Letter to Bill Weinberg

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Bill Weinberg,

I assume that you are the author of the article titled "How the Antiwar
Movement Was Blowing It"
(http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20031020/025813.html)
that was just forwarded to Doug Henwood's listserv by a Mr. Chuck Zero,
an anarchist ubiquitous to the non-Marxist leftwing of the Internet who
named himself after Subcommandante Zero as I understand it. I myself am
named after my grandfather Louis Proyect, although he was known as Lebel
Proyect.

I also assume that you are the host of the anarchist talk-show Moorish
Orthodox Radio Crusade that comes on Tuesday at midnight on WBAI in NYC.
Let me first of all take this opportunity to thank you for playing
selections from "Hava Narghile", that collection of Turkish
rock-and-roll from the 1970s. I picked it up almost immediately after
hearing it but have to confess that my Turkish friends hate it.

By the way, I have never been able to figure out the connection between
anarchism and the Moorish empire, but perhaps that's because I am
usually asleep not a half-hour into your show. I also want to commend
you for your excellent website titled World War Three Report at
http://www.ww3report.com/. It is chock-full of useful information and
written with lots of radical flair and panache. If I weren't already
committed to Marxism, I might find myself seduced by your
message--especially if I were first coming around politics and looking
for something really exciting and different.

That being said, I am rather perplexed by your statement:

>>Sound-bight [sic] pseudo-analysis is an inherent danger of activism,
which must be guarded against at all times. Slogans like "Bring the
troops home" and "US out of Iraq" are handy for fitting on a placard,
but they inevitably dodge the really tough questions. Having now plunged
Iraq into social entropy, destroyed the country's infrastructure and
brought to a boil myriad ethnic and religious conflicts which had been
simmering under the Saddam dictatorship, it might be the height of
irresponsibility for the US to just unilaterally withdraw. It would, in
fact, be a violation of the responsibilities of an occupying power under
international law.<<

I was always under the impression that anarchists were in favor of
immediate communism like the day before yesterday. Right? How does that
square with worrying about the responsibilities of an occupying power?
In fact, in my humble bronto-Marxist opinion, one nation occupies
another only as a function of the violation of international law. But,
hey, what do I know. I still like Lenin.

You also ask what happened to CARDRI:

>>Whatever happened to CARDRI, the Committee Against Repression and for
Democratic Rights in Iraq, the progressive London-based exile group that
opposed both the Saddam dictatorship and US imperialist designs in the
1980s? Does CARDRI still exist? Are any of its members still vocal and
active? It is from such voices that we must seek leadership--not from
the self-appointed cadre of Workers World, or even the comparatively
innocuous Leslie Cagan.<<

It appears that CARDRI has morphed into something called INDICT. If you
go to opendemocracy.net, a website edited by Todd Gitlin and funded by
The Rockefeller Foundation and the Bank of Sweden among others, you'll
find an effusive piece on INDICT which is pushing for a war crime
tribunal on Iraq.
(http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-88-941.jsp)

INDICT'S president is Ann Clwyd, a Blairite MP, who was praised on
William J. Bennett's website www.empoweramerica.org for her all-out
support for the war in Iraq, and formerly the President of CADRI. Her
board includes Peter Galbraith, the former US ambassador to Croatia. I
imagine with your hostility to Slobodan Milosevic, this is a feather in
INDICT's cap. My impression, however, is that Galbraith was far too
lenient about the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Krajina than polite
society should accept, but then again I tend to think that NATO's war
against the Serbs was cut from the same cloth as the war against Iraq.

Ann Clwyd is a pretty good fund-raiser, according to opendemocracy.org.
She got her hands on $3 million under the Iraq Liberation Act passed by
the US Congress in 1998. I used to have lots more trouble raising money
for Nicaragua solidarity, but maybe I didn't know the right people.
Maybe you can try to raise some money for her efforts on your radio
show. In any case, keep playing the tasty music. On that we can agree.

Yours truly, Louis Proyect

--

The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org



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