Marching with Stalin…
by Michael Kelly
Last weekend, the left held large antiwar marches in Washington, San Francisco and elsewhere. Major media coverage of these marches was highly respectful. This was ``A Stirring in the Nation,'' in the words of an approving New York Times editorial, ``impressive for the obvious mainstream roots of the marchers.''
There is, increasingly, much that happens in the world that the Times feels its readers should be sheltered from knowing. The marches in Washington and San Francisco were chiefly sponsored, as was last October's antiwar march in Washington, by a group the Times chose to call in its only passing reference ``the activist group International Answer.''
International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) is a front group for the communist Workers World Party. The Workers World Party is, literally, a Stalinist organization. It rose out of a split within the old Socialist Workers Party over the Soviet Union's 1956 invasion of Hungary--the breakaway Workers World Party was all for the invasion. A.N.S.W.E.R. today unquestioningly supports any despotic regime that lays any claim to socialism, or simply to anti-Americanism. It supported the butchers of Beijing after the slaughter of Tiananmen Square. It supports Saddam and his Baathist torture-state. It supports the last official Stalinist state, North Korea, in the mass starvation of its citizens. It supported Slobodan Milosevic after the massacre at Srebrenica. It supports the mullahs of Iran, and the narco-gangsters of Colombia and the bus-bombers of Hamas.
This is whom the left now marches with. The left marches with the Stalinists. The left marches with those who would maintain in power the leading oppressors of humanity in the world. It marches with, and stands with, and cheers on, people like the speaker at the Washington rally, Imam Musa of the mosque Masjid al-Islam, who declared ``the real terrorists have always been the United Snakes of America,'' and then led the crowd in the Islamic bombers' chant ``Allahu Akhbar!'' It marches with people like the former Black Panther Charles Baron, who said in Washington, ``if you're looking for the axis of evil, look inside the belly of this beast.''