[Nathan pretty much confirms my mental picture of his mental picture.:]
>If you want to march behind our sea of American flags and support our
>positive demands, your welcome to join. I doubt you will.
Let's see how it develops. If you get enough people to come out, we'll have to take note of it. But what's stopping you? Organize your sea of flags, by all means, if that's what you think the situation calls for. If you can't do it, it's not because WWP is stopping you. We're not as all-powerful as all that. It's because you haven't convinced enough other people to share your vision. (A humorous note is that while Seay is blasting us for putting the movement in San Francisco in a "procrustean bed", someone else on another list is accusing WWP in SF of isolating itself from the rest of the movement.)
You know, I readily agree that the movement is nowhere near broad enough. A healthy movement shouldn't be composed -entirely- or even mostly of "vanguard". But just look at how it developed. Here in Chicago, there were about 300 people who came to the first planning meeting, nearly all of whom were already anti-imperialist activists of one school or another. But of course there was a big gap between them and majority sentiment, and it hasn't been filled in yet. It's like a sharp knife with a very thin blade. It's not good if everyone is "cutting-edge". You need some weight behind that cutting edge. Compare it with the situation in 1968 around the Viet Nam War, for example. There was the cutting edge, but behind that there was a whole collection of not-so-radical opponents of the war: left Democrats, Packwood Republicans, people writing letters to their congresspeople, semi-political youth culture people, and so forth. That's what we don't have because this movement hasn't developed over a period of years.
That 'anti-war center' hasn't emerged yet. And I think it needs to. But I think you're wrong in claiming that if that awful WWP would just go elsewhere, that 'anti-war center' would blossom into existence. It's not so easy to turn 'ordinary people' against 'their government's' war effort, even as stupid a war effort as this one (the leaflets telling Afghans not to confuse the yellow food packets with the yellow cluster bombs are such a pure Dubya touch). It may take a while. We will be working on it in our way, and you can of course work on it in yours.
But I warn you of one obstacle which is pretty certain to arise. At the moment, you can at least theoretically raise this idea of 'we want to get justice on Osama, the smart way, without war on Afghanistan', because it wasn't the Taliban that destroyed the WTC. (Although the Bush administration blurs the distinction between the Taliban and al-Qaeda in public perception.) But at any time now, a serious ground campaign may get under way, and US troops may actually be killed by Taliban fighters. They might even be captured and executed. At that point, all the people who think the way Seay does now - "if you care for the workers, you have to want to get Osama" - will immediately think, "if you care for the soldiers, you have to want to get the Taliban." At that point, if you adhere to the logic you have adopted so far, you will be forced to take an explicitly pro-war position and to go along with a total war unto the destruction of the Taliban. Or am I missing something?
lp