andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>
> Now, the article is utter nonsense. Reminds me of H.
> Bruce Franklin's astounding preface to a (Doubleday?
> Signet?) anthology, which I am sure I still have
> somewhere, called The Essential Stalin, in which
> Franklin defends the purge trials of the 30s, denies
> or justifies the Stalin terror, and generally
> whitewashes the evil sonofabitch and his crimes.
> Don't know whether Franklin (who has written excellent
> stuff on Melville and on the POW/MIA cult, among other
> things) would still stand by those ravings. Of course
> a lot of us said and thought foolish things in the old
> days. Anyone else know that silly preface? The
> anthology was quite useful for work on the USSR that I
> used to do.
>
> jks
>
Bruce was the only Stanford grad student ever to be offered a position at Stanford. He and I tried our best to generate a riot in the lobby of the Americana Hotel during the 1968 MLA convention. We had been over to the Hilton for a Chomsky lecture, and having gotten tired of the stupid questions from the audience afterwards, wandered back to the Americana. Two days before Louis Kampf and two grad students had been arrested for trespassing (crime of standing at the door of the hotel holding posters). So Bruce & I stood in the middle of the lobby and began chanting "Drop the Charges." Pretty soon others began joining in, and I think we had close to a hundred or two chanting it when the MLA bigwigs succeeded in coaxing everyone into a side room for a "discussion." Left politics can be fun at times. :-)
Carrol