Shouting Truth to Depraved Power (and Its Unwitting Accomplices) (Jason Miller)

[Tace]

“Stephen Lendman Sounds Off”

By Jason Miller -- World News Trust

Jan. 9, 2007 -- I recently had the privilege of conducting a “cyber interview” with one of the preeminent domestic critics of the American Empire. Despite his relatively recent start, Stephen Lendman has rapidly become one of the most ubiquitous and well-respected chroniclers of truth in the alternative media community. Asserting unflinching support for social democracy, Hugo Chavez, and the countless victims of U.S. foreign and domestic policy, Lendman has penned a growing stack of essays assailing the brutality of American Capitalism and the genocidal crimes of unbridled United States militarism.

Recently receiving a well-deserved page on Third World Traveler (1), Stephen Lendman is taking his place amongst the likes of Petras and Chomsky, men he cites as his inspirations.

Here is a glimpse of Stephen and his worldview:

What is your educational background and what type of work did you do in your “former life”?

During my formal working life I read moderately as able and followed with horror and revulsion many world and national events but never wrote or spoke out about them. That began changing when I retired at the end of 1999 at age 65. I began reading heavily and now have an extensive library that includes many of the renowned giants I revere like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, James Petras, Edward Said, Gore Vidal, Michel Chossudovsky, John Pilger, and dozens of others including many not as well known to the greater public like June Jordan, now passed much too young and terribly missed. Her very name inspires me for who she was and what she stood for and did in her life. A truly remarkable and courageous woman.

I tell people I never wrote anything other than business reports, memos and such since finishing my master's thesis in 1959 till, by accident, late last year I wrote a long letter to Norman Finkelstein praising one of his books. He asked permission to post it on his web site and requested I submit it to other sites which I did, got a few postings, and it all took off from there but slowly at first.

Please, tell me as much about your family as you feel comfortable disclosing.

I grew up in Boston in a low middle-income family, never had any luxuries, but did have loving parents, never felt or was deprived, and by sheer luck and chance got into Harvard in 1952 when a full year's tuition was $600. It was $1000 when I graduated in 1956 with a BA. I then got an MBA at the Wharton School in 1960 with two years in the peacetime Army (thankfully) in between. I began my formal working life as a marketing research analyst for about seven years right out of grad school and spent the next 33 as part of a small family business until retiring at end of 1999. Overall, from back in school till I retired, I led a pretty plain vanilla life as just another face in a faceless crowd. Then it began to change.

more

http://www.worldnewstrust.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=801