Mark Phillips: The American Question

1/23/03: Red-baiters still.

Right-wing blogmeister Byron York pulls out a dusty old canon, in the February 10 issue of National Review:

More than a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, and long after most Americans stopped worrying about the Red Menace, a significant part of the movement that has risen up in opposition to war in Iraq is, in essence, a Communist front.

His article, titled "Reds Still", explains:

The protest was put together by a group called International ANSWER, which stands for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. ANSWER is an outgrowth of another group called the International Action Center, a San Francisco-based organization that showcases the work of Ramsey Clark, the Johnson administration attorney general who has specialized in anti-American causes. Both ANSWER and the International Action Center are closely allied with a small but energetic Marxist-Leninist organization known as the Workers World Party, which in its turbulent history has supported the Soviet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Chinese government's crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Today, the WWP devotes much of its energy to supporting the regimes in Iraq and North Korea.

At the demonstration, which many media reports portrayed as a gathering of mainstream Americans, speaker after speaker condemned the United States with ancient Communist rhetoric: "revolution," "struggle," "oppressed peoples," "imperialism," and "liberation." One speaker even addressed her fellow protesters as "comrades."

York lays it on thick, for instance in this section sub-headlined "Comrade Brian":

Perhaps the most visible face of the demonstration was its co-director and chief spokesman, Brian Becker. Becker got a lot of exposure in the days leading up to the rally; he was quoted in newspaper articles, appeared on TV, and did radio interviews to promote the event. A member of the secretariat of the Workers World Party — and called by some the party's house intellectual — Becker is a contributor to the party's newspaper, Workers World, as well as a top official of International ANSWER and the International Action Center.

Why all the fuss? Because the anti-war message has begun to resonate with average Americans.

York's piece is an intervention into the political struggle for and against the War on Islam. It's an ideological intervention: the manipulative argument that, if an event's organizers are bad, the event itself must be tainted. It's an attempt to discourage demonstrators from attending future events, thus to slow the momentum of the movement. It exists because of that momentum.

Its manipulativeness is transparent. Organizers of anti-war events are service providers to the public. Attendees make use of that service without reference to the politics of the provider. When you pay your telephone bill, do you care about the politics of the CEO of your local phone company? Of course not. What matters isn't the politics of a rally's organizers, but the politics of the attendees. They're the ones who are demonstrating. This is a basic corollary of the principle of free speech. York's attempt to obscure that principle is an encouraging signal of right-wing alarm over the movement's growth.

Right-wing discourse commonly rely on manipulation to obscure basic principles. It's one technique the right uses to mobilize voters who otherwise would refuse to support them. Our project on narratives has more information.

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