I have no dispute with Doug's ruling. Indeed, my posts have remained true to his spirit in the face of mighty provocation from Rakesh.
However, I want to register in the strongest terms my disagreement with Nathan Newman's off-list protest, which prompted Doug to act and Louis to depart. (It is noteworthy that Nathan and the other touchingly tender, easily offended complainers were scrupulously silent a few months back while Louis hammered me with much harsher words than he has ever applied to Rakesh. Not all of them, though; some of today's civility gang directed their own colorful insults my way.)
The kernel of my viewpoint is this: If white supremacy in the United States does not offend you sufficiently to bring forth intemperate words (at minimum), who could ever rely on you as a comrade in struggle? If the exemplar of courage in opposing white supremacy will not bestir you to stand and be counted, who ever will?
In this context the demand for civility is a reactionary academic fraud, to anesthetize political debate so that all issues, from the momentous to the trivial, are regarded (equally and) dispassionately. That's step one on the road to abstention from militant struggle and, as Nathan would prefer, into the Democratic Party (where incivility is never tolerated and young people are never alienated, as we recognize).
Aside from the hypocrisy of selective distress mentioned earlier, there is another. Most participants on the LBO list take a favorable view of intramural insult on the left as sport, alternately praising Christopher Hitchens or Alexander Cockburn as the most skillful player in that league. You can't have it both ways, folks.
Finally, the civility police face one direction only (to their left). Rakesh has been handy with offensive taunts throughout. When he libeled Malcolm X as a Nazi, and slurred his [Rakesh's] critics with racial taunts, his words drew no objection from Angela and but a flaccid disquisition from Nathan.
Rakesh himself whined about ad hominems, though his every allegation had been soundly trounced directly in rebuttal, yet he has not answered my political points except with white-baiting slurs and a plea for indulgence while he ponders a response. So I begin to wonder, when Rakesh slags "whiteys," what word does he really have in mind?
Let us direct a bit more light toward that thought. Is Rakesh a Nazi? He has declared himself a disciple of Paul Mattick, the council communist. As I reported several months ago, Mattick was an admirer of the "left" Nazi leader Otto Strasser. This was no youthful indiscretion on Mattick's part, nor does it reflect political immaturity of the stripe that Rakesh exploits as he combs Malcolm's early texts for examples. Mattick organized Strasser's speaking tour of North America in the postwar 1940s, after the full force of the Nazi Holocaust was well known. Strasser and his plebeian followers were as obsessive Jew-haters as Hitler. "Otto Strasser proclaimed that it was a German duty to develop 'unique racial individuality' and resist the 'cultural predominance of alien Jewry'," [Who's Who in Nazi Germany, page 248.] Before the war, Mattick's journal Living Marxism had proclaimed, "The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle against Bolshevism," an unusual slogan for a united front, but one that has provided a useful precedent for Rakesh, merely substituting "Black nationalism" for "Bolshevism."
Perhaps Rakesh can excavate an apology from Mattick's later texts. I never found one, but I never regarded Mattick's works as sufficiently worthy to spend a great deal of time wading through them. Nonetheless, even if Mattick grew to regret his flirtation with Strasser, the episode itself makes me wonder whether Rakesh's attack on Malcolm X might have an unstated purpose, a preemptive attack, as it were, of the so's-your-mother style. Did my passing reference to Mattick's shameful deed plant this seed in Rakesh's mind?
Yes, folks, I do regard the foregoing words as odious to contemplate, and would never have posted them had not the even more odious combination of Rakesh's hate-words and his admirers' demand for civility sidetracked a nobler and more worthy cause. You want civility? Begin by demanding, as Louis did on several occasions, some scrupulous scholarship from Rakesh, and adherence to those standards by his acolytes.
Ken Lawrence