The lunatic left

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(From www.themilitant.com, the newspaper of the bizarre sect-cult Socialist
Workers Party that Sol Dollinger, Jose Perez and I belonged to at different
times. As nutty as it was during the times we were in, it has gone through
a remarkable mutation over the past ten years, now having reached its
apparent goal of becoming a workerist sect-cult in the Spartacist League
tradition. When the SWP supported federal troops to the south in the early
'60s to defend civil rights activists, the faction in the party led by Jim
Robertson denounced this as a betrayal of working-class independent action,
calling for armed workers detachments to defend the activists instead. Such
detachments could only be the product of a feverish imagination brought on
by too much reading of the Marxist classics and not enough participation in
the mass movement. Although I have long ago stopped being shocked by the
nuttiness of this tiny cult, something like this truly takes my breath away.)

INS assault in Miami strikes blow to the working class

151 Federal Agents Carry Out Massive Assault at Miami home

BY MIKE ITALIE, ARGIRIS MALAPANIS, and GREG McCARTAN

MIAMI?In a brutal attack on democratic rights and in an assault on working
people, 151 federal agents, many of them heavily armed, carried out a raid
under authority of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to remove
six-year-old Elian Gonzalez from the home of his great-uncle, Lazaro
Gonzalez, in the early morning hours of april 22.

A force of 131 INS agents and 20 U.S. marshals were involved. Some 53 INS
agents surrounded the two-bedroom house, threatening a crowd there and
roughing up a number of people. The cops used battering rams to knock down
the door. An eight-member Border Patrol Tactical Unit, wearing goggles and
bullet-proof vests, and carrying automatic rifles, led the charge inside.

An AP photographer inside the house caught the now-famous scene of an agent
with the barrel of an automatic weapon in the face of Donato Dalrymple, one
of the fishermen who rescued the boy, holding Elian Gonzalez in his arms in
a bedroom. Outside, the cops ordered bystanders to the ground, told
reporters to stay where they were, and doused protesters with pepper spray,
both as they launched the raid and before they sped off in their vans.


Louis Proyect
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