[LINK] Why I'm wary about much of the anti-war movement

[rfmcdonald]

Via a correspondent, David Corn's article "The Odd and Troubling Origins of Today’s Anti-War Movement," originally published in the November 1-7, 2002 issue of LA Weekly.

If public-opinion polls are correct, 33 percent to 40 percent of the public opposes an Iraq war; even more are against a unilateral action. This means the burgeoning anti-war movement has a large recruiting pool, yet the demo was not intended to persuade doubters. Nor did it speak to Americans who oppose the war but who don’t consider the United States a force of unequaled imperialist evil and who don’t yearn to smash global capitalism.

This was no accident, for the demonstration was essentially organized by the Workers World Party, a small political sect that years ago split from the Socialist Workers Party to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The party advocates socialist revolution and abolishing private property. It is a fan of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, and it hails North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il for preserving his country’s “socialist system,” which, according to the party’s newspaper, has kept North Korea “from falling under the sway of the transnational banks and corporations that dictate to most of the world.” The WWP has campaigned against the war-crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. A recent Workers World editorial declared, “Iraq has done absolutely nothing wrong.”

I'd like to consider myself vaguely left-wing and a progressive. heraclitus once called me a Burkean conservative, granted, but I think that's reconcilable with a progressive perspective, especially if I toss in my interested in punctuated equilibrium and my admiration for the French Revolution. As Mitterrand said, anything that makes reactionaries panic so must be good. I draw the line at allying with Communists, though, or any sort of totalitarians. Are we so desperate, really?