> > > What
>> > makes it OK to support strikers together with AFL-CIO officials but
>> > not OK to work with Workers World organizers (among many others, mind
>> > you) to get an anti-war movement going?
>>
>> You think the WWP is opposed to war? I have a friend who was in Tienanmen
>> Square during the crackdown. He spent the better part of eight hours face
>> down on the pavement while a Chinese soldier periodically hit him with a
>> rifle butt. All the while my friend heard students pleading for their
>lives and then being silenced with a couple of shots. Your buddies in the WWP
>> celebrated this. That you can make common cause with these people is at best
>> disgusting, at worst insane. Good luck with your "anti-war" movement,
> > Yoshie.
>
>The WWP can be criticised for supporting the crackdown uncritically if
>that was its position (I was in Taiwan at the time with no contact with
>the US left at that time, and a few months later in parts of southwest
>China). However, aside from Li Minqi and Wang Chaohua, not much of the
>student movement was any too progressive, most were very ideolgically
>liberal in orientation and downright opportunist. The claims of a massacre
>occuring on June 4th are not incorrect, though as Robin Munro explained
>carefully an dthoroughly in a Nation article in 1990, June 11th edition,
>the claims of a massacre inside Tiananmen Square or that it was mostly
>students who were killed were greatly mistaken. Munro, as you should
>know, is hardly a friend of the CCP.
>My frind Li Minqi, who did spend two years in jail for his call at Beijing
>University for Chinese workers to rise up in 1991 (or 1990?) would agree
>with this sentiment and he is one of the very very few of the Tiananmen
>student leaders who has shown any concern for th e working class in China
>since he arrived in the US.
>Inany event, I divert again.
I trust Steve's account with regard to the ideological composition of the student movement, etc. As for the WWP's position on the Tiananmen uprising, I'm not sure what it was either, as I only recently got to know the WWP, through the course of my activism against attacks on Yugoslavia.
Lou Paulsen of the WWP says he has sent a subscription request to Doug & will be available to answer questions & respond to criticisms.
Yoshie