The Nation: The antiwar movement's friendly enemy

 

By Lenni Brenner                                                             

 

Sisters & brothers,

 

John Kerry's defeat is still with us. Liberal media pundits despairingly

discuss their party's future. What they should be discussing is their own.

"Anybody but Bush" ranks with history's most disastrous ploys.

 

If any publication saw a Kerry vote as a moral obligation, it was The Nation.

Examine it, & we see where the senior anybodyist element is coming from

historically, & what we can expect from them in the wake of their disaster.

 

Publisher Victor Navasky's "John Kerry for President" was dated 11/8,

but subscribers received it before the election:

 

"This magazine's disagreements with Kerry are deep and touch on fundamental

matters .... We believe the United States should withdraw from Iraq; he wants

to 'win' the war there .... We oppose the wall that Israeli Prime Minister

Ariel Sharon is building  on Palestinian lands; he supports it .... He opposes gay

marriage; we back it. If he wins the election, The Nation will pursue each of

these differences vigorously.

 

"But while we have sharp differences with Kerry, we believe he has the

qualities required for the presidency. He is more than 'anybody but Bush.' His

instincts are decent. He is a man of high intelligence, deep knowledge and great

resolve."

 

Let's work this:

 

"His instincts are decent" -- "he wants to 'win' the war there [Iraq]."

 

"He is a man of high intelligence" -- "We oppose the wall that ... Sharon is

building on Palestinian lands; he supports it."

 

"He is a man of ... great resolve" -- "He opposes gay marriage."

 

Never mind what you or I think. What would a psychiatrist say of this?

Indeed,

if we look at past Nation endorsements, we see fanatic commitment to

Democrats as the lesser evil, regardless of their crimes.

 

In 2002, I was to give a lecture before an Iranian professor's class.

I marched against the Shah of Iran's torture regime until its 1979 collapse.

I wanted to describe how his downfall was seen by US opinion makers.

So I asked Navasky,

 

"as the 1980 Nation editor, to briefly critique your endorsement of Jimmy

Carter ... after he brought a murderer/torturer to the US.

 

"Do you presently think endorsing Carter was morally justified and/or

politically astute? Should you apologize to the American people, and above

all

the Iranian people, for your endorsement?

 

"As Carter also brokered the Egyptian-Israeli treaty and began the arming

of the Afghan fundamentalist murderers, it would be proper to also weight

those aspects of Carter's ME policies in retrospectively judging your

endorsement."

 

Victor replied:

 

"I thought Carter and the Democrats were preferable to Reagan and the

Republicans and I still do."

 

In 1980, he supported the patron of a world champ torturer, & the arsenal of

the Taliban & Al-Qaada's forerunners. In 2002 he still insisted that he did

the right thing. He brought that mentality to his endorsement of a wannabe ally

of Ariel Sharon.

 

Kerry wasn't the 1st demagogue to rush to Zionism's side. Indeed, Warren

Hinckle interviewed Victor for the 12/20/87 SF Examiner. Navasky supported Gary

Hart for the 1988 nomination. Hinckle related how he

 

"wrote an editorial advising Hart to re-enter the race not to win but to

raise the issues. 'He only took half our advice,' Navasky said in lamentation. 'He

should have said he was running to raise the unthinkable questions about

sexual hypocrisy, the role of American Jewish money in forming American Mideastern

policy, the contradictions of a democracy engaging in covert action.'"

 

Navasky would have said 'the role of American Jewish money in forming

Republican Mideastern policy' if he was discussing only Reagan. He lives in NYC,

where Democrats & Republicans, liberal or right-wing, all say anything to get

campaign money from rich pro-Zionist Jews. Victor takes Democrats pandering to

Zionists for granted. He knows they are accessories to murder. But he clings to

his lesser evil.

 

Anyone arming such as the Shah or Sharon is accessory to their felonies.

Therefore the Democratic leaders are criminals. By extention, Navasky, knowingly

telling readers to vote for crime partners of the Shah & Sharon, made himself

an accessory to his party's crimes.

 

No mincing words: Navasky is the liberal Goebbels, telling people to vote for

Carter, patron of torture, for Kerry, who swam across oceans of snot, stark

naked, to get Zionist campaign contributions.

 

Victor will be shocked by my comparing him to Hitler's propaganda minister.

If he had even a rumor of intelligence, he would be more outraged that I called

him a Democrat.

 

His party's victims in his lifetime number in the millions in Korea &

Vietnam. Add those murdered by their pal, the Shah. Think of those slaughtered by

Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, armed by Navasky's candidate, Carter, for

daring to educate women.

 

Building an effective antiwar movement can only be done by educating those

who naively worked for Kerry, hoping to get rid of Bush. Their maturation

absolutely requires exposing of any & all pied pipers serving up endless

"crackpot-realist" rationalizations, justifying voting for homicidal candidates.

 

Navasky isn't the only rotten apple in The Nation's barrel. Editor Katrina

Vanden Heuvel is the daughter of William Vanden Heuvel, Carter's Deputy UN

Ambassador.

 

London's New Statesman's editor, Frances Saunders, wrote Who Paid The Piper?,

re the CIA's role in the cultural cold war. She described a Congress for

Cultural Freedom rally & "the Farfield Foundation, a dummy front or ‘passthrough’

set up by the CIA expressly to deal with the cash-flow for the festival, but

later maintained as the principal conduit for Agency subsidies to the Congress

because of its usefulness." She wrote that "Farfield directors included

William Vanden Heuvel, a New York lawyer who was close to both John and Bobby continued