>Picked this off the FREE REPUBLIC web site. The WASHINGTON TIMES is now
>recyclying Cockburn's attacks on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)to
>attack not only the SPLC but Chip Berlet's outfit and the left generally.
>Principled criticism of other progressives is a good thing, but this kind of
>immediate use of Cockburn's statements shows why his kind of roundhouse
>invective is a menace to progressives and leftists of all kinds. It allows
>rightwingers like this guy Wilcox and the WASHINGTON TIMES to say, see, even
>leftwingers like Cockburn agree Nazis and racists are not a big deal.
>
>-- Nathan Newman
>=====================================
Yes the piece is objectionable. While there can be fascism of the left as well as fascism of the right, the two are not equivalent. Nor is the struggle left and right against oppression.
It is typical of the bourgeois approach to civil rights to regard them as abstractly equal. So freedom from rightist oppression is equivalent to freedom from leftist oppression.
Whereas civil rights need to be defended especially in social context.
It is probably true that some civil rights activists do moralise the struggle into an abstract ideal, which makes it vulnerable to this sort of attack.
There is a marxist failure to understand the significance of the struggle for human rights -organic human rights in social context - as an inseparable part of the struggle for socialism. Indeed it is one of the main forms of that struggle.
From that point of view there can not be too much anti-fascism. Just one or two cases are unacceptable -or should be. In recent weeks there have been a couple of particularly nasty cases in Britain of people going up to a black man and spraying inflammable liquid on him and lighting it. On the other hand the nail bomber who attacked Brixton, Brick Lane, and a gay pub, was sent to jail a few months ago.
Cockburn's parasitic journalist stance sounds objectionable. The whole idea of left wing politics being an idiosyncratic quirk of a literary celebrity, is offensive. It is easier for a foreigner to adopt superficially radical postures than a member of an indigenous culture.
Send him back to Britain!
Chris Burford
London