> I hope this doesn't sounds too little rough, but aren't you positioning
> yourselves as a pretender to the leadership of the movement (not plural at all
> this time)? After all, why worry about these guys? With all the attention you
> guys give to these clowns, you'd think that the masses are a bunch of imbeciles
> who will be brainwashed into thinking North Korea is a workers paradise just
> because someone hired a PA. The sort of threat that you attribute to these
> lunatics is actually a sort of mad flattery, or one might think, severely
> misplaced jealousy.
It's not jealousy, but just too much first hand experience with these assholes. I'm an activist in Washington, DC and have had too many negative experiences with these clowns. It's been very frustrating to watch so many people fall in line behind them, not knowing or understanding who these self-appointed leaders are.
> And how can you say that civil disobedience is anathema to the WWP, IAC or
> ANSWER ? That has to be a wonderful piece of doublethink - here you seem to be
> using a very technical meaning of "civil disobedience": one which restricts it
> to non-party actions. The possibility, for instance, that the arrest of 600
> people and subsequent disciplined jail solidarity could be a kind of civil
> disobedience seems worthy of your contempt. Over here in Australia, that was
> major news amongst people who care for following the vicissitudes of the
> American left. We were all very impressed. Even if the tens of thousands
> marching on the next few days were 600 short.
It is a form of civil disobedience, but my point is that WWP/IAC/ANSWER are opposed to civil disobedience. The arrests on A15 were not sought by the IAC and came about because the cops sought to take as many people off the street as possible before A16.
> And if you are actually denying that the arrests were organised , this "oh you
> guys are such suckers for getting arrested this easily" line is awful trash. I
> didn't realise this kind of Bommy Bauman machismo was fashionable again.
The arrests weren't organized. And if they were sought by the IAC leadership, the crowd wasn't told. What happened is that the IAC event was marching around the streets and the cops decided to pre-emptively arrest the entire march to take hundreds of people off the streets.
They didn't get everybody. Several anarchists escaped the police cordons by literally "going underground" in the middle of the trapped crowd. ;-)
Chuck0
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