MAWO, Ivan Drury, and Me

In case you don't know, Ivan Drury is the guy who defected from the hardcore anti-war group FTT (Fire This Time), an organization that includes the perhaps more recognizable Vancouver anti-war group MAWO (Mobilization Against War and Occupation). You might know MAWO from its regularly scheduled protests at the Vancuver Art Gallery, and its posters displaying fill-in-the-blank headings like "All Troops Out of (insert country's name here)" and "Self-determination for the People of (insert country's name here)", etc. The interchangeable regions include Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Darfur, and Palestine.

I personally know MAWO from my days at Capilano College, where CSAW (Capilano Students Against War), another FTT sub-group, had a strong (and annoying) campus presence, not to mention near majority control of the Capilano Student Union. However, the CSU voted this term to officially sever its intimate ties with MAWO. They can still organize on campus, but it means no more privileged treatment for the group.

As far as MAWO's members went, to me they seemed robotic and frightened. Given their rigidly ideological and simplistic world-view they made no distinctions between the oppression of Indigenous people in Canada, the Western opposition to communist Cuba, the Israel/Palestine conflict, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and possible one in Iran), and all international interventions, say, anywhere in Africa. In other words, all the problems in the world are due to Western Imperialist Aggression. And the solutions? Keep the West from intervening anywhere for any reason.

And so MAWO holds its apparently-just-for-show rallies each month, complete with placard-waving, slogan-chanting, and rhetoric-drenched speeches. The fact that such anti-establishment protests are tolerated simply means that they're not really anti-establishment at all. The establishment tolerates it just fine. They are absolutely no threat to "the system". Two of these protesters' biggest enemies - George Bush and Stephen Harper - would be the first to applaud them for demonstrating their "right to public protest" and their "freedom of speech". Bush and Harper can feel secure knowing that the people who oppose them most are wasting their time screaming in the streets - annoying other citizens and turning them off of more moderate, sensible activism - instead of engaging in mainstream politics, which is where the power to change things actually is.

I had written my first article for my college paper - The Capilano Courier - criticizing MAWO for all the above reasons, but I had no idea how truly messed up things are in the group until recently. Ivan Drury confirmed my worst suspicions.

Ivan started a blog titled "Against Exceptionalism" in February of this year detailing the brutal cult-like practices of MAWO and FTT (headed by the group's alpha-tyrant, Ali Yerevani), and Ivan's own four-year long complicity in them.

Rather than re-explain myself here, I'll just make this link to a comment I left on his blog, to which he responded in a email. I responded to that email and subsequently gave him the okay to post our exchange on the blog as well. The ball's in his court at the moment, and he's promised to reply again soon.

Our minimal exchange has left me even more disillusioned about extreme Leftist activists, particular those who call themselves Marxists. You'll understand why if you read my comments on Ivan's blog.

By total coincidence, and to my surprise, Ivan and I both read at the Memewar Magazine's Shortline Reading series at the Railway Club last Tuesday, and so I got to meet him in person. Unfortunately, Ivan missed my reading early in the evening, but I did catch his not-so-subtle Marxist poetry, which employed the even-less-subtle device of having a partner-in-poetry yell out a portion of the poem from the audience. Going with my most cynical interpretation of this tactic I'd say that he was trying to match the radicalism of his politics with an equally "unconventional" (or gimmicky) reading stunt. I'll show those petty-bourgeois what the real hardcore is.

But I'm being a bit harsh. I'm also somewhat pretentious on stage. At this particular reading I couldn't help but quote Northrop Frye, who, as I told the crowd, is an important Canadian literary critic that nobody cares about anymore. He's a bit of an intellectual obsession for me, as most people who know me already know. Anyway, the quote was this: "The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego."

My point was that in our ultra po-mo (post-modern) times, truth and goodness are quite unfashionable. Anyone who dares to assert what is either "true" or "good" are often handled with relativist disdain. "Who are you to say what's good or true?", etc. Beauty, on the other hand, is all we have left, precisely because, as the easy cliché goes, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." That's pretty much the relativist's slogan. No wonder in our overly skeptical, po-mo value vacuum we're so comfortable with poetry being removed from from truth and goodness, and so focused on contentless beauty, and on personal sorrow and cleverness. Style seems to have triumphed over substance.

Obviously, though, Ivan's poetry was not devoid of political content, and it did have a message rooted in social(ist) values. So what am I getting at? I touch on it in my comments on Ivan's blog, but I'll put it another way here.

Besides the obvious aesthetic problems of basing a poem on any particular ideology (although some may argue - a Marxist certainly - that no poetry escapes such an ideological basis, and so maybe Ