[Marxism] "progresive white supremacism" again rears its ugly head on the list?

[Dbachmozart at aol.com]

Joaquin Bustelo a few weeks ago --  
 
What Lenni Brenner did was simply, in the time honored,  white-supremacist
manner of racist imperialist "progressives" and "radicals,"  was to leave the
Vietnamese, the MAIN PROTAGONISTS of this world-historic  victory, completely
out of the picture, attributing it INSTEAD to white  people.
 
My question - 
 
Can we expect a similar attack on Cliff Conner for his "progressive white  
supremacism"??

 
 
To the Editor:

I was glad to hear William Ayers rebut, in his own  words, the 
meanspirited and absurd campaign of demonization that the  right-wing 
blogosphere conducted against him. I encountered Mr. Ayers many  years 
ago in the movement against the Vietnam War and I would like to offer  
some context in which his retrospective evaluation of that movement 
can  be better understood. Bill Ayers and I have opposing views about 
the  effectiveness of that movement. He sees it as a mostly empty 
glass (it  couldn't stop the war) and I see it as a glass half full 
(it did stop the  war, but it took many years to do so).

There were, broadly speaking, two  very different and opposed "wings" 
of the antiwar movement of the 'sixties.  Bill Ayers and I were on 
opposite sides. He was (again, generally speaking)  in the wing that 
most people will remember because its leading figures, like  Abbie 
Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, were very colorful characters who naturally  
became the focus of the mass news media. The other wing, to which I  
devoted several years of my young life, was much less exciting. 
Instead  of dramatic pronunciations and spectacular actions designed 
to attract media  attention, we went about the boring business of 
organizing mass protest  demonstrations under the prosaic slogan: 
"Bring the troops home now!"  Between 1965 and 1974, although the size 
of the demonstrations ebbed and  flowed (mostly ebbing in election 
years and flowing in between), the general  trend gave evidence of an 
explosive growth of antiwar sentiment in the  general population of 
the United States.

I agree with Bill Ayers that  the wing of the movement he represented 
was ineffective. I would go further  and say it was counterproductive, 
because its sophomoric ultraradicalism  tended to discredit the 
antiwar movement and alienate most of the American  population from 
it. But the movement as a whole nonetheless persisted and,  in my 
opinion, eventually played an essential role in ending the war. From  
handfuls of protesters in its early days, the movement grew to being  
able to bring hundreds of thousands of people into the streets. Those  
demonstrators were not, for the most part, radical students, but  
ordinary people from all walks of life. Once the message of the 
antiwar  movement began to take hold among the general population, its 
spread among  those who were sent to fight the war could not be 
prevented. And once the  GIs in Vietnam themselves turned solidly 
against the war, it was only a  matter of time before it ended.

Cliff Conner

Website:  www.PeoplesHistoryofScience.com


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