That revolution thing? My bad

By Erin Millar | March 12th, 2008 | 1:09 pm

Former leader of anti-war group apologizes, reveals secrets, says it is a "cult"

“My name is Ivan Drury. I’m writing this letter to inform the left and progressive community that I have broken with Fire This Time, MAWO, and all other related groups. Through this letter I also hope to begin to stand accountable for the many irresponsible and destructive things I am responsible for having done when I was a member of these groups.”

So begins an extraordinary confession from a former senior member of Movement Against War and Occupation (MAWO), one of Canada’s most prominent, bizarre and radical group of activists that organizes on numerous Vancouver area campuses. The 5,000-word open letter, penned by Ivan Drury, reveals a group that sounds less like a Canadian campus organization, circa 2008, and more like a revolutionary cell from pre-revolutionary Russia, circa 1908. MAWO as described by Drury devoted itself to revolution, “cadre building,” opposition to capitalism, incessant infighting with and undermining of other left-leaning groups—and cult-like devotion to its charismatic, middle-aged leader, a former refugee claimant by the name of Ali Yerevani.

“Emotionally and personally,” writes Drury, “my experience in the group really messed me up.”

Drury paints Yerevani, the leader of the organization, as the main culprit: a charismatic totalitarian, one part Lenin and one part David Koresh. “Inside the group, Yerevani is a tyrant who tolerates zero dissent to his absolute control,” writes Drury. “‘Organizational norms’ mean constant phone contact with him to receive constant marching orders on everything from speakers’ lists and the admission of ‘opponents’ to events, to which button to wear on which side of your coat. No joke. These ‘norms’ also address every aspect of personal life, like how to hang car keys, what clothes women members are allowed to wear, how to invite someone to coffee, how to flush a toilet.”

The radical, anti-war movement Yerevani co-founded has, over the past four years, had a presence at almost every college and university in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland. Under the banners of Fire This Time (the organization’s house organ newspaper), Mobilization Against War and Occupation (MAWO), Youth Third World Alliance, and various other groups, the movement has organized countless protests and events on and off campus. It isn’t just opposed to the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. It is opposed to war and occupation in all forms—as part of a worldview that sees capitalism and Western society as themselves a kind of violent occupation. (For the sake of brevity, this article will refer to all of these Yerevani-associated groups under the common name of MAWO.)

MAWO’s definition of “occupation” includes the “colonial occupation” of Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia—and Canada. They are against any intervention in the Darfur region of Sudan. MAWO is also opposed to sanctions against Cuba or Iran; Drury writes that his former group reflexively lauded Cuba as a “model society with a model democracy where everyone is happy.”

It’s not only MAWO’s radical ideas and countless protests that have earned them a reputation in Vancouver’s activist scene: rumours of MAWO’s dogmatic, cult-like ways (including everything from assault to credit card fraud) have circulated for years. Drury substantiates those rumours, and describes MAWO as a cult of personality, run by an aging dictatorial leader, bent on building a cadre of followers, many recruited from West Coast campuses.

A 10-year veteran activist, Drury helped found the movement after a nasty split with another left-wing activist group allegedly orchestrated by Drury and Yerevani. In the letter, Drury explains how he once believed that his tactics — “from ultra-centralist, abusive internal dynamics to petty disrespectful conduct towards other leftists, to profoundly sectarian sabotage acts” — were justified because of the extreme corruption of the rest of the left and his dedication to “cadre building” in order to be a “true revolutionary.”

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There Are 12 Responses So Far. »

Comment by Philippe Marchand on 14 March 2008:

In a way it’s scary to see that an anti-war group could be a cult. On the other hand it’s expected that any cult will form around some “noble cause”. I hope people who are involved in groups like this go out there and meet different groups who actually practice the “values they preach”.
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Comment by Garth Gilligan on 14 March 2008:

The MAWO group, cult or not, is the logical end of the continuum that has been underway for some decades in our universities. Their antithesis on the continuum is open debate, without prejudice, for the purpose of mutual understanding and the achievement of a reasoned position on a given topic. Rather than persue this classic goal of education at the university level, single-focus interest groups on our campuses have been moving to the extreme right of the continuum in their protests, which are actually no more than blatant attempts to drown out opposing voices on any given topic. Often they disguise themselves under the envelope of political correctness. But make no mistake, their forebears wore brown shirts in Germany and refined protest into a cruel art. MAWO is but a few steps, or one more charasmatic nut or psychopath, away.

