had little connection with reality. He was a f'ing communist, a "trotskyite":
from: Writers on the Left by Daniel Aaron
...
The radicalism of Dos Passos simmered in the early twenties, boiled furiously between 1927 and 1932, and began to cool thereafter. At no time did he consider joining the Communist Party, but he supported it during his fellow- traveling stage as the successor to the I.W.W. and as the "arch-enemy" of privilege.
...
Back from Spain, "Dos Passos published articles criticizing the Communist International, defended the honor of the Spanish anarchists, supported the Trotsky Defense Committee, opposed collective security.
...
english.upenn.edu
...
Book Description
THE BIG MONEY completes John Dos Passos's three-volume "fable of America's materialistic success and moral decline" (American Heritage) and marks the end of "one of the most ambitious projects that an American novelist has ever undertaken" (Time).
...
World War One has ended, and Dos Passos's characters are facing life in post-war USA. They find that, overall, it's not really a land fit for heroes to live in: the capitalist system is still creating huge economic and social differences. The War has increased the power of large corporations and further eroded workers' rights.
...
The Big Money is a great work that exposes the American Dream as a destructive race towards an explosive jumping off point. Whichever way we make the money, it will end in devouring the part of us that was never mercenary. I'm a big fan of John Dos Passos, but I have to admit that if you aren't the type of reader who likes to visualize written images, his writing would be pretty wasted on you.
...
amazon.com
Re: "If you really want to disparage the article as Bush administration propaganda put out by a "administration hack", just find something which explains how the Bush administration got Life to publish the Dos Passos piece back in '46."
I disparaged the Jessica's Well website article as Bush Administration propaganda, not the original Life Article, which was Trotskyite propaganda, LOL. Here's what I wrote:
Bilow, October 17, 2003
The reason the Administration is pulling this (ancient) news out is in order to provide justification for their claims that the peace in Iraq is going just peachy. #reply-19413298
Never did I state that the 1946 article was Bush propaganda, LOL, that's just a strawman you set up. No, the propaganda was bringing to the attention of the world an obscure and insignificant article and trying to use it as justification for the concept that the quagmire in Iraq is somehow similar to the occupation of Germany.
You're apparently no longer arguing that there is "there is no administration involvement." #reply-19413418 But have retreated to the concept that there are "tens of millions of Republicans", so I'll take it that you concede my point, that there was a connection between the web publishing of Jessica's Well and the Bush administration. In any case, it's hilarious to see Heck Exploration running from their own website.
-- Carl |
