I.F. STONE, A FINE AMERICAN JOURNALIST

[Zlatko Waterman]

My wife knows the list of my heroes and heroines. She recognizes further that I consider these men and women my finest and most valuable teachers. Most of them I have never met. I have read their many books and articles instead.

And so, this Christmas, I received both THE BEST OF I.F. STONE and a careful, meticulous and incisive biography of I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson ( just published in 2006).

I.F. Stone:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.F._Stone

though sometimes accused by J. Edgar Hoover and others of being a spy for the Soviet KGB, was often one of the few American journalists who tried to separate government lies from the truth during the Cold War.

Later, Stone opposed the American blunderings into the Vietnam War.

Here is a passage from an article he wrote 46 years ago, in 1961.

See if you can find the applicability to the situation in Iraq today. GWB has put new clown masks on some new generals and, intent on a "surge to victory", bent himself on responding to the electoral call to bring the troops home by sending in thousands more.

But it's the general application of Stone's passage I find interesting:

( paste from I.F. Stone)


" ( . . .) It is time we realized that the brutal surgery of military and para-military methods cannot cure complex social and economic problems. ( . . .) If the hundreds of millions ( read billions today--my parenthetical) we have squandered in Laos and South Vietnam had gone into public improvements . . .both countries would be models of stability.

What rarely comes through to them ( Pentagon theorists-- my parenthetical) are the injured racial feelings, the misery, the rankling slights, the hatred, the devotion, the inspiration and the desperation. So they do not really understand what leads men to abandon wife, children, home, career and friends; to take to the bush and live gun in hand like a hunted animal; to challenge overwhelming military odds rather than acquiesce any longer in humiliation, injustice, poverty and military occupation . . ."

( such military theorists are astounded by . . .) " . . .the success that revolutionary and insurgent forces can achieve against huge and well-equipped armies . . ."

( end paste from I.F. Stone, "Anti-Guerrilla War-- The Dazzling New Toothpaste for Social Decay." published in 1961)

I. F. Stone is worth re-reading again today.


--Z

[stilltrucking]

I.F. Stone’s Weekly
Integrity r us
Bob Woodward would not make a pimple on his ass.