>You described a recent WV editorial (dated Sept 12) on the WTC
>terrorism as both nutty and brilliant. Which parts do you find
>brilliant and which nutty? I am a recent subscriber to WV so I am
>interested in what you and your list members consider valid or not
>valid in the WV editorial, and general political position.
I agree with the overall drift of the piece, which is the way I feel about lots of WV stuff. I especially like this:
>SEPTEMBER 12 - Yesterday's attack on the World Trade Center, carried
>out through the hijacking of civilian airliners that killed hundreds
>of passengers and crew, was an indefensible act of criminal terror.
>While it may be viewed as a symbol of the wealth and global reach of
>U.S. imperialism, the World Trade Center had workers of all races,
>ethnicities and religions who were employed there. And at 9 a.m. on
>a workday morning, thousands of other workers - transit,
>construction, office and countless others-were traveling through or
>in the vicinity of the Twin Towers.
>
>It is not simply that the target wasn't even an institution
>representing the brutal and murderous U.S. imperialist rulers. Those
>who perpetrated this horrific attack (and there is no evidence at
>all as to who that was) embrace the same mentality as the racist
>rulers of America-identifying the working masses with their
>capitalist exploiters and oppressors!
and this:
>
>With the counterrevolutionary destruction of the former Soviet
>Union, a workers state which however bureaucratically degenerated
>did represent an alternative to capitalist exploitation and
>oppression, the U.S. boasted of being the "world's only superpower"
>and the American imperialist rulers thought they would face no
>challenge as they run roughshod over, the rest of the world. It is a
>measure of the intense hatred for U.S. imperialism that the
>destruction of the World Trade Center, at the cost of likely
>thousands of innocent lives, could be greeted enthusiastically by
>many around the world. It is also a measure of the lack of any
>perceived possibility of defeating U.S. imperialism from within. The
>men who ran Wall Street and Washington can and must be swept away
>from within by the working class in the U.S., which includes large
>numbers of black, Latino and, increasingly, immigrant workers from
>the Near East, the Indian subcontinent and East Asia.
The descent into nuttiness is marked by this:
>The pusillanimous reformist "left" in this country, particularly
>typified by the International Socialist Organization (ISO), now
>points a finger at the American rulers' support to bin Laden and the
>Afghan Taliban as "freedom fighters" during the Cold War. Left
>unsaid is the ISO's own support for these reactionaries against the
>Soviet Red Army.
Whatever the ISO's position on the Red Army, this doesn't seem like the most urgent issue. But WV spends as much time attacking the ISO as they do attacking the bourgeoisie.
I like this a lot too:
>
>Whoever the perpetrators of the suicide attack on the World Trade
>Center, it demonstrated the mindset of those who, typically
>religious fanatics, believe they have a god-given mission to
>exterminate all "non-believers." Such Islamic zealots see trade
>unionists, leftists and unveiled women as infidels deserving of
>god's wrath. In its essence, their outlook is no different than that
>of Christian fundamentalist bigots who bomb abortion clinics in the
>U.S., where the domestic secret police, the FBI, was until recently
>headed by Louis Freeh, a member of the truly sinister Catholic Opus
>Dei. Nor is this outlook any different than that of fascistic
>Zionists who seek to "cleanse" the Palestinian nation from what is
>deemed to be the Jewish "holy land."
>
>Terrorist bombings tend to be carried out by nationalist or
>religious forces because they are at best indifferent or at worst
>hostile to the entire population they consider to be the enemy. The
>World Trade Center attack was and could only have been aimed at the
>indiscriminate slaughter of as many - ordinary, multiethnic,
>working-people as possible.
>
>As Marxists, we oppose terrorism as a strategy, even that which
>derives from real, if misguided, anti-imperialist impulses and takes
>as its target genuine institutions of state repression, which was
>manifestly not the case in the attack on the World Trade Center.
>Substituting individual acts, however heroic in particular
>circumstances, is counterposed to proletarian class struggle and the
>consciousness the working class needs if it is to stand at the head
>of all the oppressed in the revolutionary overthrow of the entire
>system of imperialist exploitation and repression. Rather, such
>terrorism serves mainly to provide a pretext for the bourgeois state
>to intensify repression.
I don't like this - in part for the style/language (this stuff should just go on the scrapheap), and in part for the Leninist loyalty to a Single Revolutionary Party, i.e. the Sparts :
>We say: U.S. imperialism hands off the world! The main enemy is at
>home! Our purpose is to build the proletarian, internationalist,
>revolutionary party that will infuse the working class with the
>understanding of its social power and historic interests as the
>gravedigger of U.S. imperialism.
Doug