Gabriel Kolko
[3] One of the best-known revisionist historians to write about the Cold War,[4] he was also credited as "an incisive critic of the Progressive Era and its relationship to the American empire.
By the time SLID published his first pamphlet, Distribution of Income in the United States, in 1955, Kolko had already completed a stint as the league's national vice chairman.
[13] According to antiwar activist Eric Garris, Kolko first established his reputation as a historian writing about the "close connection between the government and big business throughout the Progressive Era and the Cold War [...] but broke new ground with his analysis of the corporate elite's successful defeat of the free market by corporatism.
So too, with this revised version of recent American history, came the tacit recognition that this fulfilled the business community's unspoken, but deliberate, aim of stabilizing competition in the "free market.
This was an idea summarized by journalist and internet columnist Charles Burris when he argued that:Rather than "the people" being behind these "progressive reforms", it was the very elite business interests themselves responsible, in an attempt to cartelize, centralize and control what was impossible due to the dynamics of a competitive and decentralized economy.
[19] Kolko's thesis 'that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government–business coalition' is one that is echoed by many observers today.Kolko, in particular, broke new ground with his critical history of the Progressive Era.
[21] Kolko's thesis "that businessmen favored government regulation because they feared competition and desired to forge a government–business coalition" is one that is echoed by many observers today.
[22] Free market economist Murray Rothbard thought highly of Kolko's work on the history of relations between big business and government.
Kolko's landmark work, The Triumph of Conservatism, is an attempt to link the Progressive Era policies of Theodore Roosevelt to the national-security state left behind in the wake of his cousin Franklin's presidency.
"[29] Kolko next moved on to his country's war in Vietnam, a conflagration with which he and Joyce were deeply preoccupied at home and abroad; the couple were in Huế when North Vietnamese forces entered Saigon, and were granted the privilege of announcing the event over local radio.
[citation needed] In Anatomy, Kolko became "the first American historian to establish a distinction between Diệm and Thiệu, on the one hand, and the population of the Saigon milieu on the other.
He maintained, however, that capitalism is neither a rational nor a stable basis for a peaceful society: "Given its practice and consequences, opposition to what is loosely termed capitalism—the status quo in all its dimensions—is far more justified today than ever.
"[39] Georgetown historian David S. Painter similarly wrote that "while very critical of Marxist and Communist movements and regimes, Kolko also counts among the human, social, and economic costs of capitalism the 'repeated propensity' of capitalist states to go to war.
"[40] Kolko was a strong supporter of North Vietnam,[41][42] but he was opposed to Lenin and Stalin and was scathingly dismissive of Mao Zedong and his thinking.
In his view, Zionism produced "a Sparta that traumatized an already artificially divided region," "a small state with a military ethos that pervades all aspects of [it]s culture, its politics and, above all, its response to the existence of Arabs in its midst and at its borders."
[8] "The US has never been able to translate its superior arms into political success, and that decisive failure is inherent in everything it attempts," remarked Kolko in the context of the Iraq War, just after George W. Bush's Mission Accomplished speech.
[26][46] Upon retirement, Kolko emigrated to Amsterdam, where he had a home and continued to work on his historical assessments of modern warfare, particularly the Vietnam War.
