The Revolutionay Communist Party....

[wrbones]

http://www.gpjo.org/answer.htm

This was written last year by a peace protester trying to educate protesers about A.N.S.W.E.R., NION, the WWP and the IAC. Mentioned is another, the Revolutionary Communist Party.

These are the groups behind the large anti-war protests and other seditious activities.




http://www.gpjo.org/answer.htm

This was written last year by a peace protester trying to educate protesers about A.N.S.W.E.R., NION, the WWP and the IAC. Mentioned is another, the Revolutionary Communist Party.

These are the groups behind the large anti-war protests and other seditious activities.




This site is hosted by Netfirms Web Hosting

As you all know, a round of antiwar demonstrations is planned for this
coming weekend, in Washington, San Francisco, and many other cities too.
These demonstrations are obviously profoundly important, and we have
been receiving many messages asking questions about the events as well
as about the broader logic of antiwar activism, its methods, prospects,
etc.

Stephen Shalom and I have prepared another of our Question and Answer
essays, this time trying to deal with the organizing concerns people are
raising. It is now online at the site, at the following url in case you
want to go direct.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=2527


The questions and answers try to provide activists with information and
formulations useful for organizing. They deal in turn with: why oppose
the war, how does our activism impact policy, how can we get enough
people opposed to war, single issue versus multi-issue organizing,
connections between war and other focuses, single versus multi-tactic
organizing, judging tactics, relating to groups whose politics we don't
like, avoiding sectarianism, and presenting alternatives to war.

The question and answer that we include below to give this update more
substance, though many of the other questions and answers are far more
fundamental in our view, is the one that seems to be on so many people's
minds right now, due to its timely relevance to this weekend. It is the
eighth in the sequence.


(8) How should we relate to groups doing antiwar work with whom we
disagree in significant ways -- the IAC and ANSWER, NION, and the war's
mainstream opponents? How do we evaluate all these? Should we work with
people we have serious differences with, avoid them, or what?

There is no universal rule for how to relate to those with whom we
disagree. If we automatically refused to have anything to do with any
person or organization with whom we had differences, then we'd be
protesting the war in demonstrations of two or three individuals.
Obviously, we need to take account of how much disagreement there is and
whether working with particular groups allows us to express a shared
agreement and further our goals, despite our disagreements, or whether,
on the other hand, working with particular groups restricts or
undermines our efforts in some significant ways.

Continued

[wrbones]

<B>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.</B>
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.

How do these views affect antiwar demonstrations organized by IAC or
ANSWER? They do so in two primary ways.

First, an important purpose of antiwar demonstrations is to educate the
public, so as to be able to build a larger movement. If the message of a
demonstration is that opposition to U.S. war means support for brutal
regimes, then we are mis-educating the public, and limiting the growth
of the movement. To be sure, some true things we say may also alienate
some members of the public, and often that is a risk we must take in
order to communicate the truth and change awareness. But to tell the
public that they have to support either George Bush or Saddam Hussein is
not true and is certainly not a way to build a strong movement. People
are not wrong to be morally repelled by Saddam Hussein. An antiwar
movement that cannot make clear its opposition to the crimes of both
Bush and Hussein will of necessity be limited in size.

The second problem with IAC-organized demonstrations is that the
day-to-day practice of IAC cadre often shows a lack of commitment to
democratic and open behavior. It is not surprising that those who
lionize the dictatorial North Korean regime will be somewhat lacking in
their appreciation of democratic practice.

Does this mean that people who reject these abhorrent views of the IAC
shouldn't attend the October 26 antiwar demonstrations in Washington,
DC, San Francisco, and elsewhere? No.

If there were another large demonstration organized by forces more
compatible with the kinds of politics espoused by other antiwar
activists, including ourselves, then we would urge people to prefer that
one. And there is no doubt we should be working to build alternative
organizational structures for the antiwar movement that are not
dominated by IAC. But at the moment the ANSWER demonstration is the only
show in town. And much as we may oppose Saddam Hussein, we also oppose
Bush, and the paramount danger today is the war being prepared by the
U.S. government.

