Re: Any platform will do. Just get the message out there! Archived Message
Posted by Ian M on February 20, 2023, 6:59 pm, in reply to "Re: Any platform will do. Just get the message out there!"
Max Blumenthal had a good rant about this on the GZ youtube channel (possibly posted here already), starts from 6:20 but Jimmy makes some decent points in the run up to it too:
'[O]ne of the things that I think threatens some of the people attacking this rally is that they can't be in charge of the entire thing and decide who to exclude, because they love to exclude people, they love to come up with a laundry list of boutique social issues that you have to sign on to every single one with no, and there's no debate allowed, in order to participate in a rally about something else which ostensibly is what your organization is supposed to revolve around, which is the war state. This is the professional sectarian left that I've had to deal with for years and years and years, whether it was on Palestine or Syria and then you know on covid they excluded everyone from their little meeting rooms if you had any problem with thousands and thousands of workers being fired because they didn't want to take an experimental gene therapy injection that doesn't prevent transmission or infection. They would completely castigate you and then you wouldn't be allowed to speak at their anti-war rallies because you opposed like lockdowns that sent people into suicidal ideation and opioid addiction and kept children out of school for a year. Because you opposed that the professional sectarian left would exclude you, and what this rally is not doing is excluding people, including them - they would be welcome to speak and participate - but they don't want to. They want to attack because they've lost control, because the professional sectarian left has failed in every respect to form a viable anti-war movement for the past 20 years. And here we are: they want the anti-war movement to be 100 people all wearing the same shirt, with multiple advanced degrees, who agree on all the same boutique social issues, who can fit in one room, and they control everyone and everything everyone says. And this rally has broken that model because it's just open, it's what you make of it, it's what anyone wants it to be. And so they are working to sabotage it, and I know from having worked with some of these people in the professional sectarian left that they destroy every institution that they become a part of. They burrow from within, they get in there and then if you are trying to work for a greater goal within that institution and it doesn't follow their sectarian line then they start to attack you from within and run campaigns against you, and then ultimately they try to destroy the whole organization unless you get them the hell out of there. And so every institution, every NGO, every media organization that they get in they're a problem and now they're becoming a problem within this one. All we're trying to do is stop a nuclear war. And yeah I do I deeply disagree with a lot of the other speakers on things like unions or crime and these kinds of issues, uh I'm gonna go out and I'll organize for, uh you know teachers unions to fight privatization in the future. This doesn't stop me from that. The libertarians [...] they're not going to put a chip in my brain that suddenly changes me and transforms me into some kind of crypto Nazi. I can go up there and say whatever I want, as can any left-wing speaker.' Fits what I've observed in various orgs that took on woke ideology and tried to enforce it on everybody... Can't believe they succeeded in stopping people from appearing at this rally, even the likes of Medea Benjamin, a stalwart of the anti-war movement (9:40): '[M]y friend Medea Benjamin who's someone that you know I've worked with for years, who's done some of the most important anti-war organizing is not allowed to speak. You're not allowed to speak because there's naughty people on stage. It's like Ned Flanders won't allow his kids to have sugar or Rod and Todd they're like "we're not allowed, Bart, we're not allowed to have the sugar". So Medea is not allowed by on, you know, people who like these uh professional sectarians who are in her organization, and and so she had to issue a statement. And I find this really upsetting honestly, that someone of Medea's stature, with her experience and wisdom has to even do this and say this, and I've been trying to discuss this with her directly. She was just in Cuba, she's been fighting the siege of Cuba for longer than I've been alive or as long as I've been alive. But Medea Benjamin said: "People are asking me why I'm not speaking at the rage against the war machine rally. I supported the rally from the time of its conception and I support it today even though I will not be one of the speakers because the organization I support, I have been a part of for 20 years, Code Pink urged me not to speak. The Code Pink staff," meaning people who work for her "felt that my participation would hurt the group standing with other coalitions committed to gay rights, women's rights and anti-racism. They felt that Jackson Hinkle has taken stands that are anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-feminist and islamophobia," I guess they mean islamophobic, "and they were concerned about the sponsorship of the libertarian party's Mesis caucus Miss mises caucus..." ' JD: 'This is exactly my joke: Hey, I want to stop a nuclear war but not with those people. I want to spoken [sic] with people who wear pink hats and vote the right way and and have all the same sensibilities that I have. That's not how anti-war shit works. That's why in the last 20 years the war machine exploded while you people did shit like this. It's laughable, you're a joke. That's a joke.' (Youtube auto-transcript + punctuation, might not be 100% accurate.) They go through some other examples, I think including WSWS, dismissing their criticism in similar terms. I agree with them. cheers, I
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