Apology to Rakesh, etc.

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 21 Oct 1995, jones/bhandari wrote:
>
> 4. Louis has again violated the norms of reasoned debate.  His calumny
> against an ultra-left organization did not include a single line of
> rebuttal to the argument of how Farrakhan's politics will evolve into
> fascism as the crisis deepens.  This sort of rebuke was not expected from a
> Trotyskite critic of Stalinism or perhaps Louis is revealing something
> about the nature of the American Trotyskism?
>

Louis: I sincerely apologize for my intemperate outburst. Rakesh is
absolutely correct. I should have addressed the NOI/Zionism analogy.

Without intending to, I sort of agreed with it in a roundabout way. The
NOI is quite a bit like the Zionists of the 1930's, peddling snake-oil to
the Jewish masses while doing nothing to resist fascism. This is in some
ways an apt analogy.

However, it is time that American Marxists began closing the history
books and searching for analogies. What was Lenin's analogy when he had
to try to explain the haplessness of the Narodnik's faith in
peasant-commune based socialism? Lenin had no alternative but to go to
the Czarist court records and examine statistics. It reminds me of the
time when I cited this example when trying to explain why the Marxists of
today have to do something similar in explaining the militia movement.
Tim Wolforth, bless his soul, said that since Louis Proyect has been
reading a lot of Lenin lately on Russian populism, maybe he could show
what light Lenin could shed on the militias!

The truth is concrete. The NOI is not equal to the Zionist movement under
Hitler. The NOI produced Malcolm X, the most important North
American revolutionary since Eugene V. Debs. (I will be glad to defend
Malcolm's reputation on this list. His "Speeches" turned me into a
socialist and that's all I need.) The NOI also produced Muhammed Ali. His
refusal to go into the army because "no Vietnamese called me a nigger",
along with MLK Jr.'s activism, was responsible for a massive anti-war
response among African-Americans. Fascism embraces US imperialism. If the
NOI was fascist, it wouldn't allow one of its main spokesmen to challenge
imperialist war at its most critical moment.


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