So we need to consider various questions.

First, are those with antiwar views contrary to the IAC's perspective
excluded from speaking? Second, what will be the primary message
perceived by those present at the demonstrations and by the wider
public?

If past experience is a guide, IAC demonstrations will have programs
skewed in the direction of IAC politics, but without excluding
alternative voices. In general, the IAC speakers will not be offensive
so much for what they say, but for what they don't say. That is, they
won't praise Saddam Hussein from the podium, but nor will they utter a
critical word about him. However, as long as other speakers can and do
express positions with a different point of view, the overall impact of
the event will still be positive, particularly in the absence of other
options. Most of the people at the demonstration will in fact be unaware
of exactly who said what and whether any particular speaker omitted this
or that point. What they will experience will be a powerful antiwar
protest. And most of the public will see it that way too. (As was the
case during the Vietnam War too: few demonstrators knew the specific
politics or agendas of demonstration organizers.) Accordingly, and in
the absence of any alternative event, it makes sense to help build and
to attend the October 26 demonstration, while also registering extreme
distaste for the IAC, at least in our view.

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 <B>Revolutionary Communist
Party (RCP)</B>. 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.

Another group that may support antiwar activities but with whom we have
serious disagreements are liberal politicians. Many of these politicians
have totally capitulated to Bush and the right, but a few of them have
been strong voices against war. Our diagnosis of and prescription for
U.S. warmongering differ substantially from those of antiwar liberals.
Should we participate in events where Democratic Party officeholders are
leading speakers? Again, the same basic logic applies. Does the presence
of the Democrat in some way prevent us from saying what we want to say?
(Sure, at an event where Democrat X is speaking, we won't be welcome to
give a speech denouncing X as a running-dog lackey of the ruling class.
But it is unlikely that this is what we wanted to say in our ten-minute
antiwar speech anyway.) And, second, what message does the public come
away with? If the whole event is billed as a "Let's Wait A Week for War"
demonstration, then no matter what we say our participation will be
contributing to a cause we don't support, pursuing war a week from now.
But as long as the demonstration has a clear antiwar position, the
presence and participation of liberal Democrats should not preclude our
participation. Indeed, if we were on the committee choosing speakers, we
would support including many speakers who didn't agree with us on many
things, but who were clearly antiwar and who could convey an antiwar
message to audiences that we hadn't been as successful in attracting.




Michael Albert
Z Magazine / ZNet
sysop@zmag.org
www.zmag.org

[wrbones]

http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/03/1946241&mode=nocomment


an excerpt:

International Action Center - "Peace Activists" with a Secret Agenda?


Word reaches us that this article has become the source of much controversy, thus meriting its return to the front page. Readers may be interested to know that we hope to shortly publish another article from Kevin Coogan "Lords of Chaos" (previously published also in Hitlist), on the fascist underground/third position. As the IAC will be demonstrating in New York City against the WEF on February 2nd, at a time when many anti-authoritarians will also be on the streets, people should understand the nature of their politics and not mistake them for allies.
Anonymous Comrade writes:

[The following article has been reprinted from the underground rock'n'roll magazine Hit List, vol. 3, number 3 (November/December 2001). For further information, please contact Hit List, either by mail at PO Box 8345/Berkeley, CA 94044 or via email at jmbale@att.net.]

When originally published the following article was accompanied by three sidebars focussing on specific aspects of the WWP:
Appendix 1: The IAC and the Campaign Against Sanctions: Helping the Iraqi People or Saddam Husayn?
Appendix 2: "ANSWER" and "The Pod People"
Appendix 3: The WWP: From Kim Il Sung's Birthday Party to the Russian "Red-Brown Alliance"..


The International Action Center:
"Peace Activists" with a Secret Agenda?


