But if he supported Nixon, how did he get away with pontificating about the requirements of a "decent left"?
On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 6:43 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:
> Here's the Harvard Crimson account:
>
>
> http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/9/27/studies-social-committee-peretzs/
>
>
> On 9/27/10 1:31 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> [This is all worth reading, including Wolff's quoting of Marx at the
>> Harvard swells, but a couple of choice excerpts on that creep Walzer. Via
>> Lou Proyect.]
>>
>> <http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2010/09/harvard-and-peretz.html>
>>
>> The absolute low point of the day, for me, was Michael Walzer's defense of
>> his old friend. Walzer began by telling the audience that in 1969, when
>> Harvard students seized the administration building in an anti-war protest,
>> he and Marty formed a committee to defend them, and most of the advocacy for
>> the students was carried out by Marty. This, we were supposed to conclude,
>> earned Peretz a pass on four decades of ugly racist rants. Then Walzer,
>> widely considered one of the preeminent political philosophers of the
>> present day, sank to a really appalling low. He looked at one of the
>> questioners who had attacked Peretz and said, "Have you examined every
>> writing and footnote and every email of each member of the Standing
>> Committee?" At that, the audience groaned, and he shut up.
>>
>> What was really going on? I tried to explain this to the Crimson reporter,
>> and a quote from me on this may appear in the story [in the middle of last
>> night, the reporter emailed me to check the quotes before the story was put
>> in final form.] Let me back up a bit and try to get some perspective. This
>> was a gathering of more than four hundred former and present Social Studies
>> majors -- possibly the largest assemblage of sophisticated social theorists
>> since the last garden party of the Frankfort School for Social Research.
>> These are people who think nothing of discerning the deeper ideological
>> meaning in Afghan popular music or Tibetan architecture, or teasing out the
>> epistemological filiations between Foucault and Montesquieu. And yet,
>> confronted at their own conference by a massive protest, the best they could
>> come up with was "Marty is a nice guy."
>>
>> It is not at all difficult to figure out the real sources of the vast
>> corpus of disgusting statements by Martin Peretz. The answer requires only
>> one word: Israel. Why is it that while these high-powered social theorists
>> were extolling Social Studies' fruitful union of historical research and
>> theoretical analysis, none of them could find a moment to refer to the
>> transformation of left-wing Jewish social theorists into Neo-cons and
>> Peretz' transformation of The New Republic from a liberal journal into a
>> right-wing apologist for war against Muslims?
>>
>> In his fine old book on the Frankfort School, THE DIALECTICAL IMAGINATION,
>> Martin Jay remarks wonderingly on the fact that almost to a man, those
>> brilliant theoreticians, to whom Social Studies owes so much, vehemently
>> denied any significance in the fact that most of them were from upper middle
>> class German Jewish assimilated families. [See Jay, pages 31 ff.]
>>
>> I have already told the story in my Memoir of my 1973 phone call to
>> Michael Walzer, and the discovery that he and Peretz were supporting Nixon
>> in the impeachment controversy because Nixon was a strong supporter of
>> Israel. Well, here we were in this huge, elegant auditorium in Harvard's
>> Science Center, and the assembled intelligentsia, a great many of whom are
>> indeed Jewish, evinced not the slightest interest in the historical and
>> political roots of the controversy kept by Harvard's security forces from
>> intruding on their happy reminiscences.
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