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Justin
Raimondo, a contributor to numerous ultra-right media outlets and
editorial director of the mis-named “Antiwar.com,” has chosen a new
target for his diatribes. At the end of July and early August, for two
weeks running, he concentrated his fire on the organized antiwar
movement in the United States—claiming that it is dominated by the socialist
left.
Raimondo
singled out Socialist Action as a major culprit, accusing the
organization of trying to “pack” the United National Antiwar Conference
(UNAC), held July 23-25 in Albany, N.Y.
In
his first article, “Why is the Antiwar Movement Stalled? In Two Words:
the Left” (posted July 28, 2010), Raimondo railed against the UNAC
conference, which brought 800 activists—representing major national
antiwar organizations and grassroots committees alike—to Albany to
discuss and approve an ambitious agenda of activities for the coming
months.
Instead
of recognizing the conference as a tremendous achievement, instead of
seeing it as an important stepping stone toward rebuilding a broadly
based national antiwar coalition, Raimondo lashed out at it as
“sectarian.” “The antiwar movement remains a leftist sandbox,” Raimondo
exclaimed, “where sectarians get to pontificate—and do little else…”
“He
wrote, “One has only to look at the conference program to see why the
antiwar movement remains marginal, at best: a keynote address by
perennial leftist icon Noam Chomsky, who was paired with [South
Carolina AFL-CIO President] Donna DeWitt, a left-wing labor official…”
What
really got Raimondo’s dander up was a workshop (one of 33 workshops at
the UNAC conference) in which a multi-sided discussion took place on
the topic, “The Rise of Right Wing Populism & the Tea Party: Do We
Need a Right-Left Coalition?” Raimondo, an admirer of the America First
Committee that was organized for a brief time before World War II, was
ticked off that anyone could even put into question the effort to
cobble together a similar alliance between progressive social activists
and leaders of the ultra-right today.
America
First?
He
brought up an article by Christine Marie in the May 2010 edition of Socialist
Action newspaper, which had argued against the idea of building a
“Left-Right Alliance” in the antiwar movement (http://www.socialistaction.org/marie6.htm).
The article dealt in part with the America First Committee.
Raimondo
alleged, without foundation, that the Socialist Action article
had stated that the America First Committee was “anti-Semitic” and
“pro-Hitler.” While we did not make those characterizations of the
committee, our article did point out that it had never served as a
principled vehicle for antiwar activity. The corporation heads and
others who founded and funded America First believed that the
opportunity had not yet arrived to join the effort towards World War II.
Raimondo did not try to refute these facts.
He
went on to quote another passage from the May 2010 Socialist Action:
“To involve the great majority of the working people of the United
States today, the antiwar movement must be a safe place for the most militant
and combative components of the unions and of community struggles. It
must seem relevant to those whose first waking thought is how to find a
job or keep their house. It must be welcoming to the 200,000 LGBT
activists who recently marched on DC.
“A
united front with the anti-interventionist far right, on the other
hand, would require that our movement drop its demand for “Money for
Jobs, Not War!’ … It would naturally draw in the openly racist Tea
Party elements. Such a ‘united front’ would make the antiwar movement
uninhabitable by those most crucial to its success.”
This
strategy should be elementary to anyone with experience in political
and community organizing. But Raimondo didn’t get it—or pretended not
to. Here is his “translation” of Socialist Action newspaper’s
conclusions: “a left-right coalition would make the antiwar movement
uninhabitable by the inveterate sectarians of the ultra-left, whose
only concern is to recruit naïve young people into their dying little
sects.”
He
continued: “‘The unity that we need in the antiwar movement today,’ the
Trots proclaim at the end of their piece, ‘is the kind of unity
exemplified by the United National Antiwar Conference to be held in
Albany, NY, on July 23, 2010.’ No. What is needed is not
another leftist-dominated “coalition,” which puts on conferences that
address the faithful, reasserts their well-worn dogmas, and sponsors
marches of a few thousand (at most).”
Raimondo’s
second barrage
Chris
Gauvreau wrote a reply to Raimondo’s attack on the antiwar movement,
which was printed by Socialist Action and other websites. The
main theme of her article appeared in its title: “The Antiwar Movement
is not Stalled but Reawakening” She
made clear that the antiwar movement shows promise of broad unity and
strength for the future.
Gauvreau
described “the vitality and momentum” that was seen in the UNAC
proceedings and outlined the long calendar of activities approved by
the conference—which will culminate in mass national demonstrations in
New York City and San Francisco on April 9, 2011. And she contrasted
this reality to Raimondo’s allegations that the movement is snared in
the trap of Obama-worship, and that revival can be achieved only under
the terms of an alliance with the ultra-right.
