Louis: >You were in the 8th grade in 1968, weren't you, Ron? I marvel at your
>ability to "educate" me about the Panthers.
Actually Ron was from the University of Maryland campus that I attended
from1971-1976 but was several years older being from among those activists that
had been in SDS. More on this at:
http://www.route-one.org/
There's a lot of talk about Argentina etc. but no mention of Newark, Watts, the
ghetto rebellions after MLK's assassination etc which was the context of the
emergence of the Panthers. No, the issue is not one of nostalgia at all but of
a spirit of solidarity (to say nothing of "sensitivity" to their situation) and
how to approach frontline movements and activists. The approach of moderator
and his cothinkers was to view them as "opponents" they had to arrogantly
counterpose themselves to, a fundamentally sectarian and inept outlook. The
broad mass of the movement including organizations led by veterans of the 30s
and the 40s, like the Communist Party and Workers World, was different which is
why they made gains in the black community and were able to have some influence
with Panther activists and the trot milieu didn't. Same attitude to a slightly
lesser extent emerged around Native Americans and Wounded Knee. How are you
going to supposedly teach these front line militants lessons in organizing
their own communities if you have no roots in it and how are you gonna get
those roots if you diss em by arrogantly talking down to them while their under
fire in the manner of German High Doctor? It's politically wrong and socially
inept, if a politically safe approach.
The attitude expressed by moderator is the type of self serving caricature of
the movement, unwittingly recycling right wing stereotypes about the movement,
that the trots used to justify their abstention from it. I regret he has not
moved farther away from that attitude. Another example: when we were occupied
by the National Guard at Maryland in 1972 and placed under martial law for a
week, the Party branch in DC's lack of enthusiasm for this was palpable and
they did virtually nothing to get involved in this, even though we were ten
miles away and later when the campus YSA organizer gave a report on this to the
Branch displaying a full page red fist logo poster from the campus daily
newspaper, a "leading comrade" rushed up screaming that he was "miseducating"
people with that "ultraleft" stuff. Of course she had never bothered to come
out on campus to check things out. That a couple of those YSAers we lost to WWP
in the wake of this who ended up going to Cuba in 1974 didn't faze them, they
didn't care, they were too busy worried about stuff like "the internal crisis
in the Fourth International" and other irrelevant *inside baseball* bullshit
that made them feel important but, like them, had little to do with the
progressive movement.
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