Re: Kos on Marches
Michael Pugliese wrote:
Mock naive question. What is “red-baiting”?
In this case, making a big deal out of ANSWER’s role in the antiwar movement. One thing you gotta admit about a Leninist organization is that they’re really good at picking dates, getting permits, and hiring buses. No one cares about their agenda. Take advantage of their discipline.
I signed my name to a bus roster when I rode with ANSWER in 2003. They’ve never tried to recruit me to their awful party, or to lobby me to wear a North Korean red star. It’s just twisted purism to care.
Stalinists use the term one way, 99% demogogically. Is it asking inconvenient questions of Stalinized Communists? Anti-Stalinist communists, socialists, social democrats, left-liberals, use it another way as when liberals, welfare state or otherwise, are accused falsely by McCarthyites of being Stalinized Communists. UfPJ has CPUSA and ex-CPUSA leaders, among other marxist and non-marxist tendencies. I have no problem with Leslie Cagan and the CPUSA rep. on the UfPJ steering committee or Bob Wing, ex cadre in Line of March. Allowing those Stalinist ANSWER pricks to browbeat and harangue themselves into an unwarrented leadership role in a PEACE movement, when there hasn’t been a TANK they ever saw mowing down workers, peasants and students they haven’t supported, is the scandal.
No one except you, David Corn, Marc Cooper, and Nathan Newman really finds this a scandal. Carrol Cox’s liberal comrades in Illinois don’t care. Philip Weiss, writing in this week’s New York magazine, doesn’t care. This is sectarianism disguised as anti-sectarianism. The cold war is long over. Give it up.
Doug