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Left Forum 2009 (10 posts)

1. emanuel
   Member

   Hi everyone,

   So I know some of the folks helping to put on the Left Forum in NY in April 2009. They are very good friends of mine, and they asked me to help by suggesting panels, speakers, etc. I told them that if they were willing to make the forum's focus on the phenomenon of Left Gatekeeping, that I would participate and help organize for the forum. I suggested Joan Roelofs as the keynote speaker, and I sent them the following "sample promotional material" to give them an idea of what I am talking about. My questions for you all are 1) What do you know about the Left Forum and their willingnesss to address such a sensitive topic? And 2) Would any of you be willing to participate should they agree to the theme? Let me know.

   Emanuel

   Here's the sample promotional material I sent them (the specific names of individuals and orgs would or would not be included in the marketing):

   Left Gatekeeping: Controlling Your Opposition by Becoming Your Opposition

   The Empire controls the left mainly in four ways.

   1. Direct suppression.
   2. Creating phony left organizations or infiltrating authentic ones and taking over their leadership. These include radical student organizations like the International Socialist Organization (ISO), as well as national anti-war organizations like International Answer. These organizations are generally destructive to left movement building.
   3. Providing funding to leftist or alternative nonprofit organizations and media outlets via the "Liberal Foundations" (i.e., Ford, Rockefeller, Soros, etc.) in order to co-opt and control their activities and dialectic.
   4. Managing the national left discourse by controlling key leftist intellectuals, spokespersons and publishers, like Noam Chomsky, Michael Albert and Amy Goodman, who by their popularity define and establish the outer limits of left debate in the US, via the omission and disparagement of important topics, often involving domestic covert operations by the US military and intelligence agencies.

   Number one above is commonly discussed among left activists. Issues like COINTELPRO, the infiltration and disruption of left organizations by undercover provocateurs, etc., are widely acknowledged by activists, and methods to prevent such disruptions are discussed and implemented to varying degrees of success. Much less discussed or even known about are the other three methods employed by the Empire to control and render ineffective alternative social movements.

   The 2009 Left Forum will attempt to address this important topic via a series of panels, keynote addresses, and plenary discussions... Etc., Etc.

   Posted 15 years ago #
2. emanuel
   Member

   Oh yeah, and here's the website for the left forum:

   http://leftforum.org

   Emanuel

   Posted 15 years ago #
3. truthmod
   Administrator

   I told them that if they were willing to make the forum's focus on the phenomenon of Left Gatekeeping, that I would participate and help organize for the forum.

   Are you asking them to make this the focus of the entire conference? Do you think they actually might consider this? It seems like this might be asking a bit much, because Left Gatekeeping is sort of a niche topic for most people.

   Maybe the larger theme of Unity, what's keeping us divided and ineffective could be a way to approach the same issues...

   With a million issue-oriented groups on the left (from anti-baby seal clubbing to transsexual rights), people in the movement often lose sight of all the important things they have in common. What it really comes down to is a common belief in truth, justice, and compassion--which you can really just boil down to truth.

   Our opponents have always played a divide and conquer strategy. As you said, they have infiltrated organizations and encouraged distrust, confusion, and ineffectiveness. And they have also helped define boundaries of discourse. Many mainstream leftists cannot stand to hear about 9/11 truth or other conspiracy-related topics. They think that such "speculation" or "paranoia" just distract us and make us look crazy. They need to be reminded of how much of their attitude is programmed by the media they consume and those who they associate with.

   You also have people like Alex Jones on the right, who are playing their own game of divide and conquer, siphoning off disaffected youth away from the left, and convincing them that environmentalism and compassion are ruses of the elites. Of course, this is a doubly effective strategy (in terms of sabotaging the movement), in that it also creates an impression with the left and the general public of a certain kind of person/attitude that is associated with conspiracies. Many leftists don't want to be associated with these people and their attitudes.

   I would like to see a panel about how why and how the Left has marginalized and dismissed conspiracy research and how the Left should actually embrace conspiracy research/truth as a main pillar of the movement.

   Posted 15 years ago #
4. emanuel
   Member

   These are excellent points. I'll pass them on to my friends. I don't think they have a theme at all, really.

   Emanuel

   Posted 15 years ago #
5. chrisc
   Member

   Are you asking them to make this the focus of the entire conference? Do you think they actually might consider this? It seems like this might be asking a bit much, because Left Gatekeeping is sort of a niche topic for most people.

   I agree.

   I would like to see a panel about how why and how the Left has marginalized and dismissed conspiracy research and how the Left should actually embrace conspiracy research/truth as a main pillar of the movement.

