(Cross Posted from “Daily Kos”)

I am an extremist.  I have been since the Vietnam war caused me to cut short my postdoctoral training In Israel and come home to my first faculty job at SUNY at Buffalo in 1965.  Before that I had been a USMC officer, a “born again” Christian and generally a true believer in our American myths.  Listening to international news during the Gulf of Tonkin incident and contrasting it with Voice of America and Armed Forces Radio versions made me very concerned.  I immediately became more concerned when I got back to the USA and found that the propaganda I had heard from the VOA and AFR were the story being told everywhere and basically the only story.  I rose quickly to be leader in the anti-war/civil rights movement and as my friends were beaten by police for expressing their views and as the underground press and other organs became the only source of an opposition view, I became more extreme.  It was the Democratic Party we were up against.  Read on below and I’ll explain why our extremism was and is fundamentally different from what we see today and why the absence of any real left thinking here has poisoned the well so badly.