Word: menn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Anyone who knows anything about the Spartacus Youth League must have done a double-take when they read Joseph Menn's "Platonic Dialogue?" (November 19). The piece was a "fictional" epistolary exchange between two Harvard students, one who heads the "Sisyphus Youth League," Thomas Careen, and the other who heads the Conservative Club, Sy Kahane. Menn was really referring to the SYL's Thomas N. Crean, and right-wing Iranian prince Saied Kashani. He attempted to hide his politics behind crude fiction. The central point was that communist defense of the Soviet Union against U.S. imperialism can be equated with...
...coincidence that Joseph's article came out during the week of Crimson elections to its executive board. Menn is a junior and this was his big chance to make The Crimson's inner sanctum his own. "Platonic Dialogue?" is his official cover letter for his Crimson application, an attempt to clear his record once and for all of any taint of Communist politics. Any anti-Soviet junior Cold Warrior at The Crimson could have written Joe's "opinion piece" (though to be fair most would not be so crude...
...believe it or not, Menn is a member of a supposedly Marxist, supposedly anti-racist outfit called the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which at Harvard masquerades as "Socialist" Forum. The ISO claims a program that's "neither Washington nor Moscow." In the face of Reagan and Co.'s anti-Soviet was drive they refuse to defend the social gains of October 1917 and equate U.S. imperialism with the Soviet workers state, spitting on the greatest victory of the international working class. The ISO supports Reagan and the Vatican's company union in Poland, Solidarnosc, whose counterrevolutionary attempt was thankfully spiked...
What makes Joe and the ISO so upset about the Trotskyist SYL? Is it that we Marxists who defend for the Soviet Union stand for the defense of the unions, for the defense of Blacks against race terror and for workers revolution to smash capitalism? Menn is very explicit: "Sisyphist slogans like: 'Defense of the Soviet Union Begins in Central America!' 'Vietnam Was a Victory!!' 'Defend the Deformed Workers State Against Jewish Dissidents!!!''' It should be made clear that we adamantly oppose state persecution of citizens for purely ideological "crimes." But Soviet traitors like the Sakharovs, who give concrete...
...face of its domestic reflection: union-busting and race terrorism. The most hideous recent example of race-terror was the cold-blooded, state-organized murder of 11 members of the MOVE commune in Philadelphia by Reagan and his Black democratic front-man mayor Wilson Goode. However, despicable Joe Menn can joke in his piece about Klan-style "sordid and unhealthy aspects of cross-burning and rock throwing...