Todd Gitlin follow-up

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch, June 21, 2003

Gitlin: The Duke of Condescension
Return to Sender
By TODD CHRETIEN

Letters to a Young Activist,
Todd Gitlin,
Basic Books, 2003, 174 pages, $22.50.

Imagine A "young activist" who picks up Todd Gitlin's new book, seeking
useful advice from the former president of the premiere antiwar student
organization of the 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society. They will be
surprised to find that history's two most dangerous people are not members
of Bush's cabinet, but rather the Russian revolutionary Lenin and 2000
Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader. (Noam Chomsky comes in a
distant third).

Running throughout the condescending prose and sloppy fact-checking in
Gitlin's Letters to a Young Activist lies the assertion that any challenge
to the Democratic Party is either the product of youthful folly or crazed
sectarianism. His central historical contention about the 1960s movements
is that everything was going fine until people starting thinking that real
social justice required some type of revolution or looked to Lenin--who he
describes as an "intellectually dishonest" monster--for ideas.

For instance, Gitlin claims that "the Black Panther Party hijacked the
black liberation movement" and slanders the urban Black rebellions that
broke out after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination as "the momentary
exultation of looters, arsonists and snipers." Gitlin also harbors a rather
ambiguous attitude to the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch trials, which he
calls a "mixed blessing."

Having smeared any attempt to challenge U.S. capitalism at its roots,
Gitlin staggers on into the realm of the absurd. "If antiwar militancy can
take credit for driving Johnson from office in 1968," writes Gitlin, "it
must...shoulder the blame for nudging some voters towards Nixon, who
proceeded to extend the Vietnam War for five years and expanded it to Laos
and Cambodia, killing more than a million people."

Playing fast and loose with the facts, Gitlin tells his young activist
reader--who he prefers to call a "social entrepreneur"--that had the
antiwar movement supported Democrat Hubert Humphrey (who personally helped
escalate the war for the five previous years as Johnson's vice president)
for president in 1968, "he would have phased out the war." Thus, the lesson
is, if you don't vote for the Democrats, you are morally responsible for
Nixon and Pol Pot.

full: http://www.counterpunch.org/chretien06212003.html

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