Recycling Radicalism

March 24, 2003
Vol. 19, No.6
by William F. Jasper

Is America on the brink of another violent epoch of 1960s-style upheaval and polarization? Will riots and violent street demonstrations erupt in your city? Will our country be torn by on-going strife and renewed bouts of terrorism? The dials are being preset, it appears, for precisely those outcomes. The growing mobilization of "peace" demonstrators and the steady radicalization of the movement is a dark portent of coming ill.

Following the same 1960s formula of "organize, mobilize, radicalize, and militarize," today's supposed anti-war leaders are preparing tens of thousands of new recruits to "man the barricades" and serve as cannon fodder in an escalating round of revolutionary violence. This should come as no surprise, since the key organizers of these events are veteran radicals of the Vietnam War era's turbulent demonstrations. As we will show, many of these individuals are actually hard-core Communists with long records of sedition, treason, terrorism, and aiding America's enemies.

The violence that erupted during the February 16th demonstrations in San Francisco foreshadows things to come. A reported 200,000 demonstrators came out to what was, for the most part, a peaceful rally, featuring lots of singing, tie-dyed sandalistas, and Kumbaya vibes. Actor/activist Danny Glover, serving as master of ceremonies, provided star power, along with singer and longtime radical activist Bonnie Raitt. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, about 1,000 of the demonstrators broke off from the main gathering to rampage through a shopping district, smashing windows, starting fires, spraying graffiti, taking over traffic intersections and cable cars, blocking the municipal rail, and combatting the police. Two police officers were reported injured and taken to San Francisco General Hospital. Forty-six rioters were reported arrested ÷ 28 men and 18 women.

This is not an isolated incident; the "peace" activists have been refining and escalating their violent organizing tactics since their wildly successful "Battle in Seattle" in December 1999. At that time, the masses of street demonstrators were purportedly opposing the sovereignty-destroying World Trade Organization (WTO). That wasn't the real reason at all, as subsequent events proved. After capturing world attention with violent riots, the demonstration organizers, including 1960s radical Ralph Nader and his lieutenant, Lori Wallach, called not for abolishing the WTO, but for expanding its powers.

Crushing Sovereignty

This apparent contradiction did not surprise us; neither did it surprise those in the know on the other side. Leftist one-worlder Robert Wright, a senior editor for The New Republic, wrote approvingly of this about-face in a cover story entitled, "America is surrendering its sovereignty to a world government. Hooray." The Left, you see, is not against globalization so long as it's based on the socialist model.

Wright notes in his article: "Much power now vested in the nation-state is indeed starting to migrate to international institutions, and one of these is the WTO." He saw this as a very good thing. He also appreciated that "Nader and most of the Seattle left would gladly accept a sovereignty-crushing world body if it followed the leftist model of supranational governance found in the European Union." "Indeed," said Wright, "it was partly to please the Seattle activists that President Clinton espoused a future WTO whose member nations would meet global environmental and labor standards or else face sanction."

Mr. Nader and his Citizen Works organization are now trying to pull the same kind of reversal with their phony opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a regional government trap to be patterned after the European Union. They are also key players in the current anti-war demonstrations, along with many of their fellow anti-WTO, anti-FTAA cohorts. And they are once again using the demonstrations to push the world government bandwagon, this time through appeals to further empower the UN.

Now, the violence that produced the Seattle "concessions" from Clinton and the WTO for Nader and associates had been provided by carefully trained, highly organized shock troops obviously connected to the event's organizers, even though their ties were somewhat camouflaged to maintain deniability. The organizers claimed that the rioters were independent anarchists. These black-clad "anarchists" have appeared over and over again to help instigate riots at demonstrations from Seattle to San Francisco, New York to Washington, D.C., and London to Rome, Berlin, Paris, Genoa, etc. This follows the same game plan used by many of these aging radicals during their rampages in the 1960s and '70s: maintain a public facade of moderation and nonviolence while coordinating activities with more militant allies that encourage the mainstream demonstrators to drift steadily to the more violent fringes.

