I confess to having thought that a political introduction was a courtesy in an unsolicited communication. I bear no responsibility for Louis's post of my e-mail on this list, which he then attacked as though I had posted the information myself, and some others also have done. Inadvertently, I got under Louis's skin. He professes to relish that as sport when he can inflict it on others, but turns nasty and irrational when it happens to him.
Louis manages to see the clay feet on everyone else's radical heroes, with which I concurred generally, and added a few points to his, in a private communication. But the purpose of my e-mail was to note for his benefit, in the event he had not been aware of it, that Ward Churchill, the hero of his own post, also has clay feet.
I wrote as someone who had worked with Ward on a number of projects over a decade's time, always cordially, though in later years our disagreements strained our ability to unite on the political field of struggle. Ward and I discussed and debated our differences at his home, his office, at public forums, and on the telephone. When I objected to Ward that his book on Marxism was a caricature, he replied that perhaps it was, but it reported on Marxists as he knew them.
By the mid-1980s, Ward regarded CISPES as his main political enemy in Boulder and Denver. I was heavily involved in solidarity work with the FMLN, and sanctuary support, which included speaking/organizing engagements in Colorado. As far as I could tell, Ward's hostility to the FMLN was derivative, because of its political alliance with Sandinista Nicaragua. To my knowledge, no indigenous Salvadorans were oppressed or politically mistreated by the FMLN or by any of its constituent parties.
At about that time, Ward condemned the American Indian Movement leadership -- specifically Bill Means and Vernon Bellecourt by name -- as stooges of the left (his words, not mine). Ward and his supporters set up Colorado AIM to advance their political agenda. So much for Louis's assertion that "There is no other activist/intellectual in the American Indian movement who is more resolutely opposed to capitalism than Ward Churchill."
Of necessity, many of us who personally deplored the split in AIM nevertheless were obliged to work politically with Colorado AIM on solidarity issues of great importance. (Louis's vain boast of being the only Marxist supporter of indigenous people and their struggles is so much wind.)
In this arena, the culture of machismo cast a pall over much of the work, as women were assigned menial tasks but excluded from the circle where decisions were taken. One woman raised a fuss; I concurred with her point; Ward sought to put out the fire, but without implementing change at the top. I hope that things have improved in the decade since.
On the national level, Ward and I continued to collaborate on issues of agreement, particularly political repression in the United States. I had developed a considerable body of information on Jill and Gi Shafer, the FBI (and CIA, according to one reporter who interviewed Gi Schafer long afterward) provocateurs at Wounded Knee, much of it learned from Joe Burton, a self- confessed undercover FBI spy who had targeted my work in a small way, but had worked throughout the U.S. and Canada with the Shafers to set up phony communist collectives under FBI control. (Nearly all had Red in the title -- Red Star Cadre, Red Sun, Red Collective, and so forth.) Ward and Ken Tilsen had information on Doug Durham and others who had caused similar damage.
Our disagreements were acknowledged with uneasy humor. Ward would call to tease/taunt me -- for example, about his meeting with Brooklyn Rivera and Eliott Abrams ("What will our CovertAction friends say about that?" he mocked) and about his barroom encounters with Robert K. Brown. I baited him back ("If Roxanne was bad to rat on her comrades to a HUAC investigator, how can you justify your hat-in-hand meeting with the most enthusiastic war criminal in Washington?"). If anyone knows a better way to function under difficult circumstances, I'm all ears.
Louis denies that Ward chose to ally with the CIA, but ended up on the CIA's side by virtue of his support to the Miskito struggle. The latter point is true, but -- once more for effect -- Ward eventually penned (with Glenn Morris) a political justification for alliance with the CIA, using the Hmong people of Laos as his principal example. If Louis hasn't read the Cultural Survival article, he should read it before he comments further. If he has read it, his postings here are dishonest. Although Louis states that the Miskito alliance with the CIA was a mistake, Ward and Glenn argued the opposite, following the Laotian example.
Earlier, at the Boulder anti-apartheid teach-in, Ward had proposed that he and I debate our differences. It was after the CS article appeared that I renewed the proposal to hold a public debate. I asserted the necessity of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism as the central political ingredients of liberation; Ward and Glenn rejected them. Glenn offered to provide a platform for the debate, which never occurred. After the Sandinista defeat, there was scant political interest in Denver or Boulder, but I still proposed to write and publish it. Ward was willing; unfortunately, our editor was not.
In the years since, we have drifted apart, and have not remained in touch. Nevertheless, despite our fierce differences, I have always regarded Ward as a friend and as I reconstructed these events, find that I still do.
Now back to the beginning:
Ward and I met shortly after he had published his insider account of Soldier of Fortune magazine in the political journal on Africa published at DU, whose title I have forgotten. Louis asks for the facts; he should look up that article. I do not have access to my Mississippi archive at this time. Besides those details, which are politically valuable, I asked Ward how he had taken such a revolting job in the first place.
