Great News From David Horowitz

Nathan Newman nathanne at nathannewman.org
Thu Jan 23 04:23:09 PST 2003


----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas Seay" <entheogens at yahoo.com> -Chuck0, the lesson that I learned from last weekend is =that ANSWER isn't leading anything! They're a bunch =of bus organizers. =I only remember seeing a few of those monotonous =ANSWER or ISO placards the whole march. Instead there =was a sea of joy, with people doing all kinds of -interesting and creative stuff.

That's fine for these big marches but if other organizational leaders don't emerge, everything goes poof over the long-term. I don't want this to be deja vu, when before the first Gulf War back in 1991, we had equally large SF rallies (actually two in a row) but then everything collapsed as the war started and there was no real organizational infrastructure that could operate in a more complex situation.

Because if war starts, it may be bloody and nasty, but it will be relatively quick, and what will be needed is a movement that can critique not just the war but the "peace", and that is where some real leadership with an ideological critique that can be respected would be critical.

It's true that as long as the antiwar message is a simple "no" then ANSWER's politics barely matters, but that's also the problem. It reduces the Left to saying nothing intelligible other than "no"-- which in the long term is not enough. We need to build a movement that can say "yes" to social justice in a powerful way, and one thing leadership of a real democratic sort can do is build the discussion and agreement on a unified enough message that a gathering of hundreds of thousands can mean something positive and more than "no."

=-- Nathan Newman



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