Socialist Professor Responds

Let me please take this opportunity to thank you for your feedback and to clarify a few points that seem to be at issue. Thank you to those who have sent messages of support, and to those of you whose criticisms are based in argument and reasoning, rathern than in name calling and death threats. Thank you to those of you who noticed that I took care in my pledge not to identify with terrorists, suicide bombers, or Islamic regimes, but with the ordinary people around the world, including those here in the United States. And thank you, I guess, to those of you who are praying for my salvation. I tend to see a better world as being possible here on earth and am not waiting for the second coming so that the meek can inherit their due. But at least you aren't threatening my life, and I appreciate that.

To those of you who are sending me hate mail equating me with the enemy, however, let me attempt to make the following clarifications. It is true that the format of a pledge does not allow one to present arguments full-blown. People may have misunderstood my meaning and intent because of the brief and condensed nature of the genre.

I take my freedoms to dissent in this country very seriously. I do not want to live anywhere else in the world, your invitations to exile notwithstanding. I am a citizen with the right to protest what I see as unjust and inhumane policies, both economic and military. You are correct that I am relatively privileged; I would not have the same rights to dissent and protest in countries like Afghanistan, although if I lived there, I would be part of social movements to resist oppression whether in the form of Islamic fundamentalism or U.S. bombs. Activists in the countries I named often stress the importance of critique and dissent here in the belly of the beast. I feel a certain obligation, an obligation that comes with freedom, to speak out alongside of those with less freedom to speak. I pledged solidarity not with any nation's leaders or terrorist organizations, but with the ordinary people, who are not being liberated by U.S. sanctions and bombs or by U.S. support for the Israeli occupation. I see the people in Afghanistan who were bombed as they celebrated a wedding two weeks ago as being as human as those who died in the World Trade Center, for whom I also have tremendous compassion.

I should add that people in developing countries are not being liberated by the opportunites provided by U.S.-dominated world capitalism. I do not have space to go through all the evidence for these claims, but if you have an open mind, I suggest you read some Howard Zinn, especially People's History of the United States and his more recent Terrorism and War. Suffice it to say that if you have read any history you know that the U.S. either put in place or supported with money and guns the very dictators you decry today, including the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. The United States has taken part in the undermining of democratic (defined as supported by the majority of the people, not in terms of the free market) regimes in Latin American and the Carribean almost as a matter of course (Chile, Haiti and the Philippines for example), not to mention in Asia and Africa. The list is too long to recite here.

Those of you who are offended that you might have to fight and die for my freedoms clearly have misunderstood my anti-war stance. I do not want you to be sent to other countries to die or kill, because I think those actions are not in defense of our freedoms; more often it's about protecting oil profits (even Bush Sr. admitted as much about the Persian Gulf War, which resulted in more than a million and a half civilian deaths). I don't want you over there killing civilians in my name, when my freedoms are not what is being defended at all. Neither are yours. Even though you may hate me, I don't want to you die for someone else's profits.

I do not agree with the analysis that "our way of life" offers hope and salvation to those living in other countries under dictators and in poverty. When four percent of the world's population controls more than 60% of the world's wealth, when the nation states that harbor the strongest enterprises defend those interests with force, when U.S. foreign policy and economic policy are designed to drive countries into unsalvageable debt or rubble, it is impossible for me to remain uncritical. Too often, it is not the fault of bad leaders, bad values, wrong religion, or corrupt people in other nations that brings them ruin, but the policies of production for export over meeting human needs, the support of the U.S. for dictators like the former Suharto in Indonesia, who massacred more than 200,000 people but was, according to the state department, "our kind of guy" because he supported Nike and Freeport MacMoran's exploitation of the people there. I could go on. When Madeline Albright said that the deaths of 5,000 children a month in Iraq as a result of U.S. sanctions were a reasonable price to pay for U.S. foreign policy objectives, I reacted with the same level of disgust that you are bombarding me with now.

I think we have to face these hard realities about "our way of life" if we are truly to understand "why they hate us" and to prevent acts of desperation and hatred targeting civilians in the future. I am not defending terrorism (which, if defined as the targeting of civilian life in retaliation for political and economic grievances, would apply to U.S. conduct in every war it has fought). But it seems reasonable to consider that "they" (Iraqis, Palestinians, Muslims in general) might hate the United States for the havoc it has wrought in the Middle East. Some examples: First supporting and arming Hussein when he was fighting our enemies and killing the Kurds, then slaughtering Iraq's civilian population and bombing the country back to the stone age. First supporting and arming Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan when they were fighting "the communist menace," then bombing their civilian population. . . You get the idea. The support for Israel and its wars and occupations against Palestinians against United Nations resolutions and international law doesn't win our government any friends, either. It is always wrong to terrorize civilians in response to such abuses. Yet the history is part of the answer to the question and a change in U.S. foreign policy must be part of the solution.