It is to be hoped that this young man’s “coming out” will have a positive impact on our campuses. He is to be congratulated for his courage and recognized for beginning to bear the broadening fruits of a university education. It is even possible that a solid grounding in historical study will give him a better understanding of Marxism and what chaos that gentleman’s followers have wrought in the past century.
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Comment by G. Bryce on 14 March 2008:

>>obsessed with reining over even the smallest details of his followers’ lives<<

‘Reigning over’ or ‘reining in’?

Is the allusion to a monarch or a team of horses?
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Comment by Philippe Marchand on 14 March 2008:

I don’t think universities support or promote critical thinking that much, not because of “interest groups”, but just based on the curriculum taught. Is it of concern that the result of 16+ years of formal education is people who can be indoctrinated by cults and/or governments and/or media.
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Comment by erling on 17 March 2008:

MAWO’s standard campus tactic is to take over the social justice committee, use it as a conduit for MAWO events, and funnel its money to MAWO. Objections to their tactics are met with loud accusations of racism, ostensibly because Yerevani is Iranian. This has been public knowledge for a while.

From the Peak at SFU:
http://www.peak.sfu.ca/the-peak/2004-3/issue10/ne-langara.html

A copy of an article from the Langara Gleaner, distributed over left mailing lists:
https://lists.resist.ca/pipermail/project-x/2004-November/007947.html

Similar issues arose with UBC’s Social Justice Centre:
http://ubcinsiders.blogspot.com/2007/04/justice-for-social-justice-centre.html

They’re successful in part because of student turnover and a general desire left activists have to avoid sectarian bullshit. That said, their numbers at pickets have been flat for a long time, and their numbers at demos have been declining (as have demo numbers in other parts of the anti-war movement). They’re active, but they’re not growing.
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Comment by erling on 18 March 2008:

One other thing: the author might have had trouble locating Yerevani for comment because his name is a pseudonym, as are the names of some other MAWO members. The Kira Daley mentioned in the Langara article uses Kira Koshelanyk in her MAWO activities, and Yerevani’s real name is Ali Izadi-Kharrazi.

http://www.cupe15.org/aboutus/executive.htm
http://stopwaroniran.org/statement.shtml#signers
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Comment by Steve on 23 March 2008:

It’s too bad to see this writer editorializing in ways that clearly suit her employer’s far right-wing outlook. Maclean’s has been full of pro-war, Islamophobic nonsense in recent years. This piece, which could have just been good investigative journalism, instead tries to undermine the anti-war movement in general, such as when the author puts the word “occupation” in quotation marks when talking about Iraq and Afghanistan.

Plenty of people of people are opposed to war and to capitalism in general, and yet want nothing to do with a wacky cult like MAWO and its leader Mr. Yerevani (Izadi-Kharrazi).
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Comment by Erin Millar on 24 March 2008:

Steve,

There is nothing in the article that is pro-war or Islamophobic. I believe that war is a complex issue and I don’t think this article suggests that I am pro-war.

I also would like to point out that I covered this organization long before I worked for Maclean’s. In fact, I wrote about the group when I worked for a student paper — back in the days when I was criticized for my employer’s far left-wing outlook.

Ah, how things change.
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Comment by Ivan Drury on 25 March 2008:

I’ve just posted a response to Millar’s article which, I agree with Steve, is completely pro-war. I’m including the excerpt that deals with Millar’s article below, but you can find the whole thing here: http://ivandrury.wordpress.com

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In an article syndicated in the Capilano Courier under the title “A Campus Cult” and the Macleans online campus edition under the title “That revolution thing? My bad…” Erin Millar uses my statement to smear anti-war activism as inherently Marxist-revolutionary, and Marxism as inherently cultist. The article finds its way into each publication with slight differences, but in each, the theme remains the essentially the same. The most marked difference between the two is that the Cap Courier version includes a line drawing of Yerevani (for some perplexing reason), and the Macleans version concludes with the outright statement “perhaps some day [Drury will] change his mind about [the need for revolution], too.”