By Kevin Coogan

Introduction

On September 29th, 2001, just a few weeks following the September 11th terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a large peace rally was held in Washington, D.C., to oppose an American military response to the attack. The main organizer of the D.C. rally, ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism), was officially established shortly after the 9/11 attack. The leading force behind ANSWER's creation is the International Action Center (IAC), which represents itself as a progressive organization devoted to peace, justice, and human rights issues. The IAC's organizational clout is considerable: for the past decade it has played a leading role in organizing protest demonstrations against U.S. military actions against both Iraq and Serbia. After the September 11th attack, the IAC decided to turn its long-organized planned protest against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank gathering, scheduled for the 29th, into an action opposing any use of U.S. military power in response to terrorism.

The IAC owes its current success to Ramsey Clark, a former Attorney General during the Johnson Administration, who is listed on the IAC's website as its founder. Clark's establishment credentials have caused many in the mass media to accept the IAC's self-portrayal as a group of disinterested humanitarians appalled by war and poverty who are working to turn American foreign policy towards a more humane course. On its website the IAC says it was "Founded by Ramsey Clark" and then describes its purpose: "Information, Activism, and Resistance to U.S. Militarism, War, and Corporate Greed, Linking with Struggles Against Racism and Oppression within the United States."







Yet since its inception in 1992, the IAC's actions have given rise to serious doubts about its bona fides as an organization truly committed to peace and human rights issues. Behind the blue door entrance to the IAC's headquarters on 14th Street in Manhattan can be found deeper shades of red. When one looks closely at the IAC, it becomes impossible to ignore the overwhelming presence of members of an avowedly Marxist-Leninist sect called the Workers World Party (WWP), whose cadre staff virtually all of the IAC's top positions. Whether or not the IAC is simply a WWP front group remains difficult to say. Nor is there any evidence that Ramsey Clark himself is a WWP member. What does seem undeniable is that without the presence of scores of WWP cadre working inside the IAC, the organization would for all practical purposes cease to exist. Therefore, even if Clark is not a WWP member, he is following a political course that meets with the complete approval of one of the most pro-Stalinist sects ever to emerge from the American far left.

Part One: Ramsey Clark from Attorney General to the IAC

Before analyzing the role of the WWP in both the creation and control of the IAC, it is first necessary to explain just how the IAC managed to link up with Clark, a 74-year old Texas-born lawyer and the IAC's one big name media star. The son of Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark (himself a Attorney General in the Johnson administration), Ramsey Clark radiates "middle America" with his puppy dog eyes, short hair, jug ears, Texas twang, plain talk, and "aw, shucks" demeanor. Clark backs up his folksy public persona with some dazzling credentials that include serving as the National Chairman of the National Advisory Committee of the ACLU, as well as serving as past president of the Federal Bar Association.

Despite his prominence within the establishment, Clark also maintains close ties to the Left. After he ceased being LBJ's Attorney General in 1969 when Nixon became President, Clark visited North Vietnam and condemned U.S. bombing policy over the "Voice of Vietnam" radio station. He also served as a lawyer for peace activist Father Phillip Berrigan, and led a committee that investigated the killing of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by local police in collusion with the FBI. At the same time, Clark remained politically active inside the more moderate ranks of the Democratic Party. In 1976, however, his defeat in the New York Democratic primary campaign for Senate ended his political ambitions. From the mid-1970s until today, the Greenwich Village-based Clark has pursued a career as a high-powered defense attorney who specializes in political cases.

Some of Clark's current clients, including Shaykh Umar `Abd al-Rahman, the "blind Sheik" who was convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison term for his involvement in helping to organize follow-up terrorist attacks in New York City after the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, are a far cry from Father Berrigan. Shaykh `Abd al-Rahman, of course, deserves legal representation. What makes Clark's approach noteworthy is that in the case of `Abd al-Rahman (as well as those of Clark's other political clients), his approach is based more on putting the government on trial for its alleged misdeeds than actually proving the innocence of his clients. While completely ignoring Shaykh `Abd al-Rahman's pivotal role in the Egyptian-based Islamist terror group al-Jama`a al-Islamiyyah, as well as the central role that the Shaykh's Jersey City-based mosque played in the first World Trade Center attack, Clark tried to portray the blind Shaykh as a brilliant Islamic scholar and religious thinker who was being persecuted simply as a result of anti-Muslim prejudice on the part of the American government.

