Are you a Stalinist, or a dupe? ID thinks you are. Be patronized, here.

[Faygo Kid]

Issues & Insights
Bad Company
Posted 9/23/2005

The Home Front: The media have pushed the idea that the demonstration this weekend at the White House was an "anti-war" gathering. What they didn't say was who was behind it.

No doubt, many fine, sincere people demonstrated this weekend against the U.S. liberation of Iraq. Being Americans, they're certainly entitled to do so.

Maybe they even endorsed the view of those who organized the demonstrations. On Thursday, the organizers ran a two-page ad. On one, they called the Bush administration liars. On the other, they ran the names of all those who have died in Iraq.

But we'd be surprised if those well-meaning folks understood whose banner they were marching under, because the media aren't reporting it. For the record, the lead organizer is ANSWER, which the media routinely refer to as an "antiwar group."

It is nothing of the sort.

In fact, ANSWER is a front group for the Stalinist Workers World Party. And any group that qualifies for that epithet in front of its name deserves special scrutiny, since Josef Stalin was responsible for the murder of as many as 25 million human beings.

Well, you might ask, does it really matter? It sure does.

Imagine for a moment it was a different group that sponsored the demonstration — say, a neo-Nazi group. Think The Washington Post and other media would report that? You bet they would.

After all, Adolf Hitler and his thugs were some of the worst mass murderers of all time. We would expect — no, demand — media to report that a demonstration attended by hundreds of middle class moms, concerned fathers and pacifist students was in fact organized by Brownshirts.

So why do communists — particularly those who march under Stalin's flag — get different treatment? And why do thousands of average people feel comfortable marching arm in arm with them?

It's a puzzle. After all, according to the "Black Book of Communism" — a widely cited and respected compendium of communism's crimes in the 20th century — communist regimes murdered as many as 100 million people over the last century.

That's quite a record. Indeed, all the century's great mass murders — Mao Zedong (65 million), Stalin (25 million), Hitler (21 million), Pol Pot (2 million) — were communists or socialists.

Yet many well-meaning people who marched this weekend perhaps didn't know all this. Or perhaps they don't mind having their cause besmirched by people who aren't really anti-war at all, but anti-America, anti-West, anti-freedom and anti-capitalist.

It's disappointing that so many marchers will demonstrate, heedless that they're being used by people who hold them — and their bourgeois pacifism — in contempt.

Maybe it proves the old adage: Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.


Return to top of page


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


© Investor's Business Daily, Inc. 2000-2005. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction or redistribution is prohibited without prior authorized permission from Investor's Business Daily. For information on reprints, webprints, permissions or back issue orders, go to www.investors.com/terms/reprints.asp.

[porphyrian]

1. Hitler wasn't a communist or a socialist.

He used the word "socialist" in naming his government to con ignorant fuckers like this author into believing he was for the people rather than a fascist asshole.

[lateo]

18. Just like today's republicans aren't really conservative...

they spend like there is no tomorrow...

[Rex]

2. Link?

nt

[Faygo Kid]

6. Sorry. Go to Investors Business Daily. Kind of scary.

That it would be posted on that staid rich persons' site. Might be a sign that the line is going to be drawn in the sand. I personally have thought they would throw Bush over, but perhaps this article indicates otherwise. Might be more important than we at first glance realize.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

15. Some Links from ANSWER's own site, WWP, LA Weekly, and Wikipedia

A thorough-going reading seems to show that Marxist-Leninists and Maoists are also involved. But then again, just about everyone else is too.

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/50/news-corn.php

http://www.answers.com/topic/workers-world-party-1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSWER

http://www.workers.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_World_Party

[BiggJawn]

3. This struck me as ironic...

"It's disappointing that so many marchers will demonstrate, heedless that they're being used by people who hold them — and their bourgeois pacifism — in contempt."

Change "bourgeois pacifism" to "Blind Loyalty" and you've got almost every Cargo Cult ReTHUGlican under $30,000 a year...

[Bernardo de La Paz]

13. Cargo Cult Republican! What a powerful little meme!

[BiggJawn]

16. Glad you liked it. Do you know what I mean?...

Easy to understand, if you know what the "Cargo Cult" was....

Richard Feynman explains:

"I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land."


So by relation, A cluless person who sits in his leaking single-wide, driving his 19-y-o Hoopdy to his $6 job, listening to Gush Pfleghmball telling him that SMART people vote for the GOP, and all you have to do is load public offices with ReTHUGlicans, and you too shall be wealthy beyond your dreams SOME DAY because the GOP is the party of the go-getter, the small entrepreneur, the Champion of the Little Guy, unlike those DemocRATS, who want to choke the life out of your embryonic business idea with RULES and ideas that you need to share with LAZY people....

Year after year goes by, the single-wide leaks more, and the "Cargo" El Gushbo keeps promising never comes....

[nonconformist]

4. Hitler used to make huge socialist promises that he wouldn't keep

Who does THAT sound like?

[thebigidea]

5. because no one gives a shit about commies, you whiny 50s throwback

[leveymg]

7. Oh. Jezabel, we're back to Red-baiting? This isn't 1955. Joseph Who?

I seriously doubt anyone under the age of 80 is much of a die-hard Stalinist these days.

Why are you posting this crap? If it's to tell us where this ANSWER trashing is coming from, fine. But, I think not. There's five trash ANSWER threads going right now, and this seems a tad organized to me.

I don't care if they're red, black, or green. Thank you, ANSWER for doing a great job of putting this awesome event together.

Those who don't like it, can do the hard work themselves, next time. Only, I bet they won't.

[confludemocrat]

8. Source is investors business daily. For them, Left=Stalinists.

The only fighters for civil rights in the Jim Crow days were communists. I got no problems with them commies on this.

[Kurovski]

9. The prose fairly vibrates with a mournful desperation.

They know they're pretty well done for.

[MisterP]

10. Soyuz nerushimiy...

[Qibing Zero]

11. McCarthyism lives on

Here I was thinking that it had changed from 'communist' to 'radical', 'liberal', and 'extremist', but sure enough - some idiot is out there blaming dictatorship crimes on socialism.

They're whining over a PEACE protest, for goodness sake. Meanwhile, we have fascists in control of our country stripping us of our freedoms and taking the lives of thousands and thousands, from the Iraqis, to our soldiers, to the poor living in the gulf coast. It's a goddamn protest to END killing, yet they get compared to Hitler. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of fucking sense.

I'd call them pigs, but pigs at least display some level of intelligence.

[SomewhereOutThere424]

12. It's funny

The creator of the editorial will have no clue that he's being used by the bush administration for the exact reason he preaches until his death throes.

I find it amazing how people can spend a good portion of their lives studying propoganda and fanatic devotion, and have no clue they're a part of it.

[radwriter0555]

14. COMMUNISM didn't kill anyone. The corrupt thugs heading the regimes are

responsible for all deaths, murders, concentration camps, shootings, beheadings, false wars, lies, treason and corrupted voting processes.

It isn't political models that are evil in and of themselves, but the men who abuse and corrupt the government whose banners they've wrapped themselves in.

I like Communism, I like Socialism. They're for people, not politicians, and when good politicians lead, everyone benefits, not just the few, the white, the male and the already rich.

[kiki]

19. As Julie Burchill said:

They tell you how many people Communism's killed, and they tell you how many people fascism's killed. But they can't tell you how many people capitalism's killed, because the numbers are too high to calculate.

[Moderator]

17. faygokid

Per DU copyright rules
please post only four
paragraphs from the
copyrighted news source.


Thank you.


DU Moderator