One of the main anarchist groups operating at the Seattle melee and other violent venues is the Ruckus Society, which boasts many ties to so-called mainstream organizations, such as Greenpeace, Nader's Citizen Works, and the Council on Foreign Relations. With generous funding from Ted Turner, Jane Fonda, and Ben Cohen (of the Ben & Jerry's ice cream fortune), the Ruckus terrorist operatives have been able to run sophisticated schools and camps training thousands of activists in "direct action" tactics. Ruckus alumni formed the core of what Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney called "a cadre · of criminal conspirators" who "go in and cause mayhem." Commissioner Timoney's officers had experienced the Ruckus violence up close at the 2000 Republican National Convention. Yet, despite its record, Ruckus is welcome in the so-called peace movement and is listed as a member of organizing coalitions like International ANSWER, United For Peace, Global Exchange, and Peace Action.

Tinsel Town Facade

The public, however, rarely sees the radical face of the peaceniks, as represented by Ruckus and the many Communist groups dominating the movement. Instead, they are given a rotating stage of Hollywood pop icons serving as front men for the militants: Danny Glover; Sean Penn; Woody Harrelson; Susan Sarandon; Martin Sheen; Matt Damon; Robin Williams; Sarah Jessica Parker; etc.

Aging activists of the old Hollywood Left ÷ "Hanoi Jane" Fonda, Ed "the Red" Asner, Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, Norman Lear ÷ are also active in the new crusade, but they have yielded the limelight to a younger set of pampered radicals. Together with a phalanx of professional revolutionaries, college professors, and socialist millionaire moguls, they are building the "peace" effort into a virulently anti-American youth movement. They intend for this growing fifth column to complete the destructive revolution they launched a generation ago.

We saw a glimpse of this revolution on February 15th and 16th, when millions of demonstrators in hundreds of cities around the world suddenly materialized in mass protests against U.S. plans to invade Iraq. "An unprecedented wave of anti war demonstrations swept the globe on Feb. 15," the People's Weekly World, official newspaper of the Communist Party USA, boasted, "as an estimated 11 million demonstrators poured into the streets, determined to block the Bush administration's drive to war against Iraq." Unprecedented? Hardly. We have seen similar global spectacles many times in the past. The major media's reporters and commentators are drawing the obvious comparisons to the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the 1960s and '70s, of course.

One of the major surprises concerning media coverage of the current demonstrations is the resurrection of the long-lost "C" word: Communist. Amazingly, the Red records of some of the leading organizers are finding their way into the news. Throughout the Vietnam War and into the "nuclear freeze" and "anti-missile defense" campaigns of the 1980s, the Communist leadership and direction of the "peace" movement was transparent and thoroughly documented ÷ but almost never reported in the major media. The peaceniks were cast perennially as idealistsic pacifists, even though their leaders were Communist party officials and fellow travelers who openly sided with the Communist Vietcong, killing American soldiers. Even many self-styled conservatives backed off of the issue, fearful of being smeared with the "McCarthyite" label if they pointed out the obvious connections. Then came Gorbachev; Communism supposedly collapsed and died. For the past decade, in liberal Democrat and conservative Republican circles, it has been considered not only pass&Mac218; but downright gauche to use the "C" word.

Red Encore

But the Reds are back again, leading the marches and demonstrations. It's the raging topic on talk radio. Even some liberal-left commentators are admitting the connection. Veteran leftist David Corn of the ultra-left Nation magazine was recently on FOX TV's O'Reilly Factor, pointing out that one of the main groups organizing the anti-war marches, International ANSWER, is dominated by the Workers World Party, a gang of hard-core Communists.

On February 13th, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on a Rush Limbaugh excoriation of the demonstrators. "It's beyond me how anybody can look at these protesters and call them anything other than what they are: anti-American, anti-capitalist, pro- Marxists and communists," Limbaugh had said. The "furor" over the Red connection, the newspaper noted, "stems from the link between International ANSWER and the extreme left-wing Workers World Party." Said the Chronicle:

The Workers World Party and Richard Becker, a party leader and leader of International Answer, have defended Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, Kim Jong Il of North Korea, Milosevic ÷ who is on trial at the Hague for war crimes ÷ and Chinese leaders who put down the 1989 "counter-revolution" in Tiananmen Square.

