Click on the headline to link to an article via the HistoMat blog-concerning the recent passing of public intellectual, Professor Tony Judt.
Markin comment:
I have been following the Tony Judt’s serial memoirs in the last several issues of The New York Review Of Books so that I know some of the frustrations with his sheer balderdash that the writer in the linked article is discussing. For example, in the latest issue (August 19, 2010) Judt spent what precious time he had left bemoaning the decline of academic standards in the, historically, insidiously class-bound British higher education system, and the corresponding decline of the meritocracy of which he was a product in the “old” days, his old days in the 1960s. Well, everything, as we get older, was better in the old days all the way down the line, right?
On a more serious note, we can all, friend or foe, admire and honor Tony Judt’s courage in fighting the losing battle with serious illness that he fought with dignity and purpose. Still, we are political people and there is no need to soft-soap the hard fact that his political vision, his mushy social democratic political vision, was mired somewhere in the pre-World War I Second International days. In fighting the 21st century American imperial state-led “monster” military machine that is not enough, just as it was not enough in the 20th century.
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