[extropy-chat] WWP

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Dirk Bruere <dirk at neopax.com> wrote:

> Mike Lorrey wrote:
> 
> >WWP and several of these other groups accepted, prior to the Iraq
> war,
> >significant sums from Saddam Hussein, according to records captured
> in
> >Bagdad. Whether they continue to receive funds from the Baathist
> Party
> >in Syria, as is suspected, has not yet been confirmed.
> >
> >  
> >
> Well, better just ask the CIA who can be relied upon to provide
> truthful answers to all such question. NOT.
> Would these be the same records that smeared George Galloway?
> Your naivete is touching.

Your excuse making for stalinists and baathists is revealing. It also
displays ignorance and naivete of the international left and its
agenda. Domestic revolutionary and insurgency groups come under the
surveillance of the FBI's Department 5, not the CIA.

http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=370660

http://caosblog.com/archives/803

"The FBI considers the WWP a terrorist organization. On May 10, 2001,
FBI Director Louis Freeh stated that “Anarchists and extremist
socialist groups — many of which, such as the Workers World Party, have
an international presence and, at times, also represent a potential
threat in the United States.” Imagine that; the mainstream media
somehow missed the fact that the most ubiquitous organizer of
“anti-war” protests is directed by a terrorist support group. Shouldn’t
a question on this front be aimed directly at Ramsey Clark at one of
his regular press conferences?

The Korean Truth Commission and Pastors for Peace are staunch allies of
Kim Jong Il and Fidel Castro, respectively, and both groups continue to
support these murderous regimes’ violation of International law. In
addition to its role as a front for the support of
totalitarian/communist governments in North Korea and Cuba, members of
ANSWER’s steering committee such as the Muslim Student Association and
the Free Palestine Alliance continue to provide ideological, logistical
and financial support for organizations devoted to the destruction of
the state of Israel, including the terrorist group, Hamas. A
comprehensive investigation of the members of ANSWER’s steering
committee make it clear that the organization is in actuality one of
Peace’s greatest enemies. "

This isn't the first time the WWP has pandered for overseas thugs. They
also accepted funds and lobbied for former Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevich. Ramsey Clark served as legal counsel in the US for Saddam
Hussein. The WWP also runs the KTC, the Korea Truth Commission, a front
for North Korean thug-in-chief Kim Jong Il.

http://www.brookesnews.com/031502peacerally.html
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2592
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/02/310163.shtml
http://www.infoshop.org/texts/wwp.html
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=5734
http://www.leftwatch.com/archives/years/2005/000001.html
http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=370637

"The IAC has felt the sting. In a statement it blasted those who
"dishonestly claim that ANSWER is a 'front' group in order to diminish
the coalition," though it acknowledges "the presence of socialists and
Marxists, in particular members of the Workers World Party." Their
critics, IAC says, are racists: "Those who claim that ANSWER is a
'front' organization demonstrate their own racist and elitist
perception of reality." 

And ANSWER has ripped what it calls "a repugnant red-baiting campaign
against the ANSWER coalition because of its role as a principal
organizer of the mass grass-roots movement of opposition to war
throughout the United States." 

The WWP is nothing if not consistent. According to a 1974 congressional
report, it split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1959 in a dispute
over the Soviet invasion of Hungary three years before. The Socialist
Workers opposed the invasion, while Workers World partisans supported
it. "In 1968, the Workers World Party supported the invasion of
Czechoslovakia by the communist Warsaw Pact armies," the report
continued. The party, which never numbered more than a few hundred
people, supported the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army against the
United States during the Vietnam War, according to the congressional
report. Some of its activities were coordinated with enemy military
actions. An April 8, 1972, internal letter "To All Branches" of the
party urged participation in "antiwar" demonstrations in support of a
Viet Cong offensive in South Vietnam. The letter's author, John
Catalinotto, remains in the party as managing editor of its weekly
Workers World "newspaper," and occasionally represents the IAC. 

Party members received revolutionary training in Cuba as members of the
Venceremos Brigades in the 1960s and early 1970s, and at about that
time the party oriented itself ideologically with North Korea. Deirdre
Griswold Stapp, a voice of the party and currently editor of Workers
World, described how the party functioned in a 1972 report to the Cuban
Communist Party. Explaining its "international relationships," she told
Cuban leaders about the WWP's new contacts with North Korea, via a
front group called the American Servicemen's Union, according to
congressional investigators. "The chairman of the American Servicemen's
Union, Andy Stapp, recently visited the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea and opened friendly discussions with the party there," she wrote.
She later married Stapp. 

