>From Dwight Macdonald to Barbara Garson to LBJ to JFK, etc.  One expects that a thread must wander like Ariadne's clue in a labyrinth, but let's draw this together and see if we discover Theseus or the Minotaur at the center for my fourth post of the day, when three is my limit, and all on this thread.  (And I have not yet replied to Woj, whoes clue is of more importance than this rather whimsical reply.) I was not old enough to read Dwight Macdonald (DM) when he was writing in his prime but somewhere along the way I found an old collection of essays called "The Responsibility of Peoples" in a used bookstore in Lake Placid, New York.  The essays were reprints from "Mr. Macdonald's magazine, Politics" as the short acknowledment acknowledges.  I still come back to these articles, if only to remind myself of all that we have lost on the literary left.  In one aside, D.M. writes that when we declare war with a country "according to the purest form of the Responsibility of Peoples doctrine there is no moral distinction between children and grown-ups" and thus we hold all people responsible for the war and atrocity of the leaders.  He goes on to dissect "the political meaning of collective war guilt," disambiguating the political meaning of the  word "we" with an acuity that should impress the best Wittgensteinian.  Massacre from the air (the U.S. in Vietnam), the use and repeated threatened use of the atomic bomb (the U.S. in the world), sanctions that starve and put to waste a whole generation in some country or other (take your picket), the use of mass terror against a small country somewhere or another (the U.S. against Nicaragua), the rise of Death Squad "democracies ( the U.S. sponsorship of El Salvadoran and Guatemalan slaughters), is all implicit in the way that D.M. analyzes U.S. hypocrisy, against the grain of World War II super patriotisim.  The author of the American Prospect review simply glides over in seeming embarrassment the content of the essays in Politics, naming Macdonalds politics, but not at all touching his rage against the normality of hypocrisy.