The scandals coming into view with Harvard Professors like Alan Dershowitz and Lawrence H. Summers in the Epstien Files have me going back to Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967!!) by Noam Chomsky... It's no surprise the money, power, and status has people lying with few consequences in support of USA corrupt policy for Israel and Wall Street Economics now.. For back then, I wonder if The Kennedy "Intellectuals" may just be lucky there wasn't unencrypted e-mail back then, so we won't know what sort of perverse rapey pricks they were in private life, if their private lives match up with their policy participation like they do for Dershowitz and Summers...
When Arthur Schlesinger was asked by The New York Times in November, 1965, to explain the contradiction between his published account of the Bay of Pigs incident and the story he had given the press at the time of the attack, he simply remarked that he had lied; and a few days later, he went on to compliment the Times for also having suppressed information on the planned invasion, in “the national interest,” as this term was defined by the group of arrogant and deluded men of whom Schlesinger gives such a flattering portrait in his recent account of the Kennedy Administration.
It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community—for example, no one has said that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in the humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort. And what of the incredible sequence of lies on the part of our government and its spokesmen concerning such matters as negotiations in Vietnam? The facts are known to all who care to know.
... there is indeed something of a consensus among intellectuals who have already achieved power and affluence, or who sense that they can achieve them by “accepting society” as it is and promoting the values that are “being honored” in this society. It is also true that this consensus is most noticeable among the scholar-experts who are replacing the free-floating intellectuals of the past.
Let me finally return to Dwight Macdonald and the responsibility of intellectuals. Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. “Why should they? What have I done?” he asked. Macdonald concludes: “Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster.” The question, “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities
#NoamChomsky #ResponsibilityOfIntellectuals with #DwightMacdonald and #ArthurSchlesinger #KennedyIntellectuals #EpsteinFilesMusings #AlanDershowitz #LarrySummers #LawrenceHSummers