Elliott
Abrams, who is steering Trump’s Venezuela policy, has a long track
record of war crimes. Yet a number of liberal commentators are
rushing to his defense.
by
Paul Heideman
Part
2 - A young counter-revolutionary
Though
the famous novelist Thomas Pynchon once made reference to
“Schachtmanite [sic] goons like Elliott Abrams,” Abrams,
like most neoconservatives, had actually never been on the Left.
His
career as a counter-revolutionary began in college, when, as an
undergraduate at Harvard, he openly opposed Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) and other campus leftists, whom he despised as spoiled
children of the elite. When SDS members shut down Harvard in the
student strike of 1969, Abrams helped found (with fellow student
Daniel Pipes, son of Harvard reactionary Richard Pipes, and later an
Islamophobe of some note in his own right) the Ad Hoc Committee to
Keep Harvard Open.
On the
furthest right flank of cold war liberalism, Abrams backed Democratic
presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey, who was running on the platform
of continuing the Vietnam War, in 1968, and worked closely with
AFL-CIO operatives to combat the left-wing insurgency developing in
the Democratic primaries.
At
Harvard, Abrams received his law degree and in 1975 he briefly worked
for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the same
committee from which Joseph McCarthy prosecuted his anti-communist
crusade in the 1950s.
When
Abrams got there, the committee was headed by Henry “Scoop”
Jackson, also known as “the Senator from Boeing” for his service
to the defense industry. Jackson formed a pole in the 1970s around
which the most bellicose and bloodthirsty voices in the Democratic
Party gathered, figures who were obsessed with not “losing”
Vietnam, no matter the price in lives. When Jackson ran for president
in 1976, Abrams worked on his campaign.
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