Carrol Cox:
> Gordon, this won't work. Believing these particular "ordinary American
> citizens" _is_ believing Nixon and Kissinger, for everything those
> citizens "know" they first learned from Nixon and Kissinger. The stories
> about the POW/MIAs were fantastic on the surface, and to believe in them
> required both an utter faith in the veracity of men like Nixon _and_ a
> deep anti-communism, the conviction that communists were intrinsically
> evil and capable of any excess.
>
> [Crucial Digression: There exists no group within the population but
> what at some point some of its members can be 'reached' by the left, can
> become leading activists on the left. But few errors are more damaging
> to the growth of the left than the endless anxiety to reach those who
> are least likely reachable.]
>
> Some of those "ordinary American citizens" will end up on our side --
> but not through our willingness to indulge their vicious fantasies. And
> most of them will either in fact be politically passive _or_ join the
> death squads which will be hunting us down if we ever become
> threatenting enough. Opinions can reasonably differ on which sectors of
> the population are in fact most reachable at any given time, but it is
> folly to try to reach everyone at once or, worse, become focused on
> those who will despise us regardless of how much we stroke their
> prejudices.
I'm not suggesting that anyone's prejudices be stroked. I am suggesting that people who understand that Nixon and Kissinger and the _New_York_Times_ lied as a matter of course have achieved a higher state of consciousness than many of their fellow-citizens, including, regrettably, some supposed to be on the Left. I don't know whether the POW/MIA people can be reached or not, but it is certain that by taking the bourgeois view and the bourgeois side of any issue the Left will reach no one. The people are in trailer parks and ghettoes and tract housing, not with those sitting around in universities and distant countries despising their experience of loss and betrayal for fun and profit.