If you cherish the freedoms of the United States, it would be hypocritical of you to be intolerant of the expression of opinions that differ from yours. I am a well-educated, thoughtful human being. I am well qualified to teach at the University ("universe"-ity), which should be a place for thoughtful and respectful sharing of diverse views. My students get trained in critical thinking: the capacity to take in a number of perspectives and weigh evidence and reasoning on their own, which they would not be able to do if there were not at least a few dissenters among us here. I mean, the business school gets the big bucks and military- and corporate-funded research dominate the campus. It's a rare class where a student would find points of view that challenge the corporate and geopolitical hegemony of the United States. So I feel sorry for the students whose parents would keep them from attending my classes or the University of Texas because of what I wrote. Don't you have faith that your children can think for themselves? Don't you trust them with a range of positions and approaches to knowledge? Haven't you prepared them to defend your family's values? Any viewpoint is welcome in my classes so long as the arguer can provide evidence and reasoning in support of claims. Contrary to popular mythology, I do not routinely fail conservative students; I do welcome their voices in class so long as respect for others and standards of argumentation are sustained. Actually, the smarter conservative students tell me that they enjoy a good challenge, which they take as a sign of respect. And believe me, I am a member of a tiny political minority on campus that is nowhere near acting like the "thought police" envisioned by the hard right. The kind of fear I hear in the emails I am receiving and on the conservative listservs I have been monitoring is based on a complete overestimation of any single professor's influence.

In sum, I am not the enemy of freedom; to the contrary, I am among its staunchest supporters. I think freedoms should be expanded, not curtailed, in this time of crisis. I worry that now with the modified Patriot Act (which allows security agencies to perform warrantless searches, detentions, and wiretaps, among other things) and the new mega- security-intelligence agency consolidation, that we may not have these freedoms to dissent very much longer. I will raise questions about U.S. foreign policy and corporate globalization as long as I can. It is my prerogative, my right, and, as I see it, my responsbility.

A brief comment on patriotism, or nationalism: To me it seems untenable to say that I have more in common with George W. Bush, Martha Stewart, or Kenneth Lay than I do, say, with a teacher in Afghanistan or a student in Iraq or a UPS driver here at home. Likewise, they might share interests with me and have little in common with Saddam Hussein or Al Quaeda. As a socialist (not a Stalinist, and there is a difference), I have a positive vision of international solidarity and struggle against greed, war, exploitation, and oppression on a world scale. In my view, patriotic fervor dehumanizes people around the world so that their deaths or their hunger or their homelessness can be blamed on them and forgotten.

It's not like me to base an argument on the words of the "founding fathers" but let me remind you that it was Thomas Jefferson (leaving aside his fondness for slaves for a moment) who believed that criticism and dissent were at the core of democracy. He even thought that the citizenry should take up arms against a government when they thought it was becoming too tyrannical. It took a revolution to make the democracy you cherish, and in my view it will take another to make real democracy (political and economic) for the majority of the world's population.

Ben Franklin wrote that when a nation prioritizes security over liberty, the consequences could be dire for democracy. Contrary to my correspondents, I do not believe that order is the ground from which all liberty springs. History teaches quite another lesson--it took a civil war, for example, to end slavery. And "order" is a god term not of democratic societies but of fascism. Unfortunately, I believe that in this extremely sensitive time people are all too willing to embrace a notion of security--not only against terrorists but also against critical ideas and thoughtful dialogue--over liberty.

I hope that this set of expanded arguments makes for more thinking and fewer personal attacks. Of course, I hoped to provoke a response and I welcome deba†e and dialogue. I do not feel like a victim and I am not complaining about being criticized. However, I hoped to get a *real* response, not just hate and intimidation in the name of freedom.

I encourage activists with views similar to mine to come out into the light of day. The urgency of speaking now far outweighs the flak we will get for standing up.

Dear Dana -

As I examined your UT biography, helpfully posted by one of the regular users of this site, I wondered if you are a member of the cabal of socialist journalism PhDs at the University of Texas, which as near as I can tell is led by Dr. Robert Jensen.

I had the opportunity to tutor some of the unfortunate UT freshmen who took Jensen's J310 course, billed as seminar examining current issues in journalism. Lots of kids take it thinking they'll learn something about journalism, but what it really is is Marxism 101.

Take a gander at the text books used in the course: TEXTBOOKS:

Bennett, W. Lance, News: The Politics of Illusion, 4th ed. (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 2001).

Newkirk, Pamela, Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

Danner, Mark, The Massacre at El Mozote (New York: Vintage Books,1994).

