Following the Flags in San Francisco

The masked kid replied, “I‘m not hiding it -- the sun’s out and I‘m trying to protect myself.”

“Oh,” his hawkish opponent scoffed. “Well, that’s your prerogative. But it‘s weak.”

Lately, another kind of debate has swirled around the doctrinaire beliefs of the anti-war movement’s organizers. International ANSWER (Act Now To Stop War and End Racism), the group behind Saturday‘s march, is the creation of a Trotskyite sect called the Workers World Party, which noisily supports such pleasure domes as North Korea and Yugoslavia under Milosevic. Similarly, the Not in My Name project, which sponsored a celebrity anti-war petition campaign, can be traced back to the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party ???[ (RCP) ], who, like the ???[either spell out name here, or insert “(WWP)” above on first mention>> ]WWP, has nary a discouraging word to say about Saddam Hussein -- or any anti-American tyrant and guerrilla movement.

While these concerns, expressed by ???[such people as DEL2]people like Todd Gitlin and Christopher Hitchens, are legitimate reservations, they miss the point. For 40 years nearly every movement ???[ADD: either] for labor unions ???[replace “and” with “or”]and against war and institutional racism in this country was spearheaded by the Communist Party, USA ???[ADD: (CPUSA) ] -- even as ???[ADD: that organization DEL: it >>]it blissfully endorsed a totalitarian and anti-Semitic Soviet Union. The peace movement against the Vietnam War was ???[tr. 2]largely mobilized by the “mainstream” Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party, as well as the CPUSA -- two groups that often worked side by side with the RCP on college campuses to organize effective support ???[ADD: for] the United Farm Workers???[’s] wine and grape boycotts. And the rhetoric of that time was far more incendiary than anything heard last weekend. (I can still hear Black Panther David Hilliard, speaking in Golden Gate Park in 1969, praising North Korea and declaring, “We will kill Richard Nixon, we will kill any motherfucker who stands in the way of our freedom!”)

The ???[dominant =OR= dominative>>] domineering role of such groups didn‘t, contrary to what people are telling themselves today, destroy the peace movement. The end of the draft, withdrawal from Vietnam and a little FBI program called COINTELPRO helped accomplish that. Critics of the new united front against war complain that it is overpopulated with people who hate America, but there ???[ital 1?]are things to hate about America. Besides, who else has -- or would -- mobilize a peace movement? The Democratic Leadership Council? Christopher Hitchens? The best way to isolate the sectarians is to participate in the peace movement much as they do -- which will, as it happened in San Francisco, push their own contingents to the back of the parade.