On 2013-09-23, at 7:16 AM, Julio Huato wrote: > Borderline red baiting. And you seem so self satisfied, even proud, of > having contributed to it. What a joke you are.
I'm sure Louis' intent was not to red-bait de Blasio, but to bash him as a liberal. Louis belongs to that strand on the US left which believes that the Democrats are "the most effective evil" and that, by extension, the election of a Republican is less damaging to the interests of the working class. The more liberal the Democrat, like de Blasio, the greater the need to expose him. Carrol Cox expresses this viewpoint most forcefully on this list, and it appeals to a sizeable number of US radical intellectuals embittered or disillusioned by the Democratic leadership's greater responsiveness to the demands of Wall Street than to the needs of its working class base. It is somewhat reminiscent of the German CP's stance that the social democrats or "social fascists" were the more effective evil than the Nazis and that the former had to be smashed in order for the working class to effectively wage war on the latter. > On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 12:44 AM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: > (This is written by the NY Times reporter I spoke to a couple of weeks ago.) > > NY Times September 22, 2013 > A Mayoral Hopeful Now, de Blasio Was Once a Young Leftist > By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ > > The scruffy young man who arrived in Nicaragua in 1988 stood out. > > He was tall and sometimes goofy, known for his ability to mimic a > goose’s honk. He spoke in long, meandering paragraphs, musing on > Franklin D. Roosevelt, Karl Marx and Bob Marley. He took painstaking > notes on encounters with farmers, doctors and revolutionary fighters. > > Bill de Blasio, then 26, went to Nicaragua to help distribute food and > medicine in the middle of a war between left and right. But he returned > with something else entirely: a vision of the possibilities of an > unfettered leftist government. > > As he seeks to become the next mayor of New York City, Mr. de Blasio, > the city’s public advocate, has spoken only occasionally about his time > as a fresh-faced idealist who opposed foreign wars, missile defense > systems and apartheid in the late 1980s and early 1990s. References to > his early activism have been omitted from his campaign Web site. > > But a review of hundreds of pages of records and more than two dozen > interviews suggest his time as a young activist was more influential in > shaping his ideology than previously known, and far more political than > typical humanitarian work. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
