> You have - rightly in my view, castigated many who are discourteous -
> not to say infantile.
Hari, as someone who I sense has spent a good five decades, like Comrade Tron at leftist_trainspotters, agitating for communism, and alas, like the rest of the socialist and communist left, has over that time frame, seen the social networks influenced by marxism, dissipate and decline into irrelevence, I pose a despairing question, one I have increasingly obsessed over. What amount or level of blame do you assign marxist-leninists who, in more cases than not, exhibit extreme anger, hostility, arrogance, dogmatism, towards comrades in their own orgs. or supportive peripheries, let alone opposing currents, whether Trotskyist, Maoist, Stalinist, Hoxhaist, or Kumarist, for the decay of M-L?
What possible attraction can there be to joining a cadre formation or broader mileau full of pricks that make jokes about virtual icepicks and spend most of their time not fighting capitalism, racism and imperial slaughters but berating and slagging fellow leftists?
On the subject line...I've from the time I became a teenage marxist in the late 70's, despised ethno-religious nationalisms of any variety, being a sucker for that good 'ol Enlightenment rationalism, that is a common heritage of both marxian socialism and liberalism. So anti-Zionist arguments should be second nature to me. And, like the concrete oppression and exploitations suffered by Salvadoreans, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, Vietnamese, etc., the Palestinians, have a more than just cause. But, unlike my days in CISPES, where the opposing side was so obviously bestial fascists, I find it more difficult to identify with the activist circles that agitate on behalf of the Palestinian cause in the USA, (with the exception of folks like this http://electronicintifada.net/new.shtml foe example) 'cuz way too many, seem motivated by pure hatred of Jews and advance slogans and analyses and programs that are simplistic, utopian and extreme.
-- Michael Pugliese