Sara wrote > Regarding the Marxist quote from me: I was answering a point about > the ANSWER website, which I still haven't looked at. I should have > said: it wouldn't surprise me if there was a lot of Marxist/Socialist > Worker organization behind some anti-war actions. I didn't mean to > imply that all anti-war campaigners are Marxists.
And as the one who mentioned ANSWER I did not mean to imply that ALL antiwar groups were Marxist/Socialist. Bit ANSWER and it's main affiliates ARE the prime organizers and activists in the movement. Here is a link to an another antiwar group "ZNet | A Community of People Committed to Social Change" http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=2527 Some interesting excerpts from them on ANSWER, IAC and NION here: "One extremely energetic antiwar group is the International Action Center (IAC). It is the leading force in the coalition ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) which is calling the October 26 demonstrations in Washington, DC and elsewhere. (IAC and ANSWER share a New York City phone number and the latter's website features many materials from IAC.) IAC is officially led by Ramsey Clark and is largely the creation of the Workers World Party; and many key IAC figures are prominent writers for WWP. WWP holds many views that we find abhorrent. It considers North Korea "socialist Korea" where the "land, factories, homes, hotels, parks, schools, hospitals, offices, museums, buses, subways, everything in the DPRK belongs to the people as a whole" (Workers World, May 9, 2002), a fantastic distortion of the reality of one of the most rigid dictatorships in the world. IAC expresses its solidarity with Slobodan Milosevic (http://www.iacenter.org/yugo_milosdeligation.htm). There's of course much to criticize in the one-sided Hague war crimes tribunal, but to champion Milosevic is grotesque. The ANSWER website provides an IAC backgrounder on Afghanistan that refers to the dictatorial government that took power in that country in 1978 as "socialist" and says of the Soviet invasion the next year: the "USSR intervened militarily at the behest of the Afghani revolutionary government" (http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/resources/index.html) -- neglecting to mention that Moscow first had to engineer the execution of the Afghan leader to get themselves the invitation to intervene. In none of IAC's considerable resources on the current Iraq crisis is there a single negative word about Saddam Hussein. There is no mention that he is a ruthless dictator. (This omission is not surprising, given their inability to detect any problem of dictatorship with the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan.) There is no mention that Hussein is responsible for the deaths of many tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and Shi'ites. IAC's position is that any opponent of U.S. imperialism must be championed and never criticized. Another significant antiwar organization is Not In Our Names. NION has issued a very eloquent and forceful Pledge of Resistance opposing Bush's war on terrorism, signed by prominent individuals and thousands of others. NION organized important demonstrations around the U.S. on October 6 and on June 6. Significant impetus behind NION comes from the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). RCP identifies itself as followers of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Their website (http://rwor.org/) expresses support for Shining Path in Peru (which they say should properly be called the Maoist Communist Party of Peru), an organization with a gruesome record of violently targeting other progressive groups. For the RCP, freedom doesn't include the right of a minority to dissent (this is a bourgeois formulation, they say, pushed by John Stuart Mill and Rosa Luxembourg); the correct view, they say, is that of Mao (the "greatest revolutionary of our time"): "If Marxist Leninists are in control, the rights of the vast majority will be guaranteed." Despite these views, however, RCP does not push its specific positions on NION to the degree that IAC does on ANSWER. For example, while the ANSWER website offers such things as the IAC backgrounder on Afghanistan cited above, the NION website and its public positions have no connection to the sometimes bizarre views of the RCP. The case for participating in NION events is stronger than for ANSWER events. It still makes overwhelming sense to build better antiwar coalitions, but in the meantime supporting NION activities promotes an antiwar message that we support, with relatively little compromise of our views."
