Interpreting the past

[Eric Rosenbloom]

You are asking USA citizens about 30 years ago? I worked with someone
who had to ask when that Vietnam War was. And it's a safe bet that
nobody in the federal government has a past like your Joschka Fischer,
what with FBI background checks and the undemocratic election process.
So we are all pretty safe from having to worry about it.

That said, I would also say that the militants here in the USA were not
so idealist or visionary or political so much as having nothing to lose
when your ass was going to be shipped off to Vietnam anyway. With that
personal threat gone (smart bombs do the dirty work, now), most of those
folks have come to terms with the government and decry violent change as
loudly as your industrialist.

But what is that softly modulating blues faintly humming out of a
distant mouth organ . . .

Yours,
Eric R


KXX4493553 at aol.com wrote:
> I have a question to the US P-listers here: in the context of the past of our
> foreign Minister Joschka Fischer who was in the seventies a militant street
> fighter during the so called Frankfurt "house riots" (Westend) - he hit a
> policeman and so on -, there is a new debate in Germany not about the Nazi
> past but about the student movement, about RAF terrorism etc. The
> conservatives use this campaign about Fischers so called "unclear relation to
> violence" to begin a kind of "Historikerdebatte" about the sixties and the
> seventies. I know people in Frankfurt who know Fischer from that times and
> they laugh about him and don't take him for serious. But I think this isn't
> the point. The new debate concerns the hegemony of interpretation of the past
> 25 or 30 years ago. My question is now: is there any similar discussion in
> the US about the "militant" past of several people, is there, for example, a
> debate about the "Weathermen", the "American RAF"?
> Best
> Kurt-Werner Poertner