The Pepsi vs. Coke of the Anti-War Movement

David Horowitz, a persona non grata on the Berkeley campus due to his slavery reparations ad campaign last spring, took out another ad at the beginning of the U.S. led War on Terrorism just as the antiwar movement on campuses was building steam. To quickly sum up, he charged that, like the antiwar protests during the Vietnam War, this new wave of antiwar protests were being masterminded by communists and socialists who hoped to use the broader leftwing public outcry against the war to further their own ends. Of course, since the vast majority of students who would be in the Berkeley Coalition to Stop the War would already have written Horowitz off as a right-wing nutcase, his letter fell on deaf ears. Now with a little more time behind us and with the seeming unraveling of the Coalition, we outsiders can begin to prod the seamy underbelly of the movement. What we find there is not far from what Horowitz himself had said. Indeed, the level of Marxist foolishness in the antiwar movement is enough to make Joe McCarthy climb out of his grave to shout “I told you so!”

The first warning signs that something was afoot were obvious from the very beginning during the shameful 9/11 evening candlelight vigil. Besides the cavalcade of speakers denouncing “U.S. capitalist imperialism” and proclaiming that “the U.S. is still the world’s greatest terrorist” several ominous items appeared. First were little red flyers being passed out to the crowd by various members of the campus’s left-leaning fringe that declared such ridiculous things as “as freedom fighters, we stand in solidarity…” Allow me to translate for those who spend less time paying attention to these groups. The terms “freedom fighters” and “solidarity” are like having big red labels that shout “Marxist.” Besides this, there was the particularly inopportune hawking of the Socialist Worker, a newspaper published by the International Socialist Organization. More on them later.

In the following two weeks, a series of statements were issued on the local version of the Indymedia website (1). Indymedia is the breeding ground for a lot of these crackpots and a fun read for anyone with a good sense of morbid curiosity for what goes on in the minds of the extreme left. Conspiracy theories, tired old “destroy capitalism! [insert one of the following: Marxist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Communist, Socialist, Anarchist] revolution!” rants, and the incessant harping on such standby topics as police brutality, living wages, anti-Jewish sentiment, and other such fads of the left all abound here. But back to the story. These statements were signed by Ronald Cruz. Mr. Cruz, currently a first year graduate student in the School of Education, is, like Hoku Jeffery, one of those BAMN members who were students at Berkeley before I arrived and will still be students long after I leave. Mysteriously, after a week or so, these announcements dried up. It turns out that BAMN had tried its usual tactics of subverting and taking over other groups to use as a front for its own agenda. However, this time they were caught and ejected from the Coalition. Nothing unusual there, except for another defeat in what is shaping up to be a bad semester for BAMN, what with their recent failure to bus in enough students to prevent their anti-SAT I rally from failing miserably. However, when one considers that BAMN is a front group for a Trotskyite group known as the Revolutionary Workers’ League (2) and that it was ousted at the behest of the rival ISO, we begin to get into the backroom politics that have driven so many members away from the Coalition in recent weeks.

But perhaps I’m imagining things. After all, the ISO is only one of the major players in the Coalition, which, according to the discussion on their own email lists, are the ISO, Students for Justice in Palestine, and a group known as Left Turn. These three groups dominate the direction of the Coalition, as noted on one of the discussion lists by Christopher Cantor, one of their leaders, who wrote, “Thus far, I dont [sic] think that alternative viewpoints (alternative to the core groups in the coalition - SJP, ISO, LT) are being represented, or even respected.” These three groups have, often to the protestation of rank and file members of the Coalition, come to dominate both the leadership and agenda of the Coalition. Let’s examine what each group stands for individually and take a peek into what they’ve done.

First we have the International Socialist Organization. Who are the ISO on campus? Well, they, like the other prominent Marxist group the Spartacus Youth League, are a relatively tiny cadre of people who try to expand and influence other campus organizations. According to the contacts page on the main ISO website (3) the phone number for the Berkeley area ISO contact is (510) 268-9006. Doing a search on this phone number yields the name of Snehal Shingavi, an English graduate student. Snehal is one of those kinds of people who are drawn to activism like a moth to a light. He was one of the “organizers” of the 9/11 candlelight vigil, managing who would go up to the open microphone. Last year, he was one of the members of SJP involved in locking down Wheeler Hall and disrupting all the classes within. He helped with the Green Party Senate Campaign of Medea Benjamin, a veteran disturbance maker in the Bay Area. He was one of less than ten protestors who disrupted the solemnity of the campus wide memorial service with his signs and demands for attention (he carried the one that said “Don’t let them turn tragedy into war” and no, the “them” isn’t bin Laden and his terrorist buddies). I personally witnessed Snehal steal the Daily Cal during the most recent rounds of thefts and have gone on record stating so. And now Snehal is one of the major players in the Berkeley Coalition to Stop the War. If you would like to get to know this wonderful work of a man, he can be seen on Sproul peddling copies of the Socialist Worker, the ISO newspaper. They cost fifty cents.

