October 1987
American Purpose
Issue 8, Volume 1

Publication Date: October 1, 1987
Posted: Thursday, October 10, 1987

This issue includes 'The New Left, the Old Left, and the Peace Movement'; 'On Getting Involved'; 'Take Him Out to the Ball Game'; 'In Print'; 'Switzerland at the Cape of Good Hope?'; 'Antigone Meets Joan of Arc'; 'Peace, Liberty, and Land Reform'; and 'In Brief'.


In This Issue :

The New Left, the Old Left, and the Peace Movement
A Cautionary Tale
The American Peace Movement-it should go without saying-was profoundly shaped by the Vietnam-era New Left. That the New Left was, in turn, shaped by the bewilderingly rapid ideological shifts within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is equally true. Understanding what happened to SDS is therefore crucial for understanding what has happened to the peace movement. Thus the importance for the purposes of AMERICAN PURPOSE of a new history of SDS, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Simon and Schuster, 1987), by former SDSer James Miller. [More]

On Getting Involved
It is no longer a curiosity these days for a county medical society in the midst of discussing its professional business to pass a resolution on a nuclear test ban (supportive, almost invariably); or for a deanery, taking a pause from an argument about, say, the prayer book, to declare itself on administration policy in Central America (against, usually); or for a group of architects to conduct its own foreign policy vis-à-vis agencies of the Soviet state (friendly to the max, as they say on the street). That doctors probably know very little about nuclear testing or deans about Sandinistas or architects about apparatchiks doesn't seem to worry anyone very much. [More]

Take Him Out to the Ball Game
As we celebrate the 1987 World Series amidst continuing debate over Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, we recall from earlier in the season an important item from the sports pages of the New York Times, printed under the startling headline, "Baseball Fever in the Soviet Union": [More]

In Print
Three recently published books address aspects of the debate over peace, security, and freedom in ways that may just turn the arguments involved in better directions. [More]

Switzerland at the Cape of Good Hope?
In South Africa, a book that sells 5,000 copies is thought a considerable success. Since March 1986, sales of South Africa: The Solution have topped the 30,000 mark. Frances Kendall and Leon Louw's volume has now been published in the United States under a slightly different title, After Apartheid: The Solution for South Africa; and while dust jacket blurbs shouldn't be taken as the final authority on a book's possible merits, it is intriguing to note that Winnie Mandela of the African National Congress (ANC), Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Zulus and Inkatha, and white liberal novelist Alan Paton appear in tandem on the back of the Kendall/Louw collaboration. These three crucial figures in the South African drama are not regularly espied on the same side of the what-to-do-about-South-Africa argument, beyond their common rejection of apartheid. And yet Mrs. Mandela thinks (or at least says) that "Here lies hope for a shattered nation." Chief Buthelezi thinks (or at least says) that "... The Solution may prove to be a rational, workable answer to South Africa's unique problems." And Alan Paton is "... pleased that people are taking this book seriously." What gives? [More]

Antigone Meets Joan of Arc
Contemporary American feminism has never known quite what to do with the war/peace debate. One faction argues that equality requires women in the military to go into combat. Another faction claims that the war system itself reflects cultural patterns of male hegemony, usually labelled patriarchy; women's refusal to countenance a patriarchal culture will, it is suggested, lead to a withering away of war. The first faction takes its cue, in terms of historical-cultural symbols, from Joan of Arc; the second claims Antigone as its heroine. In all of this, the notion that peace might be advanced by exempting half of humanity from being a legitimate target of war seems to have gotten lost.  [More]

Peace, Liberty, and Land Reform
During the worst days of the early 1980s' debate over U.S. policy in El Salvador, Roy Prosterman of the University of Washington Law School was a marked man. By both sides. His closest colleagues in the Salvadoran land reform effort-Michael Hammer and Mark Pearlman of the American Institute for Free Labor Development and Jose Rodolfo Viera of the Salvadoran Peasants Union-were gunned down in a San Salvador coffee shop; and there was ample reason to believe that Roy Prosterman was on the short list of those who had perpetrated that atrocity. Concurrently, students and activists supporting the communist guerrillas in El Salvador were circulating on the Seattle campus where Prosterman taught a "Wanted" poster with a target superimposed on a photo of his head. On another occasion, Prosterman had to be escorted to safety by police at Harvard, where those of an ideological disposition similar to that of the "Wanted" poster miscreants in Seattle had physically threatened Prosterman during a lecture. [More]

In Brief
We note the following bit of cross-cultural news, reported in the Baltimore Sun: When the Soviet Union launched a Syrian pilot aboard its Soyuz spacecraft on a 10-day mission to the Soviet space station "Mir," the Syrian media "hailed the launch as the country's arrival at the threshold of space age and civilization. Many Syrians slaughtered sheep, a sign of veneration, in front of TV sets as scenes of the blastoff were shown." [More]