"Protest and Survive "

[JRob]

Interesting read

Protest and Survive by Victor Navasky
The Nation - posted April 28, 2005 (May 16, 2005 issue)
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050516&s=navasky

"On February 1, 2003, just weeks before the invasion of Iraq, I opened my New York Times to an article by Todd Purdum of the Washington bureau titled "The Brains Behind Bush's War Policy." From the Times's Washington bureau I expect the scuttlebutt, the inside word from the denizens of the war party. But what Purdum gives us is less inside dope from the inner circle of hawks than outside analysis from The National Interest, The Weekly Standard, from various (neocon) journals of opinion. He reports their common theme (in articles starting in 1997): "Saddam must go." And the essence of all their arguments in favor of war with Iraq? That the doctrine of containment no longer applies in a post-Soviet, post-cold war world. (Containment, of course, was first set forth as policy in another journal of opinion, Foreign Affairs, which published George Kennan's history-making essay "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," under the pseudonym "X," in July 1947.)

So take it from me (or better yet, take it from the Times), the journal of critical opinion is here to stay."

-snip-

"The Nation invited him to send his warning to his American friends--and devoted an entire issue to his message: "We must protest if we are to survive. Protest is the only realistic form of civil defense." This slogan of the British antinuclear movement may have sounded idealistic at the time, but Thompson's confidence that rhetoric could be turned into action proved prophetic. A decade before the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the self-transformation of its satellite East European regimes, he wrote that even though only courageous dissidents will, in the first place, be able to take an open part, protesting "will provide those conditions of relaxation of tension which will weaken the rationale and legitimacy of repressive state measures, and will allow the pressures for democracy and détente to assert themselves in more active and open ways."