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Tom Hayden on The Unfinished Business of Democracy
From helping to found the New Left in the 1960s right up to this turbulent election season, Hayden was a pillar of Democratic politics, a brilliant strategist and political thinker, and a leading advocate for a more just and equal society.
to read the article published by The Nation, October 24, 2016, click on
https://www.thenation.com/article/tom-hayden-and-the-unfinished-business-of-democracy/
"We need more than ever a participatory society in which persons of all life styles believe that they matter, instead of the escapist culture that absorbs millions in irrelevance. We cannot contend with the coming of external limits unless we delve more into our rich inner potentials.
It comes down to moving from a wasteful, privately oriented, self-indulgent existence to a more conserving, caring and disciplined life style. The cornerstone has to be a renewal of self-reliance, not the outmoded frontier fantasy of the Republican philosophers, but the reassertion of personal responsibility in everything from conserving resources to decentralizing services to keeping ourselves well through self-care to practicing a “right livelihood” in business. It is a change from planned obsolescence to the production of useful goods that last, from consumer madness to the achievement of inner satisfactions, from the opulence of Jay Gatsby to the frugal self-assurance of Henry David Thoreau.
More important than money and technique in elections is the factor of motivation and vision. The Democrats (or someone else) will return to national leadership when they are inspired again."
https://www.thenation.com/article/tom-hayden-and-the-unfinished-business-of-democracy/
"We need more than ever a participatory society in which persons of all life styles believe that they matter, instead of the escapist culture that absorbs millions in irrelevance. We cannot contend with the coming of external limits unless we delve more into our rich inner potentials.
It comes down to moving from a wasteful, privately oriented, self-indulgent existence to a more conserving, caring and disciplined life style. The cornerstone has to be a renewal of self-reliance, not the outmoded frontier fantasy of the Republican philosophers, but the reassertion of personal responsibility in everything from conserving resources to decentralizing services to keeping ourselves well through self-care to practicing a “right livelihood” in business. It is a change from planned obsolescence to the production of useful goods that last, from consumer madness to the achievement of inner satisfactions, from the opulence of Jay Gatsby to the frugal self-assurance of Henry David Thoreau.
More important than money and technique in elections is the factor of motivation and vision. The Democrats (or someone else) will return to national leadership when they are inspired again."
For more information:
http://www.freembtranslations.net
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His infamous trip to Israel with his then wife Jane Fonda in 1982 is more fully described at:
The Repackaging of Tom Hayden by Jeff Blankfort, 5/7/15 at
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/07/the-repackaging-of-tom-hayden/
Pertinent paragraphs:
“In the halls of the national gallery in Washington there are 46 portraits of Benedict Arnold. None look alike, yet they all resemble Tom Hayden.”
— ALEXANDER COCKBURN, Village Voice, July 20, 1982.
That’s how Alexander Cockburn opened his column, 33 years ago, upon learning of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda’s trip to Israel in the first week of July, 1982, a month after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Hayden and Fonda had been part of a tour sponsored by the Israeli Association for the Welfare of Soldiers which, according to UPI, “invited a number of American entertainers to Israel to improve morale during the [Peace in Galilee] operation” and they did just that."
"On June 6 of that year, using as a pretext the attempted assassination of Israel’s London Ambassador by the outlier Palestinian Abu Nidal group, Israel invaded Lebanon with 80,000 troops backed by its air force and navy with the intent to drive the PLO out of the country."
"In Baabda, on the outskirts of Beirut, in the third week of what would be a 70 day siege of trapped Palestinian forces, they watched from a schoolyard as gunners lobbed their deadly shells into civilian neighborhoods of Lebanon’s capital.
By then, according to Red Cross and UN estimates, the Israelis had killed, close to 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, most of them civilians, figures which Hayden, citing Israeli sources, claimed were “wildly exaggerated.”
On his return from Israel, Hayden defended his trip on Pacifica radio stations and wrote an op-ed in the LA Herald-Examiner, employing what has become a standard trope among defenders of Israel’s bloody assaults on Gaza in recent years, asking rhetorically, what the US response would be if “Mexico collapsed in bloody internal strife, and an armed terrorist group used the opportunity to continuously shell the citizens of San Diego, driving their children into bomb shelters and their elderly to settle somewhere else.”"
"That 34 years earlier, the Israelis had forced 750,000 Palestinians to leave their homes and villages and “settle somewhere else,” many of them in Lebanon, was among the larger pieces of the problem that Hayden failed to mention."
""More to the immediate point, there had not been shelling of Israel from Lebanon by the Palestinians, continuous or otherwise for the 11 months preceding the invasion, despite repeated Israeli provocations."
"To Ariel Sharon’s frustration, the PLO strictly adhered to a cease-fire agreement drawn up between the Palestinians and Israelis in July, 1981 by US ambassador Philip Habib."
"The cease-fire was no secret in Israel and Hayden could not have failed to be aware of it. He admittedly knew that in the second and third weeks following the invasion, 20,000, then 100,000 Israelis went in the streets to protest the invasion much as hundreds of thousands of Americans had protested our country’s war on Vietnam a decade and a half earlier in which Hayden, one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had played a significant role."
"He had decided to run for the California State Assembly in Santa Monica with its significant Jewish population; the need for votes and money from the latter easily trumped whatever principles that Hayden might have brought to the table."
"“I’m not the angry young man I was in the 60s,” he said in his television ads. As if to prove the point, Hayden was quoted as questioning the military’s overspending on sophisticated weapons, saying, “We actually have a shortage of old-fashioned things, like guns and tanks.” (SF Examiner & Chronicle, 10/31/82)"
"As Gore Vidal pointed out at the time, Hayden gave “opportunism a bad name.”"
"Hayden went on to win that election, the most expensive in the state’s history and several more, hanging on to his assembly seat until 1992 and then moving up to the Senate where he filled the chair from 1992 until 2000."
"If he had any second thoughts about his 1982 behavior we didn’t hear about it for 24 years when he was no longer in office and had other fish to fry and no longer Jewish voters or donors to please."
"In fact, his expression of solidarity with Israel’s invading army was no error but a calculated move to enhance his political career which it did; his 18 years in the state legislature and now tidy pension testify to that."
"In the previous October, Hayden already had his eyes on that assembly seat. In an op-ed distributed by Pacific News Service (10/9/81), he warned that the US was sacrificing Israel for the sake of Arab oil. Sounding very much like every other bought American politician from Joe Biden to Elizabeth Warren, Hayden wrote:"
"“We are letting dollars and weapons eclipse the fact that America and Israel, at their best, are lands of vision and idealism. The United States has stood side by side with Israel since its birth, not simply because it was a ‘strategic asset, but because of a strong moral commitment—a bonding of two nations with a deep respect for democracy, human rights, and justice.”"
September 1982 was the time of the infamous Sabra & Shatila Massacre, when Israel's allies slaughtered 3,000 people in refugee camps, prompting worldwide protests, including in San Francisco.
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_massacre
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=196
https://electronicintifada.net/tags/sabra-and-shatila-massacre
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/09/2012915163152213255.html
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2016/10/when-i-was-in-lebanon-subject-to.html
Tom Hayden also supported sending 4,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles during the 1992 Uprising in response to the acquittal of police who brutally beat Rodney King and his passengers. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots