ANSWER
Since 2002, “anti-war” protests have mostly been organized by International ANSWER, a group run by the Workers World Party. The Workers World Party is a rabid supporter of anti-American dictatorships. For instance, here’s a dispatch written by Deirdre Griswold, of the WWP, during a visit to North Korea:
The land, factories, homes, hotels, parks, schools, hospitals, offices, museums, buses, subways–everything in the DPRK belongs to the people as a whole. No logos or brand names claim possession over any of it. When people talk about defending their country from the imperialists who would like to carve it up and swallow the pieces, they take for granted that it belongs to them, not to foreign investors or a wealthy elite, as in all the capitalist countries.Many of the north Koreans who deal with foreigners–translators, guides, political workers–have been abroad and readily acknowledge that the DPRK, which has had to sacrifice so much for its independence, is still struggling to provide many items that people with money enjoy elsewhere, especially in imperialist countries. But they believe they have something much more precious: a people who are united behind their leaders, who share their achievements as well as their shortages, and whose culture and history are not for sale.
For that, the people of the DPRK are ready to lay down their lives if George W. Bush carries out his bullying threats.
The WWP is a Communist organization, working hard to strengthen America’s enemies.
But the Lying Liberal Media never mentions this fact. They cover up the fact that ANSWER is a Communist organization by calling it “progressive” or “liberal.” Christopher Hitchens notes the latest egregious example of this bias:
Saturday’s demonstration in Washington, in favor of immediate withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq, was the product of an opportunistic alliance between two other very disparate “coalitions.” Here is how the New York Times (after a front-page and an inside headline, one of them reading “Speaking Up Against War” and one of them reading “Antiwar Rallies Staged in Washington and Other Cities“) described the two constituenciess of the event:
The protests were largely sponsored by two groups, the Answer Coalition, which embodies a wide range of progressive political objectives, and United for Peace and Justice, which has a more narrow, antiwar focus.The name of the reporter on this story was Michael Janofsky. I suppose that it is possible that he has never before come across “International ANSWER,” the group run by the “Worker’s World” party and fronted by Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the “resistance” in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the génocidaires in Rwanda. Quite a “wide range of progressive political objectives” indeed, if that’s the sort of thing you like. However, a dip into any database could have furnished Janofsky with well-researched and well-written articles by David Corn and Marc Cooper—to mention only two radical left journalists—who have exposed “International ANSWER” as a front for (depending on the day of the week) fascism, Stalinism, and jihadism.
The group self-lovingly calling itself “United for Peace and Justice” is by no means “narrow” in its “antiwar focus” but rather represents a very extended alliance between the Old and the New Left, some of it honorable and some of it redolent of the World Youth Congresses that used to bring credulous priests and fellow-traveling hacks together to discuss “peace” in East Berlin or Bucharest. Just to give you an example, from one who knows the sectarian makeup of the Left very well, I can tell you that the Worker’s World Party—Ramsey Clark’s core outfit—is the product of a split within the Trotskyist movement. These were the ones who felt that the Trotskyist majority, in 1956, was wrong to denounce the Russian invasion of Hungary. The WWP is the direct, lineal product of that depraved rump. If the “United for Peace and Justice” lot want to sink their differences with such riffraff and mount a joint demonstration, then they invite some principled political criticism on their own account.
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