Sorry, Doug, but preparing all these Bukharinite confessions is hard work. It is not easy being so abjectly humble without a single role model on the listserv to follow. Perhaps you could instruct me on the fine art of how to caricature and avoid the inconvenient argument; I would be a very disciplined student, and I promise I won't use these techniques against you. Then I wouldn't have to apologize all the time.
You see, I had always thought, obviously as a function of my self-righteous but tepid political delusions, that there was a difference between Frederick Douglass and John Brown, and that, well, your politics were more in the vein of the John Brown. Go out in a burst of self-contented, suicidal righteousness, as the voice of true rebellion against any half-hearted compromises with power. Be the great white father out to liberate the ignorant, poor masses. Have your mark on history be a song made up about how your body is a smouldering in the grave: now that's the Doug I know and love.
But to join with the northern cause before it was even committed to the end of slavery, to recruit African-American soldiers into a Union army in which the were second class citizens because they could be historical actors on behalf of their own struggle for freedom -- all out of some reformist illusion that change is a long, arduous continuous struggle. Now those actions of Douglass are only something that I could believe. And to become a US Ambassador to Haiti -- doesn't that show Douglass' true colors, as a tool of American imperialism just like yours truly?
But now that you have spoken on this crucial issue, and at such length, I will have to reconsider it all.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20001104/08b8de3f/attachment.htm>