http://news.mpr.org/play/audio.php?media=/midday/2003/04/15_midday2
"quite good"
I appreciate the lead because movements need personalities, and his persona is quite a suitable one.
But what more could he have said? I wonder if it was only "quite good"!
It seemed to me to be positive because it tried to build middle ground in which more radical statements can be made. At least the media have been better in the UK, as Robbins ackowledges, and it has been possible to be sceptical if not totally opposed about all aspects of the war.
It is a brave moral speech. To my ear it sounds too much playing to the radical republican ideals of the founding of the USA, although he may be right that that is what will appeal most to get a hearing at this moment.
However for all his moving examples, it idealises the concepts of truth and democracy and freedom in a way that is a bit ahistorical. The reality is a wider one of the US armed forces now being overwhelmingly dominant throughout the world, and claiming an arrogant hegemony that may backfire on itself. It is the political expression of a global finance capitalism that has serious problems about stabilising the world.
It is a brave speech. A slightly more cynical and worldly wise one, might I wonder get, the press thinking more profoundly and more competitvely amongst themselves.
In the end papers like the Guardian UK did not oppose the attack on Saddam Hussein (and tacitly accommodated to it - to be fair though I did not read all the editorials). However the sort of investigative journalism that the Guardian pursues created the public space in which massive demonstrations were possible in the UK without the sort of censorship of dissent that Robbins describes on grounds of patriotism.
I think there are contradictions in appealing to a more honourable radical tradition of US patriotism in cutting into that censorship. But perhaps that is the best way he could confront his critics, instead of letting them corner him.
But citizens of the USA I do not know the conditions in your country.
Chris Burford London