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

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.

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?

===

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.

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.

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).

http://www.cupe15.org/aboutus/executive.htm
http://stopwaroniran.org/statement.shtml#signers

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.

‘Reigning over’ or ‘reining in’?

Is the allusion to a monarch or a team of horses?