This is the biggest turd alive. During the 1980s, he wrote article after article in the Village Voice demonizing the FSLN in Nicaragua. Here's what I wrote on the NY Times forum for this article:The Idealist Paul Berman's book ''A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968'' traced a line from the rebellions of the 1960's to the nonviolent revolutions of 1989. It is essentially a line from leftism to liberalism. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the great ideological battles of the 20th century seemed to have ended: liberal democracy reigned supreme. Then came Sept. 11, which, Berman argues in a coming book called ''Terror and Liberalism,'' showed that, as it turns out, the 20th century isn't quite over yet.
Packer's article really obfuscates the relationship between liberals and US imperialist interventions. Except for Vietnam, liberals always support such wars. At the beginning of the Vietnam war, the late Michael Harrington (Packer's ideological patron) supported LBJ. It was only after student protests grew massive that many of these liberal hawks turned around. I would also argue that the breach opened up between genuine pacifism and liberal warmongering not over Bosnia but years earlier in Nicaragua, when people like Paul Berman demonized the Sandinista government. His lies helped to prop up the contra war.
Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