READING PACKET:
(at Longhorn Copies, 2520 Guadalupe, 476-4498)

Ueland, Brenda, If You Want to Write, 2nd ed. (St. Paul: SchubertClub, 1983),Chapter 1, “Everybody is Talented, Original and Has Something Importantto Say,” pp. 3-9.

Cleage, Pearl, Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot (New York:Ballantine,1993), “Why I Write,” pp. 3-7.

Orwell, George, The Orwell Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956),“Why I Write,” pp. 390-396.

Abu-Jamal, Mumia, All Things Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000),“Lethal Censorship,” by Noelle Hanrahan, ed., pp. 21-30; “Livefrom Death Row,” pp. 202-204; and “Media Is the Mirage,” pp. 229-230.

Herman, Edward S., The Myth of the Liberal Media (New York: PeterLang, 1999),Chapter 2, “The Propaganda Model,” pp. 23-29.

Simons, Geoff, The Scourging of Iraq (London: Macmillan, 1996), Chapter 1,"The Legacy of War," pp. 4-32.

Chomsky, Noam, "The Media and the War: What War?" in Hamid Mowlana, George Gerbner, and Herbert I. Schiller, eds., Triumph of the Image: The Media's War in the Persian Gulf--A Global Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992),pp. 51-63.

Webb, Gary, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion(New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), Chapter 27 and Epilogue, pp. 451-485.

Kornbluh, Peter, “The Storm over ‘Dark Alliance,’” Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 1997, pp. 33-39.

All in all the course is a joke. If Jensen wanted to run a course like this, they should bill it Contemporary Leftist Thought and put it in the polisci department.

There are far too many professors of Cloud and Jensen's ilk at UT. They are ruining this once great institution. I would not send my children there, they would be far better off at Baylor or even Southwest Texas State. (Sorry about all the junk characters, I lacked the will to take them out.)

Socialists' lies are the worst when they are pretending to be the most earnest.

Suharto didn't just "kill 200,000 people." He defeated a widespread, deeply entrenched, and virulently malignant Stalinist totalitarian cancer preparing to devastate one of the world's most populous nations. By cleaning the vermin out of innumerable communist nests he saved the lives of millions, who would have been the inevitable victimms in the revolutionary blood-bath being planned by this "Cloud" fool's heroes.

But he would lead you to believe Suharto just massacred innocent villagers for no good reason.
That's a lie, "Dana Cloud," and you are a socialista liar.

Quoting the leftwing whore Halfbright's lie about us killing all those Iraqi children is even more obscene. Those of us who care about the truth recall that "sanctions" were urged by the "Peace" advocates as an alternative to war.

"Give sanctions time to work!" they cried. Well, now, we had a war and we had sanctions, and we still have the vestiges of sanctions, and it is clear they never would have "worked."

But that would have been fine with "Dana Cloud," because he would have been happy to see Kuwait destroyed, and to see Saddam control all that oil, and to see the U.S. hamstrung as a result--that was and is the agenda, after all, isn't it, "Dana?"

Oh, and one final lie. About being "Antiwar?" You didn't protest when Saddam invaded Kuwait did you. And you didn't care if the Soviet scum destroyed Indonesia did you? "Antiwar" my ass. That is your biggest lie of all, socialist crackpot liar.

Oh, dear. I wonder what you're a professor of. Certainly not history, as you seem not to know it. I have read your Howard Zinn. A sociologist friend gave me a copy of A People's History of the United States when it first came out. Having only a couple of years earlier finished my field exams in American history, I was appalled at the errors and blatant Marxism and anti-Americanism of Zinn's work. He has stated explicitly in other writings that he regards making his political point more important than historical accuracy. As my children have been forced to read Zinn in their high school honors history classes, I reread the book and came away with an even more unfavorable impression than I had originally formed. I cannot respect his work, or take him seriously.

The truly astonishing thing is that you can remain a Marxist (calling yourself commieprof strongly suggests this) after 1989 and the fall of the Soviet empire. The revelations that have come to light in the past dozen or so years make it clear that Marxism in Russia and Eastern Europe was a thug's game and morally bankrupt from the get-go. Virtually all of the charges levelled against Marxims by the right - from von Mieses on the economics side to Popper on the philosophy side and Koestler and even Whittaker Chambers, turned out to be not only true, but understated. Have you read The Black Book of Communism? Edited by Frenchmen and the work of European scholars, many with leftist credentials, the work is damning.

It used to be said (variously attributed to Clemanceau, Churchill and several others) that anyone who was not a socialist at 18 had no heart, and anyone who was not a conservative at 40 had no brains. More truly, it must be said that anyone who remains a Marxist after 1989 is either an idiot, a naive fool, or a power-hungry enemy of mankind.