   That would be great.

   Could they get Michael Parenti -- remember this?

   Michael Parenti: CONSPIRACY & CLASS POWER

   This is an in-depth analysis of the modern state and the exercise of power behind the scenes. The speech is also an important historic document. Given in 1993 it issues a warning of the use of deception to justify going to war. The speech also explains the expansion of the deregulated free market that would lead to a financial crisis as we see it today.

   The speech on Conspiracy and Class Power was lost for several years and only recently discovered in the collection of a listener in Seattle. Michael Parenti spoke before an overflow audience in Berkeley, CA

   http://tucradio.org/parenti.html#Parenti

   Posted 15 years ago #
6. Victronix
   Member

   Creating phony left organizations or infiltrating authentic ones and taking over their leadership. These include radical student organizations like the International Socialist Organization (ISO), as well as national anti-war organizations like International Answer. These organizations are generally destructive to left movement building.

   I haven't been involved in many anti-war efforts in the past couple of years (perhaps a tribute to the effectiveness of these groups), but is there any hard evidence of infiltration in ISO and/or Answer? It makes a lot of sense since these orgs just lead people in circles, sometimes literally, but I'd be interested to hear more.

   Good points.

   Posted 15 years ago #
7. chrisc
   Member

   The ISO is the UK SWP's international group and as far as the UK's SWP goes there isn't any hard evidence but they have spent years leading people in circles, oh boy, do I have some tales to tell...

   Posted 15 years ago #
8. emanuel
   Member

   Answer sabotaged the first anniversary protest marches against the Iraq war in 2004, and effectively destroyed the anti-war movement (though it did pick up a bit with Cindy Sheehan later on). They did it in combination with NION, by creating a a phony split between those who wanted to link the occupation of Iraq with the occupation of Palestine, and those who wanted to keep the issues separate. It all started with a debate on what to put on the flier. I was there in Seattle when it went down, and I heard from many others that it happened exactly the same way in city after city across the country. You had NION (Not In Our Name) people and Answer people going at each other's throats, one side accusing the other of being "Zionists" and the other side arguing, "But we don't want to offend the Jewish community who is against the Iraq war but not necessarily the Israeli occupation of Palestine." It got so out of hand, and there were key people who were being so unreasonable and unwilling to compromise that it was obvious to me it was cointel. People walked out and eventually the coalition broke down and there ended up being two marches. The anti-war protests before the Invasion of Iraq in the US were the largest protests the world has ever seen. In less than a year the movement was dead.

   You are never going to find a smoking gun to "prove" these groups are cointel. But their behaviors speak for themselves. Same goes for Albert and Chomsky, in my opinion. Goodman is just manipulated I believe.

   In any case, I never really believed my friends would try to get the organizing committee of the forum to make the entire focus left gatekeepers. But they did say that if I could get them a bunch of copies of Nafeez Ahmed's critique of Znet's anti-conspiracy theory stance, that they would include it in the packet given out to all the participants. This is perhaps the best essay exposing Albert and Chomsky's BS around conspiracies. It's even better than Michael Parenti's, in my opinion. (Has Parenti even discussed this issue in the last ten years?) Here is the Ahmed article:

   http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq37.html#_Toc1...

   Emanuel

   Posted 15 years ago #
9. chrisc
   Member

   Has Parenti even discussed this issue in the last ten years?

   I don't know, good question.

   The ISO is the UK SWP's international group and as far as the UK's SWP goes there isn't any hard evidence

   However since this is the area Annie Machon and David Shayler were working in when they were with MI5 they might know the answer to this, but they have refused to spill the beans on who the infiltrators were, this is about as far as they have gone:

   “Virtually every branch of the SWP had an agent in it when I joined the section,” Annie told her rather outraged audience at Marxism on July 9. Machon assured the comrades that she spent much of her time running down this work, to the point that, when she left the section after two years, most of the agents had been discontinued, the phone taps on the SWP HQ had been shut down, along with “the last phone tap on an individual activist in this country, Tony Cliff”.

   http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/589/shayler.htm

   Posted 15 years ago #
10. truthmod
    Administrator

    It is important to back up any charges of sabotage/infiltration with examples and evidence. Many people are turned off or overwhelmed when they hear others saying that most of the well known "progressive" groups are compromised.

    Ahmed would be a great person to get. He is really leading the way with quality research and tying together the crises of capitalism/imperialism and the environment.

    Only the most idiotic people on the left could object to him as "one of those conspiracy guys."

    If the plan for the Left Forum sounds interesting enough, I might want to come out and participate...

    Posted 15 years ago #

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