It is really quite amazing that Millar possesses such confidence in her ideas that she is able to deride the anti-war movement and Marxism with a single wave of the hand without ever substantiating her accusations or explaining what she offers as an alternative. What is she saying? Does she support the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq? Only one or the other? Does she believe that capitalism is clicking along just fine and that its opponents are whiny and immature brats who need to grow up? Certainly that can be read in the “some day” that she wishes upon me. Why doesn’t she state what she believes? Left in the dark about Erin Millar’s political / ethical / moral stances, we’re left to assume that her sympathies lie with the Macleans school of the uber-Canadian right wing.

Millar cites sources such as J.J. McCullough, the editor of the Douglas College newspaper The Other Press who also writes a regular hard-right-wing column for the same newspaper. Blind to his own political alignments, McCollough “describes MAWO members as ‘hard-line communists of the old sort — extraordinarily dogmatic, non-compromising.’ He believes that a MAWO member was ‘assigned’ to his [sic.] newspaper […]. ‘She was an agent of theirs. She openly tried to co-opt the paper’.”

With such a jump, Millar extends the criticism of FTT’s sectarian and cultish behavior and theoretical bases to a blanket condemnation of leftists who seek to publicize their views in campus newspapers. This is hypocrisy to the n’th degree. What is the difference between a left wing political line being carried into student newspapers, by MAWO or anyone else, vs. a right wing political line being carried into student newspapers by McCullough and countless others like him? Millar’s implied argument is that leftists are inherently duplicitous because they consciously enter the arena of college print journalism to put out their ideas. While leftists and progressive people are forced to organize consciously, as an opposition and minority in the world of corporate controlled media, great spaces are made for people like McCullough by the same media and the unconscious status quo that they represent in the “common sense” of hegemonic social ideology. Millar herself provides the best evidence of capitalism’s hegemonic control of media and mass consciousness: when was the last time 2,000 words of space was made available for an article about the anti-war movement in Macleans magazine? How convenient.
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Comment by Philippe Marchand on 26 March 2008:

Discourse or debate in time of war has to be considered in the context, which is that war continues as we discuss it.

Anyone who truly believes war is “a complex issue” should certainly not support countries starting war on an emotional/whim basis, like it was done in Iraq/Afghanistan. And if we truly need to reflect about it, then we should not be actively fighting at the same time.

Now the question is: are we, individually and collectively, taking the time to reflect about this BEFORE the political choices are being made?
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Comment by Trevor Hargreaves on 1 April 2008:

Regarding the above letter of Ivan Drury’s posted criticism of this article… I think it’s a fair jab at JJ McCullough that his right-sided politics could make his comments particularly suspect. But regarding the reference to the “countless other’s like him”, I would argue that the typical student newspaper climate is a left-leaning one, and a right-wing agenda within student press (at least in this country) is a rarity. Accordingly, McCullough is valued within the Other Press for his institutional experience, but regarded as somewhat of a one-man-show in regards to his politics. To put it more succinctly, he certainly didn’t rally any followers within the staff or the campus to his support of Mitt Romney’s failed presidential campaign. So likening his rightwing agenda to that of MAWO is far from the reality.

I have witnessed the zealot-like fervour with which MAWO supporters try to spread their message. Within the Other Press, it escalated to the degree that our News Editor was submitting whole news sections containing only MAWO information and ignoring all other news.

In defence of Miller’s article and the information presented therein, I think the situation is presented quite fairly.

Speaking personally, I am fairly left of centre politically yet openly condemn the MAWO approach to furthering their message. It is not so much what they have to say, but how they go about saying it. The concept of a radical political group intentionally infiltrating campuses to further their message is inherently wrong in my mind, regardless of what their specific message is.

I’m all for getting one’s message out there, but not when it’s done by playing weekend Zapatista.
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Comment by Steve on 5 April 2008:

To be clear, I did not charge Millar’s article with being Islamophobic. I said Maclean’s has run a bunch of Islamophobic material, which is a matter of record (see their disgusting Mark Steyn cover story a couple years back). And, yes, Maclean’s is also pro-war, and although Millar says these are “complex” issues, her bias is shown when she puts the words “occupation” in quotation marks.

It’s too bad maniacs like this Yerevani are around; they make for easy fodder for smear jobs like this on the whole left.
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