Yoshie wrote: >>Leftists in the North basically act as if "criticisms" of parties, movements, and governments of the South are just a matter of pointing out this or that is wrong, which doesn't help activists in the South, most of whom already know _that_.<<
I hate to say this, particularly given the context, but the obvious counterexample to this is Iran, where a very large proportion indeed of the local socialist opposition ended up exiled or dead, precisely because they didn't know what was wrong with the Khomeinists. (Specifically, they didn't believe that the Khomeinists wanted to form a totalitarian government.) Although lots of these kind of criticisms are not in the best of faith (and one could argue that nobody at the time really was in a position to predict that Khomeini would go the way he did), you can't rule out this sort of critique out of hand. If you believe that your mates are about to do something dangerous, it is OK to warn them, even if that warning implicitly advocates the status quo as less bad than the feared alternative. best dd
