Nearing As A Foreign Policy Analyst
In addition to working variously as a teacher, paid public speaker, and author, throughout his life Scott Nearing was a regular contributor of commentary on foreign affairs. As an octogenarian summing up his life, Nearing recalled
"I have spent 70 years of study and travel in order to equip myself with information that would enable me to speak and write with authority on the course of world affairs. The authority I have sought is not in any sense political. It is the authority that results from collecting and classifying information on a scientific level and interpreting facts as I have found them. Since I do not speak with political authority I have no means of communicating my conclusions except by putting them in print myself and distributing them in the most advantageous way that is available to a private citizen."
Through the years, his writings on foreign affairs were distributed via several different channels. In 1921 Nearing was, along with his colleague Louis Lochner, a co-founder of a forerunner of the Federated Press, a news service which sent out domestic and international news releases and picture mats five days a week to the labor and radical press in America. Nearing remained a regular contributor to the Federated Press (controlled by the Communist Party for most of its existence) until 1943, when he was fired for his anti-war position, which Federated Press editor Carl Haessler characterized as "childish." Nearing then began to contribute to an obscure monthly newsletter from Florida, World Events.
Shortly after its founding in 1949, Nearing began contributing a monthly "World Events" column to the independent theoretical monthly, Monthly Review, established by dissident Marxist economists Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman. Nearing tellingly characterized the objective of this publication as "the dissemination of a true understanding of society and the reporting of dependable news of the movement toward a socialist society which is steadily spreading over the face of the globe." Through the decades, Nearing wrote thousands of pages of news and commentary on these themes, retiring from this activity only in 1970, at the age of 87.
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