#fred branfman

[prcshow]

Talk with Brian Windhorst about living in New York City and leaving, his world travels, and especially his fascinating Safari trip in South Africa. http://ift.tt/1sVZ6mp

[newsdetector]

A new article has been published on www.NewsDetector.com

A new article has been published on http://www.newsdetector.com

Flacking for Pol Pot

Apart from the death of a journalist, no more poignant event is ever recorded in the media than the demise of a onetime “antiwar activist.” This was confirmed in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post last week, where the passing in Budapest of Fred Branfman, 72, was duly not...

[newsdetector]

A new article has been published on www.NewsDetector.com

A new article has been published on http://www.newsdetector.com

Flacking for Pol Pot

Apart from the death of a journalist, no more poignant event is ever recorded in the media than the demise of a onetime “antiwar activist.” This was confirmed in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post last week, where the passing in Budapest of Fred Branfman, 72, was duly not...

[arabious]

Branfman looks back on his relationship with Noam Chomsky, and the conclusions he comes to are both disheartening and, weirdly enough, completely inspiring. Read an excerpt:

SALON ⎮ Fred Branfman

I was particularly moved one night as I was sitting opposite him at dinner, struck as usual by the enormous distance between what Noam knows about U.S. leaders’ slaughter of innocents around the world and what the public realizes. I suddenly thought of Winston Smith from Orwell’s “1984,” who sees little hope of changing society and focuses only on trying to remain sane and commit to paper the truth in the hope that future generations will remember it. I told Noam that to me, at that moment, he represented Winston Smith to me.

I will always remember his reaction.

He just looked at me.

And smiled sadly.

Noam can be tough on those who he feels support U.S. war-making, but he is even harder on himself. On one occasion I mentioned that I had asked a lifelong political activist with whom we were both friendly whether, looking back on his life, he had any regrets. Our friend had responded that he wished he had spent more time with his family, and pursuing a variety of his non-political interests. “Do you have any regrets?” I asked Noam. His answer shocked me. Muttering more to himself than to me he said, “I didn’t do nearly enough.”

On another occasion I asked Noam how much satisfaction he took from having written so many books, founding a new field of linguistics, being so influential around the world. “None,” he answered grimly, explaining that he felt he hadn’t really been able to convince enough people to understand the true depth of U.S. leaders’ savage and brutal treatment of the world’s non-people. He felt frustrated, for example, that more people did not understand how U.S. leaders’ killing hundreds of thousands of innocents and destroying the very base of South Vietnamese society had succeeded, how they had actually won in Indochina by destroying the possibility of an alternative economic and social model to that of the U.S. emerging.

One evening as I was climbing the stairs to my bedroom I looked into Noam’s office. He spends his time at home these days sitting in a large office chair in front of his computer, and his posture resembled nothing so much to me as a Buddhist monk in meditation.

And then it hit me.

I suddenly realized, “Noam has been living, as I did relatively briefly during the war, for the past 40 years. He has been working around the clock, reading, writing, speaking, not wasting a minute, in a focused attempt to try and stop U.S. killing, to force the world to realize the plight of the 'unpeople.’”

And, I am unembarrassed to say, I experienced a great love for him at that moment. And an insight. For as long as I can remember, ever since reading of “Mahatma” Gandhi, I had wondered what the term “Great Soul” really meant. And at that moment I finally understood. If part of being a “Great Soul” is to fully respond to the human suffering of the voiceless, and to pour one’s entire mind, body and soul into trying to reduce it, I had finally met one. The Jewish tradition puts it a different way, in the legend of the 36 “Just Men” who — without their knowing it — at any one moment keep humanity alive. If Noam is not one of those 36, I asked myself, who is? I was also reminded of the many who have compared Noam to honored Old Testament prophets like Amos or Jeremiah, who also angrily criticized the corrupt rulers of their times whose names we do not even remember.

Although decent people can disagree over some of the stands Noam has taken in the past 40 years, I felt that at that moment, on his stairs, such controversies seemed irrelevant to appreciating who he is and what he represents. I realized that while I, like most people I know, have gone in and out of hearing the screams of the victims of U.S. war-making over the past decades, Noam has been unable to screen them out.

Read more.

[nc4l]

[nc4l]

Once you knew that innocent people were dying, how could you justify to yourself doing anything other than trying to save their lives?

Fred Branfman