Free speech and totalitarian tendencies in the antiwar movement.

It goes like this. Friday afternoon, Gloria LaRiva, the director of the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five and president of the typographical sector of the Northern California Media Workers Union, made an appearance on the Redding News Review. The News Review, hosted by independent journalist Rob Redding and produced by yours truly, airs from 3-6 p.m. on Atlanta's News Talk 1380 WAOK. LaRiva was on the show to raise awareness of the plight of the so-called Cuban Five, a group of Cuban intelligence agents detained by the U.S. government and convicted of spying on anti-Castro Cuban expats in Miami who have a history of launching terrorist attacks on Cuba.

The interview went well: LaRiva concisely explained the situation with the Cuban political prisoners, and engaged in a lively debate with the host and several callers about the merits of socialism versus capitalism. LaRiva explained that she had been to Cuba twenty-seven times, and encouraged Redding to travel there and have his eyes opened to a different way of life. Other callers were sympathetic with the plight of the Cuban Five, and expressed gratitude to Redding and LaRiva for giving the issue a rare on-air forum.

But there was just one hitch. Rob Redding has a serious researcher working for him now (again, aka yours truly), and so naturally he was aware that LaRiva is a four-time nominee for Vice President of the United States on the communist Workers World Party ticket. I had warned LaRiva by phone that no topic is off limits at the News Review. But when Redding mentioned her political affiliations and past political campaigns on the air (she was, after all, campaigning for the release of agents of a communist country), LaRiva became defensive.

Nevertheless, the interview took a full hour, and ran over an extra fifteen minutes to get in all the calls from listeners. LaRiva was gracious to the host as I escorted her from the studio, but in the hall her tone quickly changed.

LaRiva: "I guess you have to sensationalize things to make it more interesting for your listeners."

Grizzard: "I don't think it's sensationalism. I think we have a responsibility to inform our listeners about the people we bring on the air. The fact that you've run for vice president four times is a relevant piece of information that I think our listeners should be aware of. That's good journalism."

LaRiva: "You think that's good journalism? That's bullshit. So what…do you support Bush?"

Grizzard: "I've been working to get Bush impeached for over a year."

LaRiva: "Well, good luck with that."

Grizzard: "It's funny how communists get when they don't control all the information."

I started having questions about the communists in the activist community after attending the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) rally in D.C. on Oct. 26. David Corn got out a big red brush with which to paint the antiwar movement in the L.A. Weekly. I responded with a short piece on Atlanta IndyMedia titled, "About David Corn, the Workers World Party and the D.C. protest."

I was blown away by the ANSWER rally. I'd never been a part of something that big. And after I marched a 2-mile course around the White House at the head of the march, we returned to the staging area to find people still stepping off to join the tail of the march. Thus, when I saw Corn's piece my immediate instinct was to do what I could to set the record straight about the numbers and the significance of the march.

The issue brought up by Corn was ANSWER's relationship with the Workers World Party. Supposedly, ANSWER was created by the International Action Center, which was in turn created by WWP. If you find my facts a bit sketchy here, my recommendation is that you send WWP an email and encourage them to start answering media inquiries from the alternative press. Sorry…where was I? Oh yes…so Corn's big beef is that WWP, through ANSWER, is co-opting the antiwar movement to get out its communist message.

Without question, this is true to some extent. When I was in D.C. in October, every 50 feet there was someone hawking copies of the newspaper Workers World. There were also aspects of the rally that I thought intruded on the united antiwar spirit, including certain strident speakers, and a flatbed truck at the head of the march packed with loudspeakers and rhythmically-challenged chant leaders splitting my eardrums with anti-Israel slogans. Unlike Zionists AND the people on that flatbed, I advocate statehood for Palestine AND Israel. And looking around to see how effective the chant leaders were in stirring up the people at the front of the march, it seemed I was not alone in my sense about the intrusions of ANSWER's agenda.

Things were even worse at a previous D.C. rally for Palestinian human rights and autonomy, according activist and organizer Adam Hurter.

"In the process of organizing [a National Youth and Student Peace Coalition] march," said Hurter, "I experienced ANSWER…proceeding to completely hijack our effort by attempting to control our message and get the "ANSWER" name out as much as possible.

"Closed-door meetings with these people enabled me to see how they really work. They, the WWP, are not about putting themselves on the line for the good of the movement and they are not about sharing power with others. They are about advancing their "party" by opportunistically holding big demonstrations (their one and only tactic, besides mass emailing) around whatever antiwar-related cause is most popular at a given time."