Ward is a professional graphic artist of outstanding talent, as anyone familiar with his work will attest. In an encounter with SoF's owner/publisher/editor Robert K. Brown, Ward told Brown that his magazine was ugly and amateurish. Brown offered him a job to spruce up and professionalize SoF, which Ward accepted. According to Ward, their political differences were known to both (specifically, Ward's association with SDS in the sixties, and Brown's work as a CIA asset), but they both enjoyed the military-macho banter that defined the magazine's culture, and continued to relate on that level even long after Ward had published his kiss-and-tell exposé.
This was in the mid-1970s, when both Ward and I were working, in very different political arenas, to thwart CIA mercenary recruitment, in solidarity with Angola and with the Zimbabwe liberation movement. Any time I was in the vicinity of Denver or Boulder, he helped set up speaking opportunities.
As I recall, the last time he did so was in the fall of 1983, shortly before my trip to Nicaragua. Ward and other friends organized several meetings for me, including one at which I was scheduled to debate Brown and Gen. John Singlaub. Their agreed participation could only have been arranged by Ward, but in the end Brown and Singlaub backed out. (Singlaub's secretary attended my talk at UCD, presumably to gather intelligence for her boss.) The closest we came to an actual debate occurred when Brown called a radio talk show that hosted my appearance, with this remark about the previous several weeks' events: "His guys got our guys in Beirut, but our guys got his guys in Grenada."
At that time, Ward was warmly encouraging of my visit to Nicaragua as a member of an Oxfam delegation. One person I met at Puerto Cabezas was the then editor of Navajo Times, Mark Trahant (I hope I'm recalling his name correctly), who had toured the entire Atlantic Coast war zone without a Sandinista escort, and wrote his report upon his return. Both of us agreed that the Sandinistas had made dreadful political mistakes, but that they had recognized this, apologized, and honestly sought to make amends, the results of which were palpable everywhere we went.
Another was Roxanne Dunbar, then a Sandinista publicist, whose account did not differ significantly from Trahant's. Meanwhile, the contra Miskitos were directing their war efforts against the radical pro-Sandinista Indians, clinics, agricultural co-operatives, and other manifestations of modernity and reconstruction, and torching whole villages (our group visited Sukat Pin after such an attack, and while another was in progress a mile or so away) while seeking allies among the older, traditional leaders. Trahant's serialized Navajo Times report bears study by any radical who wishes to discuss this issue honestly and intelligently.
Upon my return, Ward and I had detailed discussions of all this. Ward said that he had been asked by Tomás Borge to mediate an accord with the Miskito insurgents, based on the program that Louis professes to have been correct. Initially, Ward agreed, but later changed his position. Although embarrassed by Russ Means's declaration that he was going to Nicaragua "to kill a Sandinista," and his false charge that Borge had ordered the Sandinista army "to shoot the Indians out of the trees like they shoot monkeys," Ward's Colorado AIM backed and publicized the Means/Morris military adventure, which had been funded by the Moonie ultra-right front, CAUSA.
That brings me full circle.
Having no ability to respond politically to my points, Louis attacked me for reporting my political experiences as an indulgence. Evidently he prefers Web- site Marxism/indigenism derived from the experiences of strangers. My teachers taught that our duty was to join the struggles of workers and oppressed people, and to report on them that they may be propagated. I have done my best to live up to that.
With Rosa Luxemburg, I believe that the mistakes of a truly revolutionary proletariat (and of the oppressed) are more valuable and more instructive than the finest decisions of the most excellent central committee. With Antonio Gramsci, I believe that the greatest barrier to socialist revolution is not the armed might of the state and the ruling class -- though that is capitalism's ultimate prop, after the initial barrier is breached -- but rather the ruling class culture and world view that has been internalized by workers and oppressed people.
As for the extended narrative I have presented here, no one needs to take my word for anything. Though Ward and I have not spoken in many years, it would surprise me if he would fail to verify my factual account. To be sure, he would have a robustly different political perspective on these events, and perhaps on his movement's strategy. Others who participated in many of these struggles include such Colorado activists as Larry Mosqueda (no longer there, but still engaged in struggle), Priscilla Falcon, Ricardo Romero, Kiko Martinez, Lowell May, Elaine Heinrichs, and Jim and Jenny vander Wall.
Perhaps even Louis will eventually be able to manage the more complex, contradictory, and ambiguous nuances of real revolutionary struggle, after his next political conversion. He seems to have defined his political career by those phases, which accounts for his knee-jerk retort to my simile of Trotskyism. Lest he get away with that remark, I close with this: By the time C.L.R. James came to dwell in Chicago, where I lived and worked in the 1960s, the term Troskyist was as perjorative for him as my usage that caused Louis to smart -- like a towel snapped on his bum, I guess. The more things change . . .
Ken Lawrence