Nonviolent Activist, January - February 2006
NVA LETTERS
Déjà Vu
I am deeply troubled by the article written by Bill Weinberg in your Nov-Dec 2005 issue: “The Question of International A.N.S.W.E.R.”
As a 72-year-old who remembers the intra-left squabbles of the many “Socialist/Socialist Workers/SPF”groups of the 1950s and how those futile conflicts served mainly to fuel the right-wingers and the Joseph McCarthyite movement of the time, I think “Déjà vu! Enough already!”
If there is anything in the antiwar movement needs at this moment, it is unity. As I followed Mr. Weinberg’s argument as he quoted Christopher Hitchens on how “A.N.S.W.E.R. and the Workers World Party are following a ‘line’ championed by Ramsey Clark and the former Soviets,” I thought, “not again.” Why does the left once more want to commit seppuku on itself? We have been through this before.
Instead of giving pleasure to Bush, Gonzales, Cheney, and the near-fascist people that oppose any criticism of the present policy, you, the WRL, are opening your pages to back-biting between two entities of the antiwar and peace movement? Why? What good does this internal blood-letting ever do? You are pleasing only the Bushites and those who would label us in the left as “crazies.”
I don’t care about factional disputes between UFPJ and IAC/A.N.S.W.E.R. Let us focus on the real enemy. Are you folks suicidal?
Norman K. Smith Exton, PA