But
Raimondo, in replying to Gauvreau, “Folly Left and Right” (posted on
Antiwar.com, Aug. 13, 2010), failed to hear her main arguments.
Instead, he declaimed on his usual topic—himself and the narrow niche
he has tried to carve for himself in political affairs: “Am I really a
‘right-wing ideologue’? Libertarianism is neither right nor left: we
reject these arbitrary, archaic, and obfuscating categories....”
It
would be useless to spend time trying to pinpoint Raimondo’s exact
place on the political spectrum. But Pat Buchanan—a former advisor to
Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, inveterate Cold Warrior, and vocal opponent of
women’s abortion rights—has had no trouble in identifying Raimondo with
the right. Buchanan called Raimondo’s book, “Reclaiming the American
Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement” (Center for
Libertarian Studies, June 1993, reprinted 2008), “a veritable Iliad of
the American Right,” and wrote the introduction to the second edition
of the volume.
Raimondo
writes for a number of ultra-right websites and blogs. For example, he
is listed on the homepage of Chroniclesmagazine.org as a regular
columnist, as is Pat Buchanan. Chronicles is published by the
Rockford Institute, which in its own words, “has worked to preserve the
institutions of the Christian West: the family, the Church, the rule of
law; private property, free enterprise, and moral discipline…”
To
be sure, in his Aug. 13 hit piece on the antiwar movement, Raimondo
backed down slightly from his earlier claims that the UNAC conference
was completely dominated by leftists. As he put it: “Although
I’m sure the intrepid Socialist Actioneers tried to pack the meeting
with as many of their ‘cadre’ as possible, the mere fact that there was
a debate over the question of a left-right alliance against the war …
proves that the conference was more than just Socialist Action’s
Potemkin village.”
Is
Socialist Action in league with the Democrats?
Raimondo
(a former Republican Party congressional candidate) devoted a major
chunk of his article to attempting to prove that Socialist Action is
actually “oriented toward the left-wing of the Democratic Party.”
He
stated, “By spiking the creation of a truly broad antiwar movement with
their belligerent sectarian rhetoric, these Trotskyite wreckers perform
a service to the [Obama] administration while still maintaining an open
line to what White House press secretary Robert Gibbs calls ‘the
professional left.’”
He
even claimed that Socialist Action “hailed the election of Obama … as a
victory, albeit a limited one, for the ‘working class.’”
How
could he possibly try to prove such nonsense, since everything
Socialist Action has written on the subject states the opposite? Only
through trickery. He found an article by the editors of Socialist
Action newspaper about the 2008 presidential election (http://www.socialistaction.org/editors12.htm),
extracted a few sentences from it that report on the groundswell of
support for Obama at that time, and “interpreted“ the sentence as
signifying that Socialist Action was “enthused” for Obama.
In
this, he ignored the major point of the article, which explains why
Socialist Action did not support Obama in the election—and on
principle never supports the campaigns of ruling-class candidates.
Here
are some sentences from the Socialist Action editorial that
Raimondo chose to omit: “We see Obama as the chief representative of
the Democratic Party wing of capitalist America’s bipartisan attacks on
all working people. We do not wish him well. We stand in solidarity
with the oppressed and exploited of this nation who voted for Obama in
the vain hope that his promise of change would be fulfilled. But we did
not join them at the voting booth or lend credence to their illusions.”
But
dishonest arguments are what Raimondo and others of the right-wing
media thrive upon. Neither facts nor rational analysis matter half so
much as scandal, innuendo, and screeching denunciations. (Raimondo
could not refrain from adding the quip that Chris Gauvreau “talks like
a butcher Rachel Maddow,” a journalist who is open as a lesbian.)
Gays
and lesbians, immigrants, “welfare cheats,” the unions, and Muslims are
the problem in America, say the rightists. They hope their rhetoric and
lies will divert the anger of working people away from the real source
of responsibility for this country’s severe social problems and the
worldwide economic crisis—the capitalist system.
Now
these charlatans want to bring their forces into the antiwar movement.
As in the days of the old America First Committee, some right-wingers
believe that the current war effort is too expensive and too
divisive—and that it runs counter to the isolationist “Republic” they
hold as their model. But on other crucial social issues, they line up
squarely with the most reactionary of this country’s rulers against the
interests of working people and the oppressed.
For
that reason, a pact between the antiwar movement and Justin Raimondo,
Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, and their ilk would do nothing to build the
movement into a powerful mass-based force. It would instead place the
continuation of the movement in great jeopardy.
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