Thursday, May 22, 2014

IN MEMORIAM

Jerry Fresia sent me a copy of a great letter written by Gabriel Kolko to REASON magazine.  Gabe and Joyce Kolko and I were friends back in 1959-61 when we were all at Harvard, part of a little group of lefties who called ourselves The New Left Club of Cambridge [see my Autobiography.]  I went to Google to find out where he was so that I could send him a note, and discovered, to my great sadness, that he passed away just three days ago at his home in Amsterdam.  Gabe was one year older than I.  A good comrade, and, judging from the letter Jerry sent to me, true to our beliefs to the end, unlike certain other members of that little group.   I shall miss him.
at

4 comments:

  1. Jerry FresiaMay 22, 2014 at 8:32 AM

    For those interested, the letter by Kolko in question can be found here, contained in a eulogy to Kolko:

    http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/gabriel-kolko-rip.php

    ReplyDelete
  2. Robert Paul WolffMay 22, 2014 at 9:28 AM

    Thank you for the link, Jerry. For what it is worth, I too was for a time the darling of the libertarian right, becausde of my little book IN DEFENSE OF ANARCHISM. If memory serves, I even had a note from Murray Rothbard congratulating me on the book. As I observed on antiwar.com [a libertarian blog], the American political spectrum is shaped like a horseshoe, with the extreme right and the extreme left closer to one another than either is to the center.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ChrisMay 22, 2014 at 9:44 AM

    I always tell libertarians that I agree with all their criticisms of the authoritarian nature of the state. I just go one step further and apply those same criticisms to the authoritarian nature of the corporation (or capitalist economy) as well.

    Just as all theists are atheists about all gods but one, so all hard core libertarians are against all institutions but one.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Robert Paul WolffMay 22, 2014 at 9:45 AM

    Chris, I love it. I must remember that.

    ReplyDelete