A dissident

[Chris Brady <cdbrady@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Some time ago, I wrote a foreword to a book by a Lithuanian dissident.
These are the first two paragraphs (if you go to the webpage to see the
rest: that is not my title, and that is not a picture of me but rather
the author, the subject of my essay):


 Here is the latest from former Soviet dissident, troubled Lithuanian
nationalist and resolute human rights activist Valdas Anelauskas.  Here
are contained his findings in the New World.  His revelations in the USA
are as critical, and as scathing as were his denunciations of the USSR.
His reaction to the betrayal of the immigrant's innocent hope is to me
reminiscent of Flaco Jimenez's Tex-Mex lament in Across the Borderline
about "the Broken Promised Land."  Anelauskas is also the victim of
politics over principles.  He is angry, distraught, afraid of hoping
again -- yet driven, to use the words of Antonio Gramsci, past the
pessimism of his intellect to the optimism of his will.

Anelauskas was never so gullible as to think like those earlier
immigrants from Eastern Europe that the streets here were paved with
gold.  He did arrive trusting, however, that America was closer to its
projected image than its sordid reality.  He realized too late that the
American Way was more like that road paved with intentions that leads to
Hell where even the detours were less than honorable and virtuous.  He
turns back like Dante from that place, back to tell us all.  He appears
to me also a little like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, having participated
in a process that ran out of control and far from his desires.  The
process remains incomplete; it continues and is still to be resolved.

Full:
http://www.efn.org/~valdas/author.html

Zinn liked his book . . .