Normally, I would not willingly put my ears in proximity to hip hop resentment. But the fact that Canadian taxpayers are being asked to sponsor - through various tax-supported institutions - this anti-western hatefest, organized by a terrorist-sympathizing group, just frightens me too much. I would like to organize a counter-demonstration. Please contact me @gmail to help organize one.
UPDATE: Here is a sympathetic Vancouver Courier article on MAWO. It appears they use this Hip Hop Festival (this is the second year) to raise money:
Fundraisers such as last summer's anti-war hip-hop festival help MAWO raise the necessary funds to keep the group going and help gain new members.But since all hip hop events are free, at least this year, who's footing the bill? I have yet to find the answer from the web.
UPDATE2: MAWO appears to be front organization for a group called Fire This Time. FTT have been accused of being thugs who intimidate their fellow leftists with violence. In fact, FTT openly advocates violence:
This campaign of intimidation, harassment, and assault against me by Ali Yerevani, Ivan Drury, Shannon Bundock, and anyone else participating in it must be condemned by all leftists, progressives, revolutionaries, and working, poor, and oppressed people as a violation of the basic principles of working class unity. Here I will quote from an editorial from Issue # 20/21 of the Fire This Time Newspaper called 'In Defense of the Principles of Working Class Struggle: Against Violence in the Working Class Movement':So perhaps I was hasty, above, in calling this group "pacifists". They may well be your garden variety fascists/Leninists, or at least punks with delusions of revolutionary grandeur. In 2003, they were kicked out of an "anti-war" organization for being violent revolutionaries with "massive immature egos":"It is not a matter of being against violence in principle; we are not
proposing to take up that discussion here. In fact, we believe that when
oppressed people are attacked with violence, whether by the ruling class
directly or by anyone, it is necessary to defend ourselves by any means
necessary as Malcolm X said."
Festering political differences, hacked e-mail accounts and power struggles in BC's largest peace organisation came to a head Wednesday when violence erupted at a StopWar.ca meeting in Vancouver.One has to seriously wonder how their front organization was able to acquire sponsorship from the District of West Vancouver and the City of Richmond. Are our civic politicians or their bureaucrats delusional leftists/liberals or just out to lunch?
The meeting was immediately adjourned when five members from Fire This Time (FTT)—a member group of StopWar.ca—were expelled from StopWar.ca but refused to leave the meeting. The police were called to remove them.
A scene then developed outside as individuals from both groups startedpushing, shouting and name-calling.
UPDATE3: The Georgia Straight also pegs this group as violent leftists:
Maybe it’s because a radical faction that has been accused of assault, stalking, e-mail hacking, and “thuggish lunacy” has risen to a position of prominence within Vancouver’s post–9/11 antiwar movement. Or maybe its partly because Vancouver’s main antiwar coalition has relied too expediently on “placard language” without first clearly thinking things through.But the Straight also provides a clue as to how these guys may have gotten a foot in the door of civic governmental networks. One of their key patrons is Vancouver's former moonbat councillor Tim Louis.
Whatever the case, Vancouver’s antiwar activism is moving away from the broad base of support for Canada’s refusal to join the Anglo-American enterprise in Iraq, and it has jettisoned any hope of friendship with Vancouver’s 6,000-member Afghan émigré community.
12 comments:
I'll be there. Let's do our part to make the world disgusted by the foolishness of these people to the point that the dhimmis will show their faces only when they're wrapped in bandages.
I'm thinking either the Friday night event at Ambleside, West Van., or the Sunday event on Commercial Dr. I would kind of like to pass out flyers to the West Van park goers to tell them that their council is supporting a group that is defending the Toronto 17 against a supposed government conspiracy and that is full of hatred for Israel - see the MAWO website, linked above. I would also like to show the Commercial Dr. moonbats that there are people who think they are full of hatred and war. What day is good for you?
I'm totally keen to head off to the West Van. demo on Friday, and I think I can make it for Sunday at Commercial drive too.
I'll post this wherever I can to try to drum up some fellow sane people to join us.
I think the whole world is watching. I think it's time we show them that the world is differrent, that the times they are a'changin'.
I'm ready.
There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear. There's a hippie with an ipod over there telling me I got to beware.
I think it's time we stop, friends, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down: There's battle lines being drawn.
Relativism sucks, and nobody's right if everybody's wrong.People speaking our minds,
getting so much resistance from behind, I think it's time we stop-- hey, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down.
