Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Consider Barnett Frummer. He is a radical for love's sake who finds himself stuck to the hot asphalt pavement after going limp while protesting housing discrimination. He is the hapless yearner for un-chic Rosalie Mondle, who might one day paint "Get Out of Vietnam" across his chest. He is the groping incipient gourmet (trying to out-cook his friends) who dreams that he is accused of eating Fritos. He is the poor chap who cannot get invited to those with-it parties Rosalie attends, "where whites gathered to be castigated by some prominent Negro." Says Barnett...
More disturbing than their arrogant naivete is the small intellectual distance they have travelled since 1965-Vietnam is still "unique," a "test of very little" and a "20-year blunder." It is shameful that non-experts like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn were the first to point out the actual situation in Asia. But the "experts" are still lost in the clouds, and we must question their vaunted expertise...
...would be useful to learn more of the Zen-like stroke by which the Editors have suddenly achieved full understanding not only of Vietnam but of 'the Third World.' Those of us who have lived in Asia and studied Asian histories and cultures.... Perhaps our vision has been obscured by proximity..." And so. These men are giving themselves airs. By what right...
From what I can remember of the Moratorium Day CRIMSON editorial in question, it subscribed more or less to the "radical theory" of American imperialism; i. e., to the view that there is a consistent pattern running through American interventions in such places as Greece, Lebanon, Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Dominican Republic-a pattern of suppression of elements that are unfriendly to American businesses, propose radical land reform, threaten "stability" (a stability favoring the "haves"), or are anti-American (or even dangerously non-aligned). American foreign policy is seen as motivated largely by a desire for profits and, related to this...
...hadn't joined the fight against Hitler. you probably wouldn't be alive today. "Oh no, says he, "that was in Europe." His attitude then explains, I think, a great deal about his writing now: the glib, absurd equation of Hitler's factories of death and the war in Vietnam; the facile postmortem advice to the Jews of Auschwitz and Treblinka (they should have fought, he thinks, precisely because it would have made no difference) from someone who writes that the only reason he wouldn't blow up the Center for International Affairs is that he might get caught...