Clark appears to be driven by intense rage at what he perceives to be the failures of American foreign policy; a rage so strong that it may well be irrelevant to him whether his clients are actually innocent or guilty as long as he can use them to strike back at the American establishment which once welcomed him with open arms. After losing his 1976 Senate bid, Clark deepened his opposition to American foreign policy. In June 1980, at a time when American hostages were in their eighth month of captivity in Iran, Clark sojourned to Tehran to take part in a conference on the "Crimes of America" sponsored by Ayatollah Khomeini's theocratic Islamic regime. According to a story on Clark by John Judis that appeared in the April 22nd, 1991 New Republic, while in Iran Clark publicly characterized the Carter Administration?s failed military attempt to rescue the hostages as a violation of international law. By the time Clark was sipping tea in Tehran, American foreign policy was in shambles. In both Nicaragua and Iran, U.S.-backed dictators had fallen from power. In Europe, the incoming Reagan Administration would soon be faced with a growing neutralist movement that was particularly strong in Germany. Inside the U.S., the anti-nuclear "freeze" movement was then in full swing. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union had deployed massive amounts of troops into a formerly neutral nation for the first time since the end of World War II.

[wrbones]

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/50/news-corn.php

NOVEMBER 1 - 7, 2002

Behind the Placards
The odd and troubling origins of today’s anti-war movement
by David Corn


FREE MUMIA. FREE THE CUBAN 5. FREE JAMIL AL-AMIN (that’s H. Rap Brown, the former Black Panther convicted in March of killing a sheriff’s deputy in 2000). And free Leonard Peltier. Also, defeat Zionism. And, while we’re at it, let’s bring the capitalist system to a halt.

When tens of thousands of people gathered near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for an anti-war rally and march in Washington last Saturday, the demands hurled by the speakers extended far beyond the call for no war against Iraq. Opponents of the war can be heartened by the sight of people coming together in Washington and other cities for pre-emptive protests. But demonstrations such as these are not necessarily strategic advances, for the crowds are still relatively small and, more importantly, the message is designed by the far left for consumption by those already in their choir.

In a telling sign of the organizers’ priorities, the cause of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the taxi driver/radical journalist sentenced to death two decades ago for killing a policeman, drew greater attention than the idea that revived and unfettered weapons inspections should occur in Iraq before George W. Bush launches a war. Few of the dozens of speakers, if any, bothered suggesting a policy option regarding Saddam Hussein other than a simplistic leave-Iraq-alone. Jesse Jackson may have been the only major figure to acknowledge Saddam’s brutality, noting that the Iraqi dictator “should be held accountable for his crimes.” What to do about Iraq? Most speakers had nothing to say about that. Instead, the Washington rally was a pander fest for the hard left.

If public-opinion polls are correct, 33 percent to 40 percent of the public opposes an Iraq war; even more are against a unilateral action. This means the burgeoning anti-war movement has a large recruiting pool, yet the demo was not intended to persuade doubters. Nor did it speak to Americans who oppose the war but who don’t consider the United States a force of unequaled imperialist evil and who don’t yearn to smash global capitalism.

This was no accident, for the demonstration was essentially organized by the Workers World Party, a small political sect that years ago split from the Socialist Workers Party to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The party advocates socialist revolution and abolishing private property. It is a fan of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, and it hails North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il for preserving his country’s “socialist system,” which, according to the party’s newspaper, has kept North Korea “from falling under the sway of the transnational banks and corporations that dictate to most of the world.” The WWP has campaigned against the war-crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. A recent Workers World editorial declared, “Iraq has done absolutely nothing wrong.”

