> I would actually argue (and believe it since it's one reason I've been so
> vocal) that the whole discussion on the Left itself insulates the charge,
> since most of the left criticizing ANSWER and WWP also supports the antiwar
> position. That "puppets" are trashing the puppet-master makes it hard for
> rightwing attacks to stick. It also has made the "commie charge" old news--
> it's a basic rule of politics that its better for your own side to dump the
> bad news yourself than let the opposition bring it out. When David Horowitz
> makes the charge, all the lefties at the march can shrug and say, hey Corn
> wrote about that last month in the Nation-- where's the news value?
>
> The reality is the reality that reporters know about-- nasty types are doing
> a lot of the organizing, a lot of those organized don't like the politics of
> the organizers, but the hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating are
> therefore doing so for their own reasons. They can't be dupes when the
> whole ANSWER issue is so widely discussed.
I pretty much agree with Nathan on this. Most of the people who turned out for the protests did so because they wanted to protest the war. Call this movement by convergence if you will. If any other left group had put some money and resources into organizing the protests, the result would be the same.
There is plenty of evidence to support this position, that ANSWER is merely riding a wave (which will soon wipe them out). I've read accounts on IMC websites about people who thought about going to Washington, yet ended up going to something closer, in their state or region. I read about one group of people from upstate Wisconsin who winded up going to the protests in Madison. And there were big protests all over the place, most of which were not organized by ANSWER.
I also read somewhere about how the vaunted ANSWER bus service wasn't as efficient as advertised. Some guy sent an email around about how he tried to contact the ANSWER contact in Rochester, NY, but the guy wasn't doing any organizing of the buses. The local anti-war and peace folks had to organize their own bus to get to Washington.
So, the people who went to the ANSWER rallies aren't dupes, but they did want to protest the war.
The question is, how do we organize around the authoritarians who pull ANSWER's strings?
Chuck0
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