The Alliance for Workers Liberty recently posted a series of articles on the Trotskyist position at the establishment of the state of Israel. I actually found the documents very interesting, and generally support the AWL's position in respect of Israel as opposed to the bash Israel Brigades position, though personally for reasons I have outlined on their website I do not agree with the Two-States solution.
I posted a number of short pieces to several of the articles in the series they produced all of which seem to have been accepted except for several posts replying to the argument given by Albert Glotzer in reply to Eernest Mandel. At first I thought that it may have been a technical problem that caused the posts to be deleted, but having reposted them I found they were deleted again without any explanation. There did not seem anything contentious in the posts. This seems strange for there to be such censorship from an organisation that prides itself rightly on the openness of its website compared to those of other Left-wing organisations, and which has gone out of its way to defend free speech over the cartoons issue for isntance, and even in defence of the capitalist media in Venezuela that called for support for a coup against the Chavez government.
As yet no reason for the censorship has been given, and now the thread to which the posts were made has been closed for comment!
In the interests of free speech against this censorship, I am forced then to resort to publishing the pieces here rather than the more appropriate place in reply to the Golotzer article itself.
6 comments:
It might well be - indeed it is unfair - to state the obvious, but the comments you make on the WL website, and the comments on those comments, seem to guarantee that no-body else will bother to comment on those articles, as your comments are extremely long and long-winded and quickly dominate the comments boxes, making it impossible for anyone else to take part.
They make me think I am reading the Boffy website and not the WL one.
Perhaps the deletion of some of your comments is actually to *encourage* debate, and not to discourage it. Like when at meetings the same person doesn't usually have the opportunity to take the microphone over and over again; others are given the chance first.
Just a thought, eh.
Karl,
I note your comments. The easy test I suppose would be to look at all those threads on the WL site where I have not posted, and see how much debate they have encouraged. Well I did that a while ago, and to me it looks like 90% of threads lead to no dialogue whatsoever, indeed most of the threads that do have dialogue are the ones I have contributed to, so I suppose if we were to look at the evidecne, it would appear to contradict your theory.
On the point about people hogging meetings, well surely the whole advantage of an online forum is that you do not have to sit waiting for someone else to finish speaking before you contribute do you. And you have the opportunity to skip through what they have written if you so wish.
Finally, its hardly that the posts deleted were long. So this does not seem to be the reason these particular posts were deleted.
Writing on the AWL website:Your argument here repeats the only response given by someone, presumably from the AWL to my personal blog.
Just to clear it up, I'm not a member of the AWL, and I am also not "paulm" and have no idea who he/she is.
Dear Karl Marx,
Whether you are a member of the AWL or not, whether you are really Karl Marx or not, the fact remains that your comments here are the same as the only sentiments I have ever heard from the AWL, which was when they asked me to no longer write a blog for them, though that seems to have itself been prompted in reality by the fact that these blogs were not so much long as no longer supporting 100% the politics of the AWL.
They are also the same as those of former AWL member PaulM (Paul McGarry) who though no longer an AWL member rarely criticices them.
More imnportantly as I have set out here, and in response to Paul on the AWL site the argument you, and he raise does not stand up. The threads I have contributed to have precisely been the ones that have produced the greatest degree of discussion.
Moreover, in response to this argument being raised by Pete Radcliffe some time ago, I have fo the last few months adopted the same approach that he did, which is to break down the comments into a series of posts rather than one large one.
I had not posted for some time prior to writing a few posts in relation to the AWL's posts in relation to the establishment of Israel. I posted short comments in relation to the articles by Mandel and Glotzer. The comments to the mandel article were left alone the comments on the Glotzer article all deleted despite being short as you can attest by viewing them on my blog here.
I reposted them with a complaint about them being deleted. Rather than explain their deletion the AWL deleted them again along with my complaint.
At that point I posted them here, and in a reply to Martina Daycoi in another thread reposted them along with a link to my blog here. Again rather than explain their action the AWL's response then appears to have been simply to delete all my posts along with my account.
I had the week before been trying to copy all my posts from the AWL site in order to combine them into a series of articles here as I do not have copies of everything I had posted to the AWL site over the last two years or so. But due to ghome commitments I was unable to continue that work for over a week. It was only when I went back to continue it that I found that my account, and my posts had been deleted. As I have said before all of the ideas contained in those posts are now lost. It is the equivalent of electronic book burning.
the argument you, and he raise does not stand up
That you write 8 paragraphs in reply to a one-sentence statement of fact, suggests the opposite.
On-screen, on-line comments are not the same as a group's internal discussion document.
Dear Karl Marx,
Your comment here is sophism of the worst kind. My comments were not merely a reply to your one sentence of fact, but in response to previous comments here and on the AWL website.
It is of course possible to reply to a one sentence accusation against you with the one snetence reply "its not true", but the scientific method does usually require that statement to be verified by some reference to evidence. It takes just one sentence, and a few seconds to accuse a man in court of murder, it usually takes many months, and thousands of words to refute the charge.
This is partly what is so ludicrous about the AWL's argument. They say they are in favour of free speech, and open debate,but then want to restrict criticism of their own long articles to just a few words.
Your argument about such criticism on their website, and in internal bulletin discussions suffers the same degree of sophistry. Were we all part of a single revolutionary party your argument might have some validity, but we are not. Were it he case that what we were talking about here was articles printed in a newspaper, or spoken at a meeting your argument would be equally valid. But we are not. We are talking about an electronic medium. The marginal cost of comments to such a medium is negligible, the capacity for readers to simply scroll past comments they do not wish to read as opposed to having to listen to them being spoken invalidates that argument.
In short this medium enables everyone to participate in discussions in the same way that would be possible given almost unlimited resources for members of a single organisation. Anyone that truly wishes to participate in open discussion, rather than trying to maintain a monopoly of ideas over young impressionable members of their Leninist organisation, as Lenin clearly feared in his comments about freedom of criticism in "What is to be Done?" would welcome that opportunity.
The purpose of this website will be to allow real discussion, and the development of ideas not to simply be a slanging match restricted to unsupported statements. But my short answer to your point would be.
1. Nothing you have said explain the reason for deleting all the old posts.
2. The first posts deleted were those replying to the Glotzer article which were not long. The posts in response to the Mandel article which formed part of the same series were not deleted.
3. My comments complaining about the deletions were tiny.
4. The deletion of my account, and all my posts came only after my complaint about those deletions, the reposting of the articles, and their posting here.
5. Clearly, this had nothing to do with the length of those posts, but was about their content. The other crap is just a convenient cover.
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