Hello,

Thank you to the author of the article http://nyc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=33796&group=webcast for naming a painful truth about the sponsorship of Not In Our Name.

Of course NION is a front for the bizarre maoist cult, the Revolutionary Communist Party. And we need to be honest about this. See the RCP's web site, http://rwor.org/wh-new.htm .

For that reason, many groups didn't sign on to the NION pledge (and have created alternative pledges, see http://www.peacepledge.org/ and http://www.wri-irg.org/en/index.html) even though the NION pledge itself was cleverly and beautifully written to hide the RCP role. That's what front groups are for.

Of course, many people worked on and came to this demonstration because of the importance of saying no to war, and that's what is encouraging. Most who did so know nothing of the RCP's role, and wouldn't dream of supporting the authoritarianism, patriarchal militarism, homophobia, and general support for murderousness (support of Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution and the resulting death of over 20 million human beings, the Shining Path of Peru, etc.) of the Maoist positions the RCP takes.

Similarly, many will go to D.C. on October 26th because of the importance of demonstrating in D.C. against the war, even though the organizing for that is dominated by another cultish front group, this time the Trostskyist, Tiananmen-Square-massacre supporting, Workers World Party, through their front groups, the International Action Center and the ANSWER "coalition."

I am afraid that the domination of many of our anti-war coalitions by these authoritarian groups gravely damages our ability to mobilize people into genuine movements for peace, liberty, and justice.

In Peace,
Sam Diener

"Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to
things - the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by a lack of it. And things cannot love."
- Paulo Freire