Jerry Monaco wrote:
>
>
> Not long back I went to a screening of "Sir, No Sir" in the basement
> of a church in Woodside Queens. It was given by two peace groups in
> Queens. The church was a church that catered mostly to minorities. I
> would bet that most of those minorities were anti-war. The half hour
> before the film was shown there was a church service. Did I go and
> try to talk to the people who came out of the church? Judging by the
> way they talked they were all from Central America or southern Mexico,
> areas of the world I know well. Yet I didn't have the guts to even
> talk to them and neither did anyone else around. It takes guts, and
> the willingness to embarrass yourself and push, but none of us did
> it. So there we were at an anti-war meeting in a "minority" church in
> Queens, and practically all of us were "white". Whose fault was
> that? I don't know. Mine probably.
There's always fault enough to spread around, but I doubt the spreading achieves much.
A speculation -- Hypothesis as to why the U.S. came down with such ferocity on the Panthers:
The Panthers were making real progress (or at least threatened to make real progress) on uniting black and white leftists in cooperative struggle. That simply cannot be allowed.
Your are correct of course that people of color are significantly to the left of most whites in their general opinions. But then there are quite few more whites than 'we' can reach (recruit, mobilize, what have you) who are significantly to the left of "most whites." We don't have to convince them of anything in particular. "WE" just have to somehow build a form of struggle which promises some results.
Incidentally, if the label "stalinist" means anything at all, it means a leftist who attempts to drive a wedge between workers and trained intellectuals.
Carrol