FREE MUMIA. FREE THE CUBAN 5. FREE JAMIL AL-AMIN (that’s H. Rap Brown,
the former Black Panther convicted in March of killing a sheriff’s deputy
in 2000). And free Leonard Peltier. Also, defeat Zionism. And, while we’re
at it, let’s bring the capitalist system to a halt.
When tens of thousands of people gathered near the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial for an anti-war rally and march in Washington last Saturday, the
demands hurled by the speakers extended far beyond the call for no war
against Iraq. Opponents of the war can be heartened by the sight of people
coming together in Washington and other cities for pre-emptive protests.
But demonstrations such as these are not necessarily strategic advances,
for the crowds are still relatively small and, more importantly, the
message is designed by the far left for consumption by those already in
their choir.
In a telling sign of the organizers’ priorities, the cause of Mumia
Abu-Jamal, the taxi driver/radical journalist sentenced to death two
decades ago for killing a policeman, drew greater attention than the idea
that revived and unfettered weapons inspections should occur in Iraq
before George W. Bush launches a war. Few of the dozens of speakers, if
any, bothered suggesting a policy option regarding Saddam Hussein other
than a simplistic leave-Iraq-alone. Jesse Jackson may have been the only
major figure to acknowledge Saddam’s brutality, noting that the Iraqi
dictator “should be held accountable for his crimes.” What to do about
Iraq? Most speakers had nothing to say about that. Instead, the Washington
rally was a pander fest for the hard left.
If public-opinion polls are correct, 33 percent to 40 percent of the
public opposes an Iraq war; even more are against a unilateral action.
This means the burgeoning anti-war movement has a large recruiting pool,
yet the demo was not intended to persuade doubters. Nor did it speak to
Americans who oppose the war but who don’t consider the United States a
force of unequaled imperialist evil and who don’t yearn to smash global
capitalism.
This was no accident, for the demonstration was essentially organized
by the Workers World
Party, a small political sect that years ago split from the Socialist
Workers Party to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The party
advocates socialist revolution and abolishing private property. It is a
fan of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, and it hails North Korean dictator
Kim Jong-Il for preserving his country’s “socialist system,” which,
according to the party’s newspaper, has kept North Korea “from falling
under the sway of the transnational banks and corporations that dictate to
most of the world.” The WWP has campaigned against the war-crimes trial of
former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. A recent Workers World
editorial declared, “Iraq has done absolutely nothing wrong.”
Officially, the organizer of the Washington demonstration was International
ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). But ANSWER is run by
WWP activists, to such an extent that it seems fair to dub it a WWP front.
Several key ANSWER officials — including spokesperson Brian Becker — are
WWP members. Many local offices for ANSWER’s protest were housed in WWP
offices. Earlier this year, when ANSWER conducted a press briefing, at
least five of the 13 speakers were WWP activists. They were each
identified, though, in other ways, including as members of the
International Action Center.
The IAC, another WWP offshoot, was a key partner with ANSWER in
promoting the protest. It was founded by Ramsey Clark, attorney general
for President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. For years, Clark has been on a
bizarre political odyssey, much of the time in sync with the Workers World
Party. As an attorney, he has represented Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a
political cult. He has defended Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic and
Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, who was accused of participating in the
genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Clark is also a member of the International
Committee To Defend Slobodan Milosevic. The international war-crimes
tribunal, he explains, “is war by other means” — that is, a tool of the
West to crush those who stand in the way of U.S. imperialism, like
Milosevic. A critic of the ongoing sanctions against Iraq, Clark has
appeared on talking-head shows and refused to concede any wrongdoing on
Saddam’s part. There is no reason to send weapons inspectors to Iraq, he
told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer: “After 12 years of brutalization with sanctions
and bombing they’d like to be a country again. They’d like to have
sovereignty again. They’d like to be left alone.”
It is not redbaiting to note the WWP’s not-too-hidden hand in the
nascent anti-war movement. It explains the tone and message of Saturday’s
rally. Take the question of inspections. According to Workers
World, at a party conference in September, Sara Flounders, a WWP
activist, reported war opponents were using the slogan “inspections, not
war.” Flounders, the paper says, “pointed out that ‘inspections ARE war’
in another form,” and that she had “prepared party activists to struggle
within the movement on this question.” Translation: The WWP would do
whatever it could to smother the “inspections, not war” cry.
Inspections-before-invasion is an effective argument against the dash to
war. But it conflicts with WWP support for opponents of U.S. imperialism.
At the Washington event, the WWP succeeded in blocking out that line —
while promoting anti-war messages more simpatico with its dogma.
WWP shaped the demonstration’s content by loading the speakers’ list
with its own people. None, though, were identified as belonging to the
WWP. Larry Holmes, who emceed much of the rally from a stage dominated by
ANSWER posters, was introduced as a representative of the ANSWER Steering
Committee and the International Action Center. The audience was not told
that he is also a member of the secretariat of the Workers World Party.
When Leslie Feinberg spoke and accused Bush of concocting a war to cover
up “the capitalist economic crisis,” she informed the crowd that she is “a
Jewish revolutionary” dedicated to the “fight against Zionism.” When I
asked her what groups she worked with, she replied that she was a
“lesbian-gay-bi-transgender movement activist.” Yet a May issue of
Workers World describes Feinberg as a “lesbian and transgendered
communist and a managing editor of Workers World.” The WWP’s Sara
Flounders, who urged the crowd to resist “colonial subjugation,” was
presented as an IAC rep. Shortly after she spoke, Holmes introduced one of
the event’s big-name speakers: Ramsey Clark. He declared that the Bush
administration aims to “end the idea of individual freedom.”