Since the ISO doesn’t hide their dedication to Marxism, let’s see how they fare on the other big charge levied often against the antiwar movement- is the ISO anti-American? The answer to this is, unsurprisingly, a resounding yes. In their short “Where We Stand” (4) section, one of the headings is “Revolution, not Reform” where it reads “The structures of the present government–the Congress, the army, the police and the judiciary –cannot be taken over and used by the working class.” So the next time you hear some claptrap coming out of the Stop the War Coalition that “dissent is patriotic,” remember that one of three big organizations within it is most assuredly not patriotic, instead advocating the destruction of the very government that provides them the opportunity to express their beliefs.

A good case in point for the charge that the antiwar movement is lead by the ISO and other Marxists in order to further their own agendas is the California Schools Against the War (C-SAW) conference held Veteran’s Day weekend at our campus. Immediately after the conference ended, the Indymedia website was flooded with posts from people angry with the ISO who believed that the conference was hijacked. One particularly involved thread (5) on Indymedia sums it up nicely, and is well worth the read for anyone interested in seeing what other hard left people have to say about the ISO and other vanguard communist groups. According to the myriad of people who posted, the ISO not only dominated the discussion and silenced dissent, but also rammed through many resolutions that the assembled people did not understand fully and refused to explain the resolutions to attendees when asked. According to several posters, this happened at sister conferences across the country, including in Boston and Chicago. Is it not highly suspicious that members of ISO did this at simultaneous conferences, and that they all pushed for a national conference? Most likely, the ISO hopes to use the student antiwar movement to provide a support framework for their own socialist revolution made up of Lenin originally coined this term for his unwitting Western allies, and in modern usage denotes people who are not communists and not socialists, but rather just dupes of the Communist movement, used to bolster body counts and votes in pursuit of the agenda without their knowledge.

The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) are another infamous troublemaker group on campus. Besides managing to almost single-handedly marginalize an entire issue (the Palestinian problem), SJP, like BAMN, is one of those supposedly single issue groups that manages to be involved in nearly every single protest on campus. Besides the aforementioned siege of Wheeler Hall, SJP was involved in the latest invasion of the Daily Cal offices (over Darrin Bell’s terrorists in hell cartoon) and recently held a rally on Sproul to celebrate “Intifada Week.” What’s fun about the Intifada Week rally is that it was held on Yom Kippur. I’m not going to go into why I suspect that many members of SJP are fervently anti-Jewish, but the event was, no matter what SJP members believe, in extremely poor taste for that day. Another fun surprise is that we find out that our buddy Snehal is a member of SJP. Isn’t it puzzling how the same few people show up in all these different clubs? I personally find it entertaining that many of them belong to a club that supports armed violence by the Palestinians against Israel (which they call an aggressor state) yet also belong to the Stop the War Coalition, which opposes armed violence by Americans against an aggressor. One has to wonder whether they are truly ideologically committed to peace or if they are simply opposed to anything that would help preserve our country.

Finally we come to the last group in the Stop the War Coalition trinity. This group, named Left Turn, whose motto is “from anticapitalism to revolution” (sound familiar?), was kind enough to make my work quite easy. In their new online pamphlet “No to Bush’s War,” (6) besides offering a fairly long defense of bin Laden, they included a section entitled “Marxism and Terrorism.” Here we learn that Left Turn and all “good” Marxists reject terrorism. Not because it’s evil, mind you, but because “[t]o free the world from oppression and injustice requires not merely getting rid of particular ministers or blowing up military or other targets, but tearing up the roots of the capitalist system itself. The only force with the power to do that is the collective strength of the working class.” In other words, they oppose terrorism only because it distracts from their goal of communist revolution! They even see terrorists as misguided Marxists, who have rejected the “unified working class” for airplanes and bombs. This equation of terrorists and killers to Marxists is fitting in a way. The mass murder by Communist and National Socialist (Nazi) regimes are well documented (for a great summary, I recommend Death by Government by R.J. Rummel), so perhaps Left Turn is right in drawing a link behind the motives of terrorists and Marxists.