Although the Chronicle got Mr. Becker's first name wrong (it's Brian, not Richard), it did accurately state some of the group's positions. The Workers World Party (WWP) website claims that the group is composed of "independent Marxists who respect the struggles for self-determination and progress of oppressed nations." Oppressed nations like, say, North Korea? The problem is that the WWP slavishly sides with North Korea's oppressor, Communist dictator Kim Jong Il. Last year Becker, a member of the WWP secretariat, was a guest of "Uncle Kim" for a glorious propaganda tour of that wretched "Peoples Republic."

Laboring with Becker at International ANSWER is Deidre Griswold Stapp, editor of Workers World newspaper. Stapp was trained in Cuba in the 1960s and '70s as a member of the Venceremos Brigades, an important adjunct of Fidel's Tri-Continental terrorist training apparatus.

Becker, Stapp, and their comrades at the WWP are unreconstructed, unapologetic, hard-core Communists. They split off from the Trotskyite terrorist Socialist Workers Party in 1959 over minor ideological differences but have yielded none of their radical edge. They steadfastly support the most vicious Red dictators, including Fidel Castro in Cuba, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and the murderous Communist regimes in China and Vietnam. Their website exults that the 1975 Communist takeover of Vietnam (and the ensuing genocidal bloodbath) was a "liberation" in which "U.S. imperialism suffered its most outstanding defeat in history."

With a pedigree like that, not many Americans will confuse the WWP with the American Legion or the VFW. But Brian Becker is a director of International ANSWER, the principal coalition spearheading the anti-American "peace" efforts. And other WWP Reds are conspicuous in the coalition's activist leadership as well. Obviously, this plays havoc with the peaceniks' attempts to paint themselves as a broad alliance of ordinary folks. So the tack they have adopted is to claim that International ANSWER is just one of many umbrella organizations promoting the demonstrations and the WWP is but one of many diverse groups within the International ANSWER coalition. The major media's ranks are amply stuffed with left-wing activists and sympathizers who have largely cooperated in this ruse. ("Just a few of those WWP fanatics, nothing to get too worked up over.")

Unfortunately, many of the pro-war conservative critics have aided this ploy by focusing almost exclusively on the WWP connection to the demonstrators. But the WWP is not International ANSWER's only Red problem, and International ANSWER is not the only group or coalition in the peace movement. In fact, as during the Vietnam War era, today's organized anti-war menagerie is dominated by hard-core Communists ÷ and even convicted terrorists ÷ including many with longtime ties to the Soviet KGB and Cuban DGI.<>*

Most conservative critics also have failed to note a trait common throughout the radical peacenik movement: a slobbering affection for the UN that matches their loathing of America.

Ramsey Clark, the founder of International ANSWER, for instance, declares: "Only firm opposition to war can serve and save the United Nations. The peoples and nations of the world are looking to the United Nations to prevent the United States from waging a war of aggression against Iraq."

The Move On coalition is telling its people to ask Senate and House members to sign a "ÎDear Colleague' letter asking the President to let the U.N. Inspectors do their job."

United For Peace urges its activists to flood Congress with calls of support for a Senate resolution that "calls on the president to support the United Nations weapons inspection program."

Win Without War is telling its legions to flood Congress with the message that "Supporting the current UN disarmament mission in Iraq is critical."

Meanwhile, Peace Action proclaims:

The US must do its part to strengthen international legal systems in order for them to be as effective as possible. This means immediately paying US back dues to the United Nations (UN) and working through the UN to strengthen international laws on terrorism and the means to enforce them. The US should also support the International Criminal Court (ICC)....

Reviewing these groups' literature reveals that their revolutionary leaders are laboring in giddy anticipation of the day when the U.S. will be submerged in, and totally subservient to, the United Nations. What will come as a shock to many is that, all the furious rhetoric notwithstanding, the position of these radicals is not that much different from that of the Bush administration. And for that important story, we direct the reader to the article beginning on the next page.

* In the next issue of THE NEW AMERICAN, we will examine this anti-war menagerie in more detail.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2003/03-24-2003/vo19no06_radicalism.htm