Hate America First, by Gore Vidal:

I was in Guatemala when the CIA was preparing its attack on the Arbenz government [in 1954]. Arbenz, who was a democratically elected president, mildly socialist. His state had no revenues; its biggest income maker was United Fruit Company. So Arbenz put the tiniest of taxes on bananas, and Henry Cabot Lodge got up in the Senate and said the Communists have taken over Guatemala and we must act. He got to Eisenhower, who sent in the CIA, and they overthrew the government. We installed a military dictator, and there's been nothing but bloodshed ever since.

This event was the watershed for nearly every subsequent protest by the leftist liberals in the Americas (including the U.S.) and was pointed to over and over as the great evil of American patriotism; it has been thrown around every program of socialist interest on college campuses ever since; it is popular among the left-winger-weenies as the calling card or ID card of the politically correct's assertion that the United States of America is the enemy to be hated.

I may strongly disagree with even more such "businesses practices" than has Mr. Vidal, but his ill will toward Americans trying to defend themselves against the ultra-coercions of the nationalizing socialism(s) which he and his followers have favored, has constantly overlooked that very horror, such as this, which we still struggle against --- what the leftists have manifested; see: The U.S. case against the court (ICC) is bogus on its face., Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 2, 2002, by editorial staff (posted by wallcrawlr). My reply there:

Why is there no mention of the truly large atrocities committed by the extreme left-wing in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune?

Will Castro and the communists of Cuba be arrested?

Will the communists of Southeast Asia be arrested?

Will the communists of Asia be arrested?

Heart of darkness: Cambodia's Killing Fields
August 8, 2001 [CNN online]
By CNN's Joe Havely
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- The fields of Choeung Ek on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, carry a dark secret.
Across the baked earth scraps of cloth and human bone poke through the soil and are slowly bleached white by the harsh tropical sun.
In the center stands a glass-walled shrine containing more than 8,000 skulls -- the remains of just a few of those who died here.
These are the Killing Fields of Cambodia.
Here, just a few kilometers from the center of Phnom Penh, tens of thousands of people met their deaths -- entire families wiped out.
Many of those killed were intellectuals or trained professionals -- people considered counter-revolutionaries by the Khmer Rouge leadership bent on turning Cambodia into a [communist, socialist, leftist, fascist] peasant's paradise. (In " [ ] " --- mine, F_S)
Towards the end of its rule, as the regime became increasingly paranoid and turned on itself, many once senior Khmer Rouge cadres also met their end at Choeung Ek.
Men, women and children -- some just a few months old -- were killed here, often in the most violent and brutal ways.
With bullets in short supply, the condemned were forced to kneel before an open grave then stabbed through the head with a sharpened bamboo stake ...
Reign of terror

The fields of Choeung Ek contain more than 100 mass graves

In the corner of the field stands a tree ...
Against its trunk the heads of babies were smashed by young men brainwashed into believing their actions would free Cambodia from colonial imperialism ...
Reuters contributed to this report.

Actually, coöps can work under certain circumstances. Indeed, even relatively pure communism can work in societies that are small enough that everyone knows everyone else, and where people inherently reward hard workers and shun slackers. Unfortunately, such societies are very fragile, and coöps can usually only survive if they both maintain a narrow focus and have a means of accountability (either direct, if they're small enough, or financial, if they're larger).

Linda Ellerbee tells a great story about that.

She lived in a commune for a while during her idealistic youth. One day she needed water for the meal she was cooking, so she trudged 200 yards down a step snow-covered hill, at night, freezing her butt off, chipped through the ice over the stream, scooped out a bucket of freezing water, and trudged laboriously 200 yards back up the slippery hill with a heavy bucket of water.

When she got back inside, a guy lying on the couch watching TV glanced over at her panting, frozen visage, lazily said, "far out, man...", then turned back to stare slack-jawed at the TV.

She moved out the next morning and got a job.

Now, when I read the work of commieprof I am appalled. Have things changed so much or was I merely young when I formed those opinions?

Both. You undoubtedly were filled with the typical idealism of youth, hence my earler quote about 18 and 40. More importantly, things really hae changed so much. When you were an undergraduate, most of the professors were liberals of the New Deal variety, with a few Marxists and socialists in the mix and a few conservatives. The graduate students were increasingly radical and Marxist taken as a whole. Those graduate students have spent the past 20-40 years becoming the full professors of today and raising several generations of Marxist and radical scholars. The result is what you see in commieprof, a reductio ad absurdam of the ideas you found entertaing and inventive 40 yearsa ago and the feminist and Marxist and politically correct trends I saw in graduate school some 30 years ago. The liberalism you knew 40 years ago bears the same resemblence to what currently passes for liberalism as a sailboat bears to a battleship.

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