Lou Paulsen wrote:
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nathan Newman <nathan at newman.org>
> [clip] As
> you know, this was the sequence of events:
>
> Burford: declares that it is necessary for the anti-war movement to
> raise "global government" issues.
>
> Paulsen: asks what class content this has.
Here was your first mistake Lou. Chris Burford simply is not a serious person -- no serious person would maunder on about an embryonic popular movment expounding a plan for global government. One might as well put out plans for the colonization of Jupiter in the 5th millenium or demand that all children be taught to read Plato in Greek by the age of three.
>
> Seay: in order to disrupt this thread, throws out a jibe about Hungary
> in 1956.
>
> Paulsen: points out the irrelevance of what Seay is doing.
Second mistake. The polite response to an intellectual as to a physical fart is to pretend not to have heard/noticed/smelt it. Such huge irrelevancies are best ignored.
The problem with red-baiting as an obsession is that it does not respond
to the case in front of it but operates by a sort of free-swinging
semi-syllogistic method. And expansion of Seay's mystic remark to insert
all the suppressed logical leaps and suppressed factual assumptions
would take tens of thousands of words. Why bother.
>
> [clip]
> Newman: acquits me of "weeping" but declares that I am engaged in a
> "reflexive strategy" of defending WWP's "methods".
Nathan unlike your other would-be tormenters is a serious person -- but as I've noted before his quite principled adherence to the Democratic Party does incapacitate him for understanding any argument focused on the creation of a mass movement. I think your response to him is quite reasonable.
> I will let the rest of the list decide for themselves which of the
> posts in this series display the characteristics of unresponsive
> "reflex".
> Meanwhile, "the caravan moves on."
I have not encountered any red-baiting yet in the local movement here, and I gather that Yoshie has not encountered any in Columbus. Perhaps it will be less of a problem in practice than on maillists. People that spend their time shrieking at events half a century in the past don't have much time left over for practical political work.
Carrol
>
> lp