The Pepsi vs. Coke of the Antiwar Movement: Two Brands, One Communism
by Rory Miller

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. 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. 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 the seeming unraveling of the Coalition, outsiders can begin to prod the seamy underbelly of the movement. What we find there is not far from what Horowitz himself had said.

EARLY WARNING SIGNS

The first warning signs were obvious from the beginning, during the shameful 9/11 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 declaring such things as “as freedom fighters, we stand in solidarity…” Allow me to translate: the terms “freedom fighters” and “solidarity” are big red labels that shout “Marxist.” Besides this, there was the hawking of the Socialist Worker, a newspaper published by the International Socialist Organization.

In the following two weeks, a series of statements were issued on the local version of the Indymedia website. Indymedia is 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!" rants, and harping on such topics as police brutality, living wages, anti-Jewish sentiment, and other such fads. These statements were signed by Ronald Cruz. Mr. Cruz, currently a first year graduate student in the School of Education is a BAMN (Bring Back Affirmative Action by Any Means Necessary) member. Mysteriously, after a week or so, these announcements dried up.

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. However, when one considers that BAMN is a front group for a Trotskyite group known as the Revolutionary Workers’ League 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.

COALITION POLITICS PART I: THE ISO

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.

First we have the International Socialist Organization. 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. A main contact is one 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. He was one of less than ten protestors who disrupted 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”). I personally witnessed Snehal steal the Daily Cal during the most recent rounds of thefts. Now Snehal is one of the major players in the Berkeley Coalition to Stop the War.

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” 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.” 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 example 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. They charged that the ISO had hijacked the Conference. One thread on Indymedia sums it up nicely. 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.

COALITION POLITICS PART II: SJP

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) are another infamous Leftist 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 siege of Wheeler Hall, SJP was involved in the 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.” during Yom Kippur. Snehal is a member of SJP. Isn’t it puzzling how the same few people show up in all these different clubs? I 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.

COALITION POLITICS PART III: LEFT TURN

The last group in the Stop the War trinity is named Left Turn, whose motto is “from anticapitalism to revolution”. In their new online pamphlet “No to Bush’s War,” 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 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 ANSWER?

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). Included groups are 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). There's 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 we find this statement: “Bombing a poor country? Killing Children? Cluster bombs? This is not ‘fighting terrorism.’ This IS terrorism!”

Additionally, the IAC is a proponent of every Progressive cause under the sun, including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Vieques, Affirmative Action, the “right to a job” and many others too numerous to list here- the full list is on their website . It was founded in 1992 by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsay 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 goes back to authoritarian Communists, this time a group known as the Workers’ World Party (WWP), that has established, through Ramsay 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 Milosevicis detailed 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 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 December 8th issue of the People’s Weekly World, the weekly newspaper of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), there is an article describing the People’s Weekly World Northern California banquet on November 18th, where Barbara Lubin will be among three honorees. The banquet included Congressional citations provided by the darling of the antiwar movement, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), who has a long history of support for Communist dictatorships, most notably her actions on behalf of the dictator of Grenada while a congressional aide to former representative Ron Dellums (D-Oakland).

IN CONCLUSION

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!