Officially, the organizer of the Washington demonstration was International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). But ANSWER is run by WWP activists, to such an extent that it seems fair to dub it a WWP front. Several key ANSWER officials — including spokesperson Brian Becker — are WWP members. Many local offices for ANSWER’s protest were housed in WWP offices. Earlier this year, when ANSWER conducted a press briefing, at least five of the 13 speakers were WWP activists. They were each identified, though, in other ways, including as members of the International Action Center.

The IAC, another WWP offshoot, was a key partner with ANSWER in promoting the protest. It was founded by Ramsey Clark, attorney general for President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. For years, Clark has been on a bizarre political odyssey, much of the time in sync with the Workers World Party. As an attorney, he has represented Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a political cult. He has defended Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic and Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, who was accused of participating in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Clark is also a member of the International Committee To Defend Slobodan Milosevic. The international war-crimes tribunal, he explains, “is war by other means” — that is, a tool of the West to crush those who stand in the way of U.S. imperialism, like Milosevic. A critic of the ongoing sanctions against Iraq, Clark has appeared on talking-head shows and refused to concede any wrongdoing on Saddam’s part. There is no reason to send weapons inspectors to Iraq, he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer: “After 12 years of brutalization with sanctions and bombing they’d like to be a country again. They’d like to have sovereignty again. They’d like to be left alone.”

It is not redbaiting to note the WWP’s not-too-hidden hand in the nascent anti-war movement. It explains the tone and message of Saturday’s rally. Take the question of inspections. According to Workers World, at a party conference in September, Sara Flounders, a WWP activist, reported war opponents were using the slogan “inspections, not war.” Flounders, the paper says, “pointed out that ‘inspections ARE war’ in another form,” and that she had “prepared party activists to struggle within the movement on this question.” Translation: The WWP would do whatever it could to smother the “inspections, not war” cry. Inspections-before-invasion is an effective argument against the dash to war. But it conflicts with WWP support for opponents of U.S. imperialism. At the Washington event, the WWP succeeded in blocking out that line — while promoting anti-war messages more simpatico with its dogma.

WWP shaped the demonstration’s content by loading the speakers’ list with its own people. None, though, were identified as belonging to the WWP. Larry Holmes, who emceed much of the rally from a stage dominated by ANSWER posters, was introduced as a representative of the ANSWER Steering Committee and the International Action Center. The audience was not told that he is also a member of the secretariat of the Workers World Party. When Leslie Feinberg spoke and accused Bush of concocting a war to cover up “the capitalist economic crisis,” she informed the crowd that she is “a Jewish revolutionary” dedicated to the “fight against Zionism.” When I asked her what groups she worked with, she replied that she was a “lesbian-gay-bi-transgender movement activist.” Yet a May issue of Workers World describes Feinberg as a “lesbian and transgendered communist and a managing editor of Workers World.” The WWP’s Sara Flounders, who urged the crowd to resist “colonial subjugation,” was presented as an IAC rep. Shortly after she spoke, Holmes introduced one of the event’s big-name speakers: Ramsey Clark. He declared that the Bush administration aims to “end the idea of individual freedom.”

Most of the protesters, I assume, were oblivious to the WWP’s role in the event. They merely wanted to gather with other foes of the war and express their collective opposition. They waved signs (“We need an Axis of Sanity,” “Draft Perle,” “Collateral Damage = Civilian Deaths,” “**** Bush”). They cheered on rappers who sang, “No blood for oil.” They laughed when Medea Benjamin, the head of Global Exchange, said, “We need to stop the testosterone-poisoning of our globe.” They filled red ANSWER donation buckets with coins and bills. But how might they have reacted if Holmes and his comrades had asked them to stand with Saddam, Milosevic and Kim? Or to oppose further inspections in Iraq?

continued

[wrbones]

One man in the crowd was wise to the behind-the-scenes politics. When Brian Becker, a WWP member introduced (of course) as an ANSWER activist, hit the stage, Paul Donahue, a middle-aged fellow who...

[wrbones]

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-pacepa041403.asp

[wrbones]

at least some of it.


http://www.internationalanswer.org/endorsers.html