> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
>
> Hell no. It's not cop baiting to point to GS's involvement with the
> Congress for Cultural Freedom and other CIA fronts in the 1950s.
It is cop-baiting when you use it as an adjective in a subject header, as opposed to brining it up in a general discussion of the history of Cold War liberalism.
If folks want to discuss Mike Dolan's behavior in Seattle, pro or con, that's legitimate discussion. Calling him a well-known police informant is cop-baiting.
Identifying Steinem as primarily a "CIA feminist" is about equivalent to McCarthy identifying every former left activist as a "known Communist" and arguing that was the only important identifier worth using.
> Nor is it cop-baiting to point out that, as Liza said, Steinem refuses to
> talk about it - quite the contrary, she threatens to sue anyone who
> brings it up. How about that suppressed Redstockings chapter on
> Gloria & her mysterious history, which speculated on the mysterious
> emergence of Ms. magazine, complete with subsidies from Clay Felker &
> Warner.
Key word here is "speculated"-- exactly the reason this kind of rhetoric used in a subject header as an adjective is cop-baiting. The reality is that the CIA quietly funded a whole range of liberal programs in the 50s and 60s, so a lot of folks from the period can easily be tarred with this kind of smear-by-association.
Just as in the 30s, various Communist groups funded or indirectly controlled a whole range of liberal groups. Did that justify McCarthy calling every member of those front groups a "Communist"?
The logic is the same. It's all guilt by association and is based on an unnuanced conspiracy view of how contested political terrain is mobilized and fought over by different forces.
No question the CIA was trying to control a range of liberal groups in the 50s; ditto for the Communists; ditto for other groups (Catholics, John Birchie types, etc.). And many of the people taking support from one or the other groups (or sometimes support from multiple groups) were not controlled by anyone, but no doubt saw themselves as playing their own political games with other peoples' resources.
Given the fact that so many lefties are so nasty and so unrelentingly libelous in their attacks on people they don't like, I am not surprised that Steinem refuses to say anything about the matter. If she said anything that exculpated herself, a lot of lefties would just ignore those statements in order to keep attacking her, so it would do her no good with people who want to bring it up. And anything a bit more dicier showing poor political judgement at the time would be blown out of proportion to attack everything else she's done.
Maybe Steinem is just a long-term CIA mole in the liberal-left, reporting at intervals to her masters pulling her strings. You all sound like loonies to me when you imply that, but feel free to keep spouting it.
As noted, there are plenty of things Steinem can be criticized on substantively for her political work, but I again wonder at the joy of some leftists in slagging one of the handful of top feminists willing to publicly identify herself as a socialist.
It's all nasty self-defeating cannibalism by the sectarian left.
-- Nathan Newman