>On Friday, June 18, 2004, at 11:26 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>> Nevertheless, Camejo's proposal reminds us that the period from the
>> end of the 2000 elections till the beginning of the year 2004 turned
>> out to be a great missed opportunity for the Green Party.
>
>You can say that again. A party that doesn't do anything
>particularly important for four years is not of much use.
It is not true to say that the Green Party did not do anything in the emergence and development of the movement against the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. At the local level, Green Party activists (as well as young Campus Greens) did a reasonably good job, being an indispensable part of activist coalitions in most communities where Greens have solid presence.
I'm talking about organizing at the national level. As the Green Party (unlike the Democratic Party, the Workers World Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Committee of Correspondence and its allied peace organizations, all of which have created their own anti-war "coalitions") is very decentralized, it is extremely difficult to work out and actually implement a coherent strategy of doing third-party organizing in the context of various social movements, not to use the social movements as fishing ponds but so that both the party and movements will grow together. It is not clear how to solve this problem without sacrificing democracy in the party.
>BTW, I've been curious about your purpose in making these Spanish
>posts. It obviously isn't to inform the whole list membership, or
>you would have provided translations. Are you trying to embarrass us
>into learning Spanish?
It would be good for more Americans to learn Spanish, but English and Spanish are similar enough that, if you are curious, you can parse what's posted in Spanish with Google's translation feature (or some such free machine-translation device) and supplemental recourses to a Spanish-English dictionary.
I've posted materials in various languages, mainly in English, Spanish, and French (and, on a few occasions, Italian and German) to this and other listservs and also on my blog. If I could, I'd post materials in Japanese and Chinese, too, but (being technologically challenged) I have yet to learn how to do so with Eudora and Blogger (if anyone has a clue, email me offlist). The more languages you post in, the more various your readers will be, I think.
For instance, I posted info about a French film L'IRAK D'UNE GUERRE A L'AUTRE (see <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2002/2002-November/026330.html>) to LBO-talk and some other listservs. Then, one of the co-directors of the film Béatrice Pignede happened upon it (which is why I like listservs that have public archives), and she wrote me a note, and we corresponded a while.
I'd love to learn Arabic and Farsi (as I have good Arab and Iranian friends), at least well enough to get the gist of journal and newspaper articles, but I haven't had a chance to devote myself to studying them.
I need to learn Korean, too. JC Helary claimed that it would be much easier for a native speaker of Japanese to learn Korean than English. Is that true??? -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>