Talk:A.N.S.W.E.R.

WWP

Do we know how many of their leaders are actually from the WWP?

Are the WWP _actual_ Stalinists or just described by their opponents as such? Secretlondon 13:06, Jan 15, 2004 (UTC)

you actually don't have to support Stalin to be called stalinist. You just have to do politics as Stalin has... see: Stalinism

But we also know that stalinist is a general insult thrown around the left. I've seen Trotskyist groups described as Stalinist, for example. I think that use of stalinist is POV.

This article also needs some evidence as to how many of the leaders are actually WWP. It looks like an unsubtantiated slur otherwise. Secretlondon 13:14, Jan 15, 2004 (UTC)

It has been established by several knowlegeable activists that ANSWER is a front organization for the Workers World Party. The domain registration uses the same address as the New York offices of the WWP. The spokespeople for ANSWER, at their press conferences and rallies, have consistently been WWP cadre members. These are people who are known to be leaders within the WWP, activists who lead their other front groups, and people who write for the WWP's newspaper.

Founding date

Does anyone know the founding date of ANSWER? I know they started up very soon after September 11, but I don't know the date. Also, were Muslim groups part of ANSWER from the outset, or were the founders all secular leftists? -- Jmabel 05:00, Aug 9, 2004 (UTC)

Unencyclopedic material cut from article

Some statments by the group New York City, May 17-18, 2003 Included: "Those of us here in this room are the most important people in the United States today."

"Okay. So let's get started on the portion of the agenda where we all get a chance to talk, and I would like to appeal to my fellow European American males to not be the first ones to shoot your hands up or to get up on the floor, but to give everyone else a chance to speak first and try not to dominate the discussion."

"..we need to marry the concept of discrediting the election with the concept of educating people about where the real power lies."

"the Constitution itself sucks; there's a lot wrong with it."

"There's no right to healthcare, no right to education, no right to jobs, none of that is in there. Racism, anti-gay bigotry, none of that is outlawed by the Constitution. Those are the things that need to be in a real peoples' constitution."

Arabian Woman "This country (America) was founded on violence. This country has been doing this since it began and I think that people need to understand that."

"Cuba is an occupied country....the U.S. won't leave" [1]

<end of cut material>

The fact that people made these remarks at a meeting is not encyclopedic. There is no way to know for any of these whether the view expressed is representative of the organization, especially because ANSWER meetings are open to the public, so there isn't even any guarantee these were said by members. I could say a lot more, but I'll leave it at that, unless someone wants to argue otherwise. -- Jmabel 05:09, Sep 9, 2004 (UTC)

these things were said behind closed doors but were videos taped

A.N.S.W.E.R. and its founders

The following conversation is copied from User talk:Jmabel:

I don't know what to think about 207.237.85.184 removing that relevant bit of information about the founders in the A.N.S.W.E.R. article. I know that you and I both have fixed the information back several times, and they don't seem to want to use the discussion page as suggested. I'm curious to know what you think about 207.237.85.184. Please do let me know... Schuminweb 11:25, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

Hi, the above user is me. I apologize for all this. I didn't really understand how the site worked, and thought that my revisions were somehow being reverted automatically. I finally did some investigation, and realized I could just explain it. I hope I haven't agitated you too much.

Regarding my revision, I deleted the reference to the International Action Center in the opening paragraph about A.N.S.W.E.R. because although the IAC was a founding member of the ANSWER Coalition - among a few others - it no longer is a member. In fact it belongs to an entirely different antiwar coalition, the Troops Out Now Coalition. It therefore is an inappopriate sentence for an introduction to ANSWER. If you go the ANSWER website for instance, you will not find any mention of the International Action Center. None of the ANSWER groups refer to it as an "IAC" or "Ramsey Clark" initiative. Of course, if one were to write a history of ANSWER, on the other hand, it would be necessary to describe the IAC's past involvement.

Likewise, I removed the International R.E.S.P.O.N.S.E. criticism of ANSWER, because after a little investigation, that does not appear to be the name of any functioning social justice organization. In fact, it appears simply to be a webpage satirically created to slander and criticize ANSWER. We are, after all, talking about one of, if not the largest, antiwar coalitions in the country, so it has been involved in many meaningful debates, polemics, and discussions. The Wikipedia entry instead unduly highlights a criticism from a made-up group, which could have been thrown together in a few minutes. It doesn't really shed any light on the history of the organization or its involvement in the antiwar movement. It could be listed in the "criticisms" of ANSWER section of the page, but it's hardly the authoritative, or even credible, voice when it comes to describing ANSWER's organizational approach. Really the entry needs to be thoroughly expanded, because at the present time, "International RESPONSE" and the "Lerner incident" - receive an inordinate amount of attention considering everything that ANSWER has done in its 4-year (to the day) history. The "Lerner Incident" really is less than 1% of ANSWER's history - no antiwar coalition backed his claim of antisemitism, and the issue soon disappeared. It shouldn't be written out of the history, but it shouldn't be half the entry. I attempted to cut it down, but had the revision reverted once again.

The pen 00:34, 14 September 2005 (UTC)The_pen

<end moved material>

1. I have no problem with cutting the International R.E.S.P.O.N.S.E. material. I agree, it is at best a fringy group, at worst one guy with a computer.
2. This article, like any encyclopedia article, is in equal doses about the present and the past. If WWP, IAC, and Ramsey Clark were just two unconnected groups and an individual who happened to be among the founders, I would agree that it was not important. But, in fact, IAC was a WWP front pure and simple, and Ramsey Clark (who, by the way, I respect quite a bit) has a history of close work with them going back at least to the 1980s. And they didn't just happen to be among the founders: in the early days of A.N.S.W.E.R. they were utterly dominant. They provided nearly all of the group's impressive logistical capability, and leveraged that to effectively dictate the group's line. They are the reason A.N.S.W.E.R. was able to get up and going so amazingly fast after 9/11 when no one else in the U.S. peace movement could achieve anything of the sort. But they are also the reason so much of the U.S. peace movement distrusted A.N.S.W.E.R. from the get-go. This is absolutely central to the story of this group. To leave it out would be like writing an article about the U.S. Civil War and leaving out slavery, or an article about Oscar Wilde and leaving out that he was an incredibly popular playwright.
3. The word I've heard is that the Party for Socialism and Liberation plays almost exactly the role in A.N.S.W.E.R. previously played by the WWP, and that it is in large measure the same people, organized in a similar manner. I have no idea how accurate this is, and I'd be interested in seeing citation in either direction. I think the article probably needs to have a paragraph on that, and would hope it would be well covered at Party for Socialism and Liberation. Frankly, I haven't been paying that much attention to A.N.S.W.E.R. now that they are not "the only game in town" (although I probably will be at their Seattle rally a week on Saturday 9/24, because on that day they are "the only game" in my town).
4. I seems disingenuous to say that "no antiwar coalition backed his claim of antisemitism". "Coalition" narrows it down to A.N.S.W.E.R. itself, NION, and UFPJ. Quite a few organizations and important journals of opinion on the left felt he was quite mistreated, although most viewed this as political narrowness rather than anti-semitism. Since Lerner himself urged people nonetheless to support and attend the rally in question, the lines were not drawn as sharply as they might have been. The incident may have been chronologically "less than 1% of ANSWER's history", but only in the sense that shooting wars have been "less than 1% of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict": you can't explain the bitterness on both sides without telling that part of the story.

Jmabel | Talk 01:46, 14 September 2005 (UTC)