Marta Russell wrote:
> American Journal
> The Anti-War Movement and Its Critics:
> Merle Haggard Locates Osama;
> General Hitchens, Hie Thee to Fort Bragg;
> Whose Left Is It Anyway?
>
> by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
> It wasn't until 1966 and 1967, that the left, particularly the Socialist
> Workers Party, managed to stage the big anti war rallies that that broke
> forever the pro-war consensus, and set the stage for more radical actions.
> And by then there was that potent fuel for an antiwar movement, the draft,
> which prompted Stop the Draft Week.
>
> By 1968 we had a worldwide anti-imperial movement; we had the May-June
> upheavals in Paris; we very definitely thought history was on our side. Not
> any more.
>
> Today? We have the premonition of a big antiwar movement. Like the SWP
> forty years ago, the Workers World Party did much of the organizing of the
> recent demonstrations, which doesn't mean the 150,000 or so who marched in
> the Bay Area and in Washington DC are dupes of Karl Marx, Ramsey Clark
> and Saddam Hussein, but merely that organizing big demonstrations takes a
> lot
> of dedication, energy and experience. I have a dream, said Martin Luther
> King, and so he did, but the Communists in the south helped him put flesh
> on that dream as they did the dreams of Rosa Parks.
I could take issue with Cockburn's revisionist history of the 60s, which places far too much importance on the SWP as players (not surprising that one Trotskyist comes to the rescue of Trot activism), but again I have to point out that he is giving the WWP far too much credit for organizing the October demonstrations. If anything, the WWP rode the wave of anti-war dissent more than they organized it. Many people managed to get to the ANSWER protests in Washington, DC and San Francisco on their own and not on the ANSWER/WWP Mass Transit Service. More importantly, there were dozens of anti-war protests around the world that day--most of them not organized in any way by ANSWER.
Let's give credit where credit is due. Let's not give too much credit to the ANSWERbots who happen to have run to the front of the march to lead it.
The anti-war movements will start marching while Ramsey Clark drones on back at the stage.
Chuck0
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"...ironically, perhaps, the best organised dissenters in the world today are anarchists, who are busily undermining capitalism while the rest of the left is still trying to form committees."
-- Jeremy Hardy, The Guardian (UK)