In a speech to the 6th Congress of the League of Socialist Working
Youth of Korea, the youth branch of North Korea's ruling party, Andy
Stapp praised "Comrade Kim Il-sung, ever victorious, iron-willed,
brilliant commander and outstanding leader of the international
communist and working-class movements," according to a transcript
published in a congressional report. "As instructed by Marshal Kim
Il-sung, the outstanding leader of the international and working-class
movements, the No. 1 target of all the revolutionary people in the
world is U.S. imperialism. In order to avenge the many oppressed people
who have died a bloody death, and in order to build a new society in
America in which everyone enjoys happiness, as in Korea, I recognize
the great juche idea of Marshal Kim Il-sung as the Marxism-Leninism of
the present time." 

Stapp committed himself and his organization to armed violence and to
promoting mutiny within the U.S. military. According to the transcript
of his speech broadcast over Radio Pyongyang, Stapp stated, "The
American Servicemen's Union will study as documents, that must be read,
the works of genius of Marshal Kim Il-sung. ... With the juche idea as
the guiding compass of struggle, we will consolidate the branches of
the American Servicemen's Union in order to rally more soldiers around
the organization. In this way the American GIs will fight against their
real enemies, against the policy of aggression and war enforced on them
by the U.S. ruling circles and the fascist military officers." 

He added that his goal was "to build a powerful American Servicemen's
Union that will turn the guns against their fascist officers. ... If
the American Servicemen's Union cuts the windpipe of U.S. imperialism
inside the army while at the same time it is mutilated in all parts of
the world, U.S. imperialism will surely perish forever." 

Today, the WWP and its fronts claim to be nonviolent, but they remain
as enthusiastic as ever about North Korea. Visiting Pyongyang to
celebrate the 90th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung in April
2002, Griswold Stapp signed a statement denouncing President George W.
Bush's "notorious antiterrorism war" and demanding that "the Korean
peninsula be reunified without fail under the wise leadership of the
respected leader Kim Jong-il following the banner of the Three Charters
for the national reunification set forth by the great President Kim
Il-sung." Filing an article from the North Korean capital for the July
23, 2002, issue of Workers World, Griswold Stapp called Pyongyang
"truly one of the most beautiful cities in the world." 

Brian Becker, a WWP secretariat member and a director of ANSWER and the
IAC, visited North Korea in March 2002 to denounce the United States,
discredit the presence of U.S. troops in South Korea and reaffirm a
commitment to reunify the divided peninsula along the lines of the plan
set by Kim Jong-il. Becker serves as a spokesman for the IAC and its
antiwar campaign. 

The second major coordinating faction of the present-day antiwar
movement, headed by UPJ under Leslie Cagan's leadership, has its roots
in the old Soviet "active-measures" agitprop networks, say
homeland-security experts. 

Insight has traced Cagan's career to Cuba, where in the early 1970s as
a member of the Venceremos Brigades she received revolutionary training
and indoctrination. In the last years of the Cold War, Cagan organized
mass protests from an office called Mobilization for Survival,
according to former congressional investigators. She coordinated with
Soviet international front organizations and the CPUSA as the vanguard
element of broader-based demonstrations around the world against U.S.
resistance to Soviet expansion. This magazine has obtained Mobilization
for Survival documents from the 1980s that show the group's support for
Marxist-Leninist insurgencies and terrorist groups in the Third World,
Middle Eastern terrorists (including the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine), Soviet-backed dictatorships in Africa and
Latin America, and Soviet-inspired campaigns for the unilateral
disarmament of the United States. 

In 1990-91, when the United States led an international coalition to
free Kuwait from the Iraqi military, Cagan coordinated the National
Campaign for Peace in the Middle East to organize grass-roots
opposition to the liberation. Also in 1991, when the CPUSA broke into
two factions, Cagan cofounded the splinter group, called the Committees
of Correspondence. Now she runs the UPJ, coordinating opposition to the
war on terrorism in general and the effort to destroy Saddam's arsenal
of weapons of mass destruction. 

Meanwhile, longtime Cagan associate Michael Meyerson is helping to run
protests in New York, according to the Associated Press. Formerly a
member of the national council or "Politburo" of the CPUSA, Meyerson
has been involved in protests since at least 1960. It was Meyerson who,
in a 1965 visit to Hanoi, was made an "honorary nephew" of North
Vietnamese Communist Party leader Ho Chi Minh. He returned home to
attend "antiwar" protests sporting a Viet Cong cap and the ring he
famously said was made from the wreckage of an American fighter plane.
He ran the U.S. Peace Council, the New York-based branch of the World
Peace Council, a Soviet international front organization that,
according to 1982 CIA and FBI testimony before the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence, received covert funding and direction
from the KGB. "



Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

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