Most of the protesters, I assume, were oblivious to the WWP’s role in
the event. They merely wanted to gather with other foes of the war and
express their collective opposition. They waved signs (“We need an Axis of
Sanity,” “Draft Perle,” “Collateral Damage = Civilian Deaths,” “Fuck
Bush”). They cheered on rappers who sang, “No blood for oil.” They laughed
when Medea Benjamin, the head of Global Exchange, said, “We need to stop
the testosterone-poisoning of our globe.” They filled red ANSWER donation
buckets with coins and bills. But how might they have reacted if Holmes
and his comrades had asked them to stand with Saddam, Milosevic and Kim?
Or to oppose further inspections in Iraq?
One man in the crowd was wise to the behind-the-scenes politics. When
Brian Becker, a WWP member introduced (of course) as an ANSWER activist,
hit the stage, Paul Donahue, a middle-aged fellow who works with the
Thomas Merton Peace and Social Justice Center in Pittsburgh, shouted,
“Stalinist!” Donahue and his colleagues at the Merton Center, upset that
WWP activists were in charge of this demonstration, had debated whether to
attend. “Some of us tried to convince others to come,” Donahue recalled.
“We figured we could dilute the [WWP] part of the message. But in the end
most didn’t come. People were saying, ‘They’re Maoists.’ But they’re the
only game in town, and I’ve got to admit they’re good organizers. They
remembered everything but the Porta-Johns.” Rock singer Patti Smith,
though, was not troubled by the organizers. “My main concern now is the
anti-war movement,” she said before playing for the crowd. “I’m for a
nonpartisan, globalist movement. I don’t care who it is as long as they
feel the same.”
The WWP does have the shock troops and talent needed to construct a
quasi mass demonstration. But the bodies have to come from elsewhere. So
WWPers create fronts and trim their message, and anti-war Americans, who
presumably don’t share WWP sentiments, have an opportunity to assemble and
register their stand against the war. At the same time, WWP activists,
hiding their true colors, gain a forum where thousands of people listen to
their exhortations. Is this a good deal — or a dangerous one? Who’s using
whom?
“Organizing against the silence is important,” Bob Borosage, executive
director of Campaign for America’s Future, a leading progressive policy
shop in Washington, said backstage at the rally: “This [rally] is easy to
dismiss as the radical fringe, but it holds the potential for a larger
movement down the road.” Borosage did add that the WWP “puts a slant on
the speakers and that limits the appeal to others. But history shows that
protests are organized first by militant, radical fringe parties and then
get taken over by more centrist voices as the movement grows. They provide
a vessel for people who want to protest.”
That’s the vessel-half-filled view. The other argument is that WWP’s
involvement will prevent the anti-war movement from growing. Sure, the
commies can rent buses and obtain parade permits, but if they have a say
in the message, as they have had, the anti-war movement is going to have a
tough time signing up non-lefties. When the organizers tried and failed to
play a recorded message from Al-Amin, Lorena Stackpole, a 20-year-old New
York University student, said, “This is not what I came for.” And an
organizer for a non-revolutionary peace group that participated in the
event remarked, “The rhetoric here is not useful if we want to expand.”
After all, how does urging the release of Cubans accused of committing
espionage in the United States — a pet project of the WWP — help draw more
people into the anti-war movement? (In a similar reds-take-control
situation, the “Not in My Name” campaign — which pushes an anti-war
statement signed by scores of prominent and celebrity lefties, including
Jane Fonda, Martin Luther King III, Marisa Tomei, Kurt Vonnegut and Oliver
Stone — has been directed, in part, by C. Clark Kissinger, a longtime
Maoist activist and member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.)
Let’s be real: A Washington demonstration involving tens of thousands
of people will not yield much political impact — especially when held
while Congress is out of town and the relevant legislation has already
been rubber-stamped. (The organizers claimed 200,000 showed, but that
seemed a pumped-up guesstimate, perhaps three or four times the real
number.) The anti-war movement won’t have a chance of applying pressure on
the political system unless it becomes much larger and able to squeeze
elected officials at home and in Washington.
To reach that stage, the new peace movement will need the involvement
of labor unions and churches. That’s where the troops are — in the pews,
in the union halls. How probable is it, though, that mainstream churches
and unions will join a coalition led by the we-love-North-Korea set?
Moreover, is it appropriate for groups and churches that care about human
rights and worker rights abroad and at home to make common cause with
those who champion socialist tyrants?
At the rally, speaker after speaker declared, “We are the real
Americans.” But most “real Americans” do not see a direct connection
between Mumia, the Cuban Five and the war against Iraq. Jackson, for one,
exclaimed, “This time the silent majority is on our side.” If the goal is
to bring the silent majority into the anti-war movement, it’s not going to
be achieved by people carrying pictures of Kim Jong-Il — even if they keep
them hidden in their wallets.
As yet another WWP-in-disguise speaker addressed the crowd, Steve
Cobble, a progressive political consultant, gazed out at the swarm of
protesters and observed, “People are looking for something to do.” Good
for them. But they ought to also look at the leaders they are following
and wonder if those individuals will guide them toward a broader, more
effective movement or toward the fringe irrelevance the WWPers know so
well.
Jonathan H. Miller contributed to this report.
Copyright 2002 LA Weekly