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Progressives Mourn Passing of Author and Activist Jonathan Schell
an article by Jon Queally, Common Dreams (abridged and reprinted by permission)
The progressive community on Wednesday was
celebrating the life, work, and activism of longtime
writer and Yale University professor who passed away
late Tuesday at his home in Brooklyn after a battle
with cancer.
Author, educator, and activist Jonathan Schell (1943-2014)
click on photo to enlarge
A journalist who reported on the Vietnam War as a
staff writer for The New Yorker and whose book,
The Fate of the Earth, is still regarded as one of
the great books on the nuclear threat, Schell
became a longtime member of The Nation magazine's
community of writers and an activist who focused
on nonviolent struggles, human rights, and ending
the injustice associated with foreign wars abroad
and assaults on liberty at home.
Schell was a senior fellow at The Nation Institute
and a lecturer at Yale University, where he taught
courses on nonviolence and nuclear disarmament.
Over the years, his work appeared in numerous
print and online publications, including: The
Nation, TomDispatch, Harper's, Foreign Affairs,
and Common Dreams.
For a look at those articles which appeared on
Common Dreams, click here.
The Nation's Katrina vanden Huevel, on behalf of
herself and the magazine where Schell worked most
for the latter part of his career, writes today:
The power and persuasiveness of so much of
Jonathan's work came not only from his elegant
style, clarity of analysis and powerful logic but
also in the enduring belief that there is no idea
so powerful as a moral one. In a special 1998
Nation issue making the case for nuclear
abolition, he compelled us to confront the nuclear
peril in which we all find ourselves, and he
brilliantly laid out the argument that there
exists a viable and desirable alternative to
continued reliance on war and nuclear weapons. On
the nuclear crisis, no voice was as clear, no
writing as perceptive as Jonathan’s, going back to
his acclaimed 1982 book The Fate of the Earth and
his articles in The Nation and in other
publications.
In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and in
its aftermath, Schell was an outspoken critic of the
Bush administration and put particular emphasis on
the failure of a pliant media that asked too few
hard questions both before and during the war.
In his last essay in a column series, titled
'Letter from Ground Zero,' based specifically on
the aftermath of 9/11 and the misguided road to
Iraq, Schell wrote movingly about how the flawed
response to the attacks of September 11th, though
clear for a time, at some point became hard to
distinguish from deeper problems—both new and old—
that he perceived were gripping the American
republic. . .
Though many voiced the idea that "9/11 changed
everything," Schell proved himself capable of more
sophisticated analysis in which, despite the
widespread damage and deep implications of those
events and the Iraq War that followed, he
concluded that "what remains most striking and
most surprising is the degree of continuity of the
systemic disorder in the face of radical,
galloping change in almost every other area of
political life" . . .
(Thank you to Janet Hudgins, the CPNN reporter for
this article.)
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DISCUSSION
Question(s) related to this article:
US government's responsibility for the war in Iraq, How can we hold them accountable?
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Latest reader comment:
I hope that Barbara Boxer will continue to "speak truth to power". The 9/11 Commission's report and the part that was withheld from the public until today seems to back up Boxer's statements.
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