giuliani declares war on marxists

t byfield tbyfield at panix.com
Mon Dec 20 06:40:27 PST 1999


[gotta love all the 'er' and 'oops' bullshit. who said the

NYT doesn't have a sense of humor?]

<http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/

regional/ny-marxists-streets.html>

December 20, 1999

Giuliani's New Mission: Get Marxists Off Streets

By JOHN KIFNER

A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the swift

collapse of communism's Evil Empire, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is

still darkly wary of Marxist influence in the nooks and crannies of

the city.

The mayor's latest encounter with the Red Menace came as he faced

down the threatened strike from the Transport Workers Union and its

dissident faction, the New Directions Caucus.

"There are people who want to cause anarchy," the mayor warned at a

City Hall news conference last week after a tentative agreement was

announced. "I know a week ago I said that Marxism unfortunately is

still alive in parts of New York City even in the latter part of

this century, even though it's been disgraced all over the world."

Mr. Giuliani's vigilance in this matter has sometimes been

overlooked in the hurly-burly of daily governance, but a review of

his public statements shows that he has discerned a sinister

Marxist tinge to a wide variety of enemies, from the paradoxically

well-organized anarchists who sacked a Starbucks in Seattle to the

gardeners who plant flowers in the city's vacant lots.

"The remarks of one of the leaders of New Directions is a perfect

example of what I'm talking about, where he advocated taking away

profits from business as being one of the really good side benefits

of having a strike," Mr. Giuliani said. "I think he said he would

take away the profit orgy of Christmas from businesses."

He was apparently referring to Tim Schermerhorn, a leader of the

New Directions Caucus, who said, in threatening a strike: "The real

powers that be in the city -- business -- is planning an orgy of

profit-making. They're not going to rake it in if the trains aren't

running."

That, the mayor said, "means taking jobs away from people. It means

seeing unemployment go up. It means really hurting people who need

the most help. And it's a true misunderstanding of what America is

all about. That comes from the influence of Marxism, and if you

need any better indication of it, it was said at a Marxist study

group.

"So philosophy is important. It has done a tremendous amount of

good things to help people, and the isms and ideologies of this

century have cost an awful lot of human lives," the mayor

concluded.

Mr. Giuliani expanded his horizon to foreign affairs last week,

bearding Fidel Castro, that stubborn Communist holdout, by urging

asylum for Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old found clutching an inner

tube off Florida after his mother and stepfather drowned fleeing

Cuba.

There was even consideration at City Hall, later dropped, of

inviting him to the New Year's Eve celebration.

"I think unfortunately and tragically Castro has become a

romanticized figure in America," Mr. Giuliani said.

When the nonprofit Parks Council said that the growing reliance on

private fund-raising for maintenance and repairs meant that

greenswards in wealthy areas -- like Central Park -- got better

services than those in poorer neighborhoods, Mr. Giuliani was not

fooled that the 90-year-old council was composed of prominent blue

bloods and even a top fund-raiser for George W. Bush.

"That's the rich-and-the-poor knee-jerk reaction," the mayor said.

''It probably comes out of spending some time in school in the 40's

or 50's studying Marxism or something."

The council's position "comes out of a very, very extreme radical

political outlook on the world in which you were taught to look at

things that way, and you just see them that way no matter what the

facts are," Mr. Giuliani said in October.

Earlier this year, the mayor tried to sell developers more than 100

city-owned lots that neighborhood groups had transformed from

garbage-strewn wrecks into flowering mini-parks, declaring, "This

is a free-market economy; welcome to the era after communism."

Protesters dressed as ladybugs and plants descended on City Hall,

including a man in sunflower garb who took up a perch in a ginkgo

tree.

The dispute was resolved only by last-minute divine intervention,

in the person of Bette Midler, who bought some of the most

endangered lots.

More recently, he said at a gathering of big capitalists, er,

business leaders, that the unruly demonstrations against the World

Trade Organization in Seattle indicate "the remaining damage that

Marxism has done to the thinking of people.

You know we have it in the city and the influence that it's had on

universities and thinking and the idea of class warfare."

The mayor explained later, at a City Hall news conference, that his

remarks at the "21" Club, the famous gathering spot of the ruling

class, oops, the rich and powerful, were meant to examine "the

whole notion of class warfare, which really comes out of the

teaching of Karl Marx, trying to divide people into different

classes." He did not elaborate on his reference to the city's

universities.

Mayor Giuliani has said he intends to deliver a speech for the new

millennium in which he will discuss "the influence of isms and

ideology on the kind of violence we've had in this century. Just

because we're in the latter part of the century doesn't mean the

perversions of those philosophies don't affect it."

Stay tuned.



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