Beyond the antics of sectarian Marxists at Berkeley, we see a similar pattern emerge in the national antiwar movement. The major alternative in nationwide organization to the framework that the ISO is setting up is run by the ponderously named International Act Now to Stop the War and End Racism (International ANSWER). This too is a coalition of groups, a list of which is freely available on their website (7). Groups include the “small ‘c’ communist” Green Party USA, Left Turn (again), and a whole slew of political parties that include the terms “socialist,” “workers,” “people’s,” or “communist.” ANSWER itself is a project of the Washington, DC based International Action Center (IAC). Once again, we also find substantial proof of the anti-American sentiment of the antiwar movement’s leaders. On the announcements section of the San Francisco branch office of the IAC’s website (8) we find this wonderful statement: “Bombing a poor country? Killing Children? Cluster bombs? This is not ‘fighting terrorism.’ This IS terrorism!” And they say that antiwar activists aren’t patriotic.

Additionally, the IAC is a proponent of every Progressive cause under the sun, including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Vieques, Affirmative Action, the supposed “right to a job” and many others too numerous to list here- the full list is on their website (9). It was founded in 1992 by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Mr. Clark is one of those never ending hate-America crackpots who, among other things, initiated a war-crimes tribunal that tried and found guilty President George Bush and Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, among others, all while refusing even to condemn Saddam Hussein. He routinely rails against capitalism, free trade, and the other cornerstones of free economic development.

The reason for all this, once again, goes back to authoritarian Communists, this time a group known as the Workers’ World Party (WWP) (10), that has established, through Ramsey Clark, the IAC as a front group. The history of the WWP and their continued support of dictatorship, including Stalin’s rule, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the KGB coup against Gorbachev’s opening of society, Saddam Hussein, and Slobodan Milosevic is wonderfully detailed (11) by a left-wing anarchist writer who is as much opposed to the authoritarian Communist as he is to the American. Clark and the WWP were influential in the last major antiwar movement during the Gulf War, and, through ANSWER, have taken a major role in the current movement.

Another major member of ANSWER, with her name cited almost at the very top of its coalition members, is the Bay Area’s own Barbara Lubin, executive director of the Middle East Children’s Alliance and outspoken antiwar activist. We at The Patriot have had the distinctly unpleasant experience of encountering her in person when we spoke against the Berkeley City Council’s resolution to condemn the U.S. War on Terrorism. She too is more than a little bit red. In the November 3rd issue of the People’s Weekly World, the weekly newspaper of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), there is a small announcement (12) that Barbara Lubin will be among three honorees at the People’s Weekly World Northern California banquet on November 18th. Nothing quite like being considered worthy of an award from the Communist Party of the USA, is there? Before I move on from the topic of this banquet, I’d like to note that, in the true spirit of community, equality, and Marxism, tickets for this event cost $40 a person.

So it comes down to this, antiwar folks. You have your choice of either communism or…communism. It’s the Coke vs. Pepsi choice of the antiwar movement. Of course, I don’t suggest that all of you are stupid enough to adhere to thoroughly repudiated economic systems and dictatorships masquerading as popular democracy. However, you should be aware of who you look to for guidance and what their true motives are. Let me tell you, it isn’t an ideological love of peace and pacifism that drives these Communists to lead the antiwar movement, otherwise groups like the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) would be more prominent in the Coalition. No, it’s because you all are tools to be used to advance the coming of the Revolution. Workers of the world, unite!

Good work, angry. I know that there is a lot of physical beauty in the Bay Area, but sometimes I think that the time has come for the remnant of good people in that place to leave, and not turn back, lest they be turned into a block of salt!

Isn’t it puzzling how the same few people show up in all these different clubs?...One has to wonder whether they are truly ideologically committed to peace or if they are simply opposed to anything that would help preserve our country.

Good work!

This is a very accurate observation. This is how a very small group of Marxist ideologues almost invariably are able to exploit and channel the sentiments of the naive majority who participate in these demonstrations. In addition, they seek to develop a mask of respectability by seeking members of the clergy and union leaders to speak at these events.

Furthermore, they are NOT committed to peace, but rather to violent class warfare and the destruction of Freedom.

Wherever you have these types of demonstrations look to see who's really doing the grunt work not necessarily who is giving the speeches. If you're really interested, try going to some of the "organizational" meetings and watch what goes on and how things work.

I had a little bit of experience with these sort of folks back in the 70's. You have to be kind of over the edge all on your own to take them seriously. They end up recruiting about 2% of any group that they try to take over. Although sometimes they do manage to take over whole organizations. One group I was involved with (Vietnam Veterans Against The War) had been taken over by the CPUSA. Most of the VVAW chapters in the nation, including the Minneapolis chapter that I was a member of, chose to disband rather than be associated with the CPUSA.

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