But if Corn's suggestion is that everyone in the antiwar movement is too stupid to see past this, I beg to differ. When one of the ANSWER speakers came to the mic, one person shouted "Stalinist! Stalinist!" And when another speaker became monotonous in soliciting contributions to help pay expenses for the rally, a large number of people near the front of the stage took up the chant, "Enough about money! Enough about money!"

After I wrote my response to Corn, GNN Executive Editor Anthony Lappé asked me to research a story on the role of WWP in the antiwar movement. As I started working on this story, I quickly became frustrated by the lack of response and help I got from WWP and ANSWER One of the only people who would even talk to me was Adam Levenstein, head of the Atlanta International Action Center. He told me that he was hesitant to help me out with the story because, "there's been enough red-baiting." Thus, before I'd written a word I was told that whatever I wrote was going to be biased against ANSWER/IAC/WWP.

As I waited in vain for emails that I sent out to speakers from the march and the national offices of ANSWER and WWP to be returned, I was asked to be the publicity chair for the MLK March in Atlanta. This year's march and rally featured keynote speaker Rep. Barbara Lee from Oakland and carried a theme of opposition to war in Iraq. Thus, when I became an organizer for a peace march, I decided it might create the appearance of a conflict of interest if I went ahead and wrote an unfavorable piece about ANSWER (and by that point, it was most certainly going to be unfavorable). By the time I completed work on the march in January, I'd put the story out of my mind. But after Ms. LaRiva offered her critique of the News Review outside our studio, I decided it was time to have my say.

I'm not down with communism because it's just another form of totalitarianism. Whereas fascism is the totalitarianism of the economic elite, communism is the totalitarianism of the intellectual elite. Communists, as far as I can tell, don't see a free press or free speech as necessary because they've already figured out what is the best way for humans to co-exist, and thus no further open discussion is needed. Here's a simple test you can do the next time you have a conversation with a communist: Ask them who the heroes were at Tiananmen Square. Were they the people who stood in front of tanks and were shot for speaking their minds? Or were the heroes the guards who shot the protestors?

A quick scan of the archives of the workers.org web site will provide the answer on where WWP stands. One article there gleefully refers to the defeat of the "counter-revolution of 1989." By evading my questions or failing to answer my inquiries entirely, WWP, ANSWER and the IAC effectively censored this story. That, along with LaRiva's protestation of having her political affiliation mentioned on the air, should tell you pretty much all you need to know about where these folks stand on press freedom. Tiananmen Square tells you all you need to know about where they stand on free speech and freedom of assembly.

In the "Chomsky Reader," Noam Chomsky describes the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, where communists, fascists and anarchists vied to direct Spain's future. According to Chomsky, across Spain workers began spontaneously nationalizing industries and organizing a government from the ground up based on consensus. Chomsky said this was the most remarkable outbreak of anarcho-syndicalism the world had yet seen.

Meanwhile the fascists and communists, both possessed of far more military power than the ordinary people organizing from below, each sought to enforce their own visions of social organization on Spain. According to Chomsky, the fascists and communists initially ignored each other and sought to put down the anarcho-syndicalist outbreak. "Only once the possibility of any real freedom and self-determination had been eliminated," wrote Chomsky, did the fascists and communists then turn their attention to each other, with Franco's government eventually winning out.

Levenstein disagreed with Chomsky's analysis, as well he might. He rightly remarked however that, "ANSWER is not, pardon the pun, the answer. There can be no doubt that what's needed for the antiwar movement is a broader coalition, one that involves peaceniks and Quakers as well as radicals."

Nevertheless, I've decided that I'm through being told to shut up about this story, and stop being "divisive." I've decided that any freedom won through self-censorship is a freedom not worth having.

Buddy Grizzard (bud...@georgiapeace.org) is the producer of the Redding News Review and a contributor to GNN. He will deliver what he terms a "scathing, well-researched denouncement of the War on Drugs" at the 10th Annual Great Atlanta Pot Festival on 4/20 at Piedmont Park in Atlanta, a free event featuring performances by Lil Jon and the EastSide Boys and Peter Tosh Legacy.

GNN invites Gloria LaRiva and representatives of ANSWER, WWP and IAC to respond unedited to this article here on GNN.tv. 

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