Don't overgeneralize from your own bad experience. In the first Gulf War, some wierdo liberal/churchy types destroyed the (rather good) coalition we had built up in Columbus by choosing THE NIGHT THE BOMBS STARTED FALLING to blow up the coalition by redbaiting my espouza and myself (Solidarity) and the DSA guy who, with us, was holding down the red/pink end of the coalition; accusing us of a commie plot to divert the antiwar coalition to our own insidious unpatriotic ends, blah blah. We walked out that night, taking the "action committee" with us, and ran a rump protest group during the war while those who remained, for whatever reason, spent the war discussing our perfidy. This is literally true. It was pretty destructive. I also experienced a lot of redbaiting from liberal during the antinuclear campaigns of the 1980s.
That doesn't mean there's any excuse for the Guild, of all groups, to carry out an ideological inquisition.
jks
--- Nathan Newman <nathanne at nathannewman.org> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
>
>
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >>The Red Purge has also had deleterious impacts on
> non-socialists as
> >>well, as you can obviously see in the attitudes of
> most LBO
> >>anarchists and non-socialists here.
>
> >There's some truth to this, but there's also some
> bullshit to it too.
> >Any critique of the politics, organization, or
> rhetorical style of
> >the sects is dismissed by sympathizers as
> redbaiting.
>
> There is zero truth to it-- just the fact that so
> many progressive groups
> are still willing to sign up with ANSWER on
> endorsements, despite public
> knowledge it is run by the WWP, shows how much
> bullshit the "redbaiting"
> card is all about. People hate particular sectarian
> groups because they
> think they fuck up meetings, screw up coalitions,
> are physically violent, or
> just bore everyone to death.
>
> After the last month of internal withhunts within
> the Guild against me,
> culminating in almost an hour last night at the
> local NYC Guild chapter
> discussing the inappropriateness of my views on my
> weblog, personal email on
> this list, and assorted other ideological failings
> due to my criticism of
> the WWP, my tolerance for even a smidgen of defense
> for this
> "anti-redbaiting" crap is pretty much at an end.
>
> I've never experienced this kind of ideological
> inquisition in any liberal
> group I've been a member of, despite places where I
> was known to have more
> leftwing "commie" views. My experience in life is
> of far more ideological
> intolerance from the "leftwing" sectarians than from
> regular progressive
> folks.
>
> -- Nathan Newman
>
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