What a field-day for the death hippies.A thousand people in the street
passing out leaflets and carrying signs
Mostly say: "Think about it!"
It's time we stop the moonbats. Hey, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down.
Lefty paranoia strikes deep; into your life it will creep. It starts when you're always afraid that if you step out of line, the Leftists will come and take you away.
We better stop worrying. Hey, what's that sound?
Everybody look what's going down?
The whole world is watching, and we'll be there to show them that here in Vancouver we fight back against the dhimmis.
LOL - can we use the old signs?
Sure. I have them in the office where people come in and look at them and say: "What's that about?" And then, oh yeah, off I go.
Those tuning in from other sites, please leave a contact for us so we can organise our meeting better in the comiing week.
As we do each week, we will meet at VPL in the atrium on Thursday evening from 7-9:00 pm to make further plans. You'll recognise us as those wearing blue scarves, and me in my Israeli beflagged baseball cap.
Let us know that you'll join us.
You claim to defend tolerance, but use language like "Commercial Dr. moonbats"
Who said anything about tolerance? I am not a left-liberal relativist holding to some fantasy ideology that all should be tolerated, even those whose beliefs are intolerant of others or of freedom. I certainly try to respect those who share in our humanity, as my fellow human beings, but as such we are all capable of being wrong and stupid and when this endangers others or our nations we should be called on it and denounced. Moonbat is an apt description for many on Commercial Dr. for so many there are full of White Guilt and anti-nationalism that they have become a danger to the very culture and polity that tolerates their presence and freedom to be stupid. ONe thing I want to do is write up a bio of Che Guevara, the terrorist and murderer and "revoltionary" who shares in the responsibility for the Gulag state of Cuba, and hand it out to every of the many Vancouver moonbats who go around wearing his image on their tshirts. They look so proud and vain - what do they know of tolerance, these Gnostics?
Don't get me wrong, I'm apposed to a lot of what MAWO is about, but then again, so is most of the organized left, especially in the Vancouver area.
However, I think you are really confused about what it is you're protesting, especially when you say things like - "fascists/Leninists", two ideologies on the complete opposite sides of the political spectrum! Fascism is about rule by a small corporate elite, while the principles of Leninism were/are about returning Democratic control to a larger section of society via Trade Unions, Workers' Councils and an organized democratic party. Not to mention that the Soviet Union was the country that defeated fascism/Nazism!
Secondly, why are you getting angry about a group being "anti-American"... Do all three countries in North America now share the exact same values? That makes no sense to me. Especially when the right - including groups like the Minutemen, John Birch Society, and NSM - are the ones pushing for ultra-nationalist "sovereignty" between the 3 countries in North America. Aren't you kind of undermining that idea by making an argument against "anti-Americanism", as if we're all the same?
I know I'm late to this post (just found it on google) but you really seem like a confused rightist.
Thanks for your comment;
What is a "confused rightist"? I do not think of myself as a rightist; i think of myself as a defender of centres. Keep in mind that the left-right distinction is itself a product of the left (it's key to how the "left" came to define itself in the French Revolution). In my view, it is a distinction that should not important to how a conservative see himself. THe left needs "the right", as a defining arch enemy, but to my thinking it is more of a projection of an evil twin than a true revelation of difference.
Sure the Nazis and the SOviets fought each other. BUt this is no proof that they were ideological opposites. They were in fact fighting over the mantle of socialism (national vs. international) in a classic example of the narcissism of small differences. Surely at the end of the 20thC we can now see that both fascism and communism, despite some differences, were essentially cut from the same historical cloth, in a response to the evils of the free marketplace.
If Leninism was about "returning control to a large section of society" how come it failed? But of course we now know it had to fail. We now know that you can't have a project to enforce equality without having a "corporatist" elite who put everyone in their place.
As for anti-Americanism, yes we are not all the same and there are many things for Canadians to defend about their unique nation. Yet, there is rational critique of things American and then there is the now world-wide religion of "anti-AMericanism" which is a kind of ritualized leftism which takes knee-jerk positions against America, not through reasoned discussion of particular AMerican weaknesses, but as a general organizing (mentally and socially) principle. It is the latter which I oppose. I see "anti-Americanism" as basically an irrational resentment very similar to antisemitism: both are resentments of the successful and leading nations: Israel being historically the world's first nation, America today being first in historical influence. Anti-AMericanism is resentment of firstness. But firstness (freedom) is a necessary human quality and to resent it is irrational. It is the failure to see this that makes people think serious socialism is possible without having a "fascist" elite in charge of the inevitable dictatorship.
Thanks for the quick response!
I first of all strongly disagree that the Soviets and the Nazis were fighting over "the mantle of socialism". Nazism was socialism in name alone, and shared none of the same qualities of international socialism, especially in regard to understanding the world through the lenses of historical materialism. It was more a method of gaining influence with the German working class who was already accepting of many scientific socialist ideas going around Europe.
In my view, there are many reasons the Bolshevik revolution eventually failed, and I think it's fair to argue that much of it was because it actually was a more democratic movement than the world bourgeois order had themselves ever been able to muster. The people in roles of power all around the world saw what it for what it was, and reacted quite violently to it - invading Russia with imperialist troops and imposing strict sanctions on those countries whose working class sought to align themselves with the movement developing in Russia. Not to mention that Russia from the very beginning was taking a huge gamble by attempting to skip over capitalism, a necessary developmental step on the road to socialism. They believed that by starting the spark they could get support, and it didn't work out quite that way, and the revolution eventually degenerated into state capitalism under Stalin.
As far as America representing "firstness", I'm also not sure where you're coming from. America was not the first bourgeois democratic revolution in the world, France was. So why isn't there hatred for France being the first? I also don't think much of the hatred for America come because they were the "first" - it comes from their position as a global imperialist superpower. While I will admit that for some it's an easy answer just to blame America without further analysis of many situations, I do believe that much of the hatred for America comes from the history of U.S. Imperialism over the last 60 years. If it was just about "firsts" then why was America not hated to this degree until after WWII when they really began there projects for global domination of resources? That makes about as much sense as saying that Middle Easterners simply hate us because of our freedom! C'mon, I think it's a little bit more complex than that.
There's that old line about the young man who, if he isn't a socialist at 20 has no heart, but if he's still one at thirty has no head.
I hope this accommodates red fox, but this line really needs to be updated after the socialist experiment rang up far more murders than the Nazis managed. I would say 25 would be the maximum age at which one should tolerate the nonsense fox has written.
Just how, exactly, can socialism work, without a tyrannical class keeping everyone in line? And where does the creativity and freedom necessary to the renewal of the society come from if anyone who tries is at the mercy, for his life and future, of the state and its deep resentments to broach no other power center, all in the name of defending "equality" of course.
If there were a serious hypothesis that socialism could work in the most advanced countries, it would be well known. No such hypothesis exists. So why do young people still cling to a dream that has no basis in reality?
Yes, finding your way in a free market society is very difficult in a number of ways. Some never succeed despite much effort. Most people today would acknowledge that a capitalist society has to have a social safety net, but there has to be a limit and discipline on this or it soon happens that one is no longer in a society with a free market. Most people would acknowledge the many evils of a capitalist society; but only someone who can't accept the reality of human beings for what we are would take this fact as license, in 2008, to argue for socialism, which is clearly a much more evil and deadly idea.
Why is it that so many young people can't live with such hard truths and have to believe in socialism even after all the murders, even when you can still find many people in a city like Vancouver who actually lived under socialism who can tell you how horrible and evil the experience and idea is?
As for fox's understanding of history, perhaps that's where the problem lies. The American revolution was indeed prior to the French Revolution; but in any case the first free market society evolved in the UK; the French Revolution was an attempt to catch up to the success of the much smaller and yet all of a sudden more powerful and wealthy nation to the north.
In terms of innovation, the English-speaking countries have indeed been the world leaders for the last few hundred years. France has been at best a nation that manages to put in a respectable second place. And, as a rough approximation, it is not far off to say that America is hated because it is a free and successful society. It is not by any standard meaning of the word an "empire" or an "imperial" culture. It is a powerful nation that tries to take the attendant international responsibilities that come with success, that tries to maintain conditions for interntational trade, with more or less skill, as the case may reveal.
If the US were a serious imperial power it would have just taken the oil fields long ago, instead of putting up with all the crap and expense they get from people unwilling to be coaxed into the modern world. But no, they instead try to fill the world with greater freedom, wealth, food, medicine, technology, etc. The US has done more than any other nation to make it possible for 7 billion people to walk this earth today. A more hard-nosed society would have left the world's masses to die in their own poverty while they just took what they could. And what is the result of American faith in modernity and free markets? A global religion of anti-Americanism premised on conspiracy theories and victim worship. Shame, shame, shame.
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