[Pen-l] Tim Unwise

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Over on alternet.org, a website occupying a place on the political 
spectrum a bit to the left of Huffington Post, there's an article 
that has been generating a bit of controversy. Titled rather 
provocatively "Enough of 'Barbituate' Left Cynicism, Obama Is a 
Victory over White Supremacy," it is a reproach to those reprobates 
like me, Alexander Cockburn, Paul Street and others who tend to 
regard the Obama presidency as Bill Clinton's 3rd term.

When crossposted to the pro-Obama Portside mailing list, it even 
rankled some people who had actually rung doorbells for Obama. If 
Wise's intention was to win people to his point of view, he really 
needs to brush up on his people skills. The politics of course is a lost cause.

The bulk of Wise's article is a kind of throwback to 1950s B movies 
like "My Son John" that has some kid looking like Wally Cleaver 
getting sucked into a secret commie cell and getting transformed into 
a robotic true believer after the fashion of "Invasion of the Body 
Snatchers". For some reason, Wise has chosen to personify these kinds 
of it-came-from-outer-space Rooskies as pro-Albanian Marxists:

"But despite being interesting, these folks also managed, at least 
for me, to demonstrate one of the key problems with the left in the 
U.S. Namely, for the sake of ideological purity few within the 
professional left expressed any joy about life, or any emotion 
whatsoever that wasn't rooted in negativity. They were like the 
political equivalent of quaaludes: guaranteed to bring you down from 
whatever partly optimistic place you might find yourself from time to time.

"This was never so evident as the day I hopped into a car with one of 
the Stalinoids (a member of something called the Albanian Liberation 
League, which viewed the brutal regime of Enver Hoxha as a worker's 
paradise), and headed downtown for a rally to protest Contra aid. 
Once in the car, I asked about the music playing from his stereo. 
What was it? I wanted to know. He quickly explained that it was 
Albanian folk music, and the only music he listened to. I made some 
joke about how strange it was to be living in one of the greatest 
musical towns on Earth and yet to restrict oneself to a single genre 
of music (especially that favored by Albanian sheepherders), to which 
my revolutionary friend responded with a grunt and a scowl. Of 
course, because Comrade Stalin never much liked jazz."

Now at first blush, Wise might be understood to be writing satire, 
especially with the reference to Albanian folk music. Unfortunately, 
Wise was only making a feeble attempt to con his readers into 
believing that such a group with such unlikely characters ever 
existed. If you google "Albanian Liberation League", you will only 
come up with links to his own article. As somebody who spent 5 years 
in CISPES and went on to become the east coast coordinator of 
Tecnica, one of the largest Nicaragua solidarity organizations, I 
assure you that no such group ever took part in the movement. 
Furthermore, the pro-Albanian left had pretty much evaporated by the 
mid 1980s when the Central American movement was in full stride. 
Finally, the groups that did exist tended to call themselves 
something like Communist Party Marxist-Leninist, not anything with 
Albania in the name. They might have been crazy, but they were not stupid.

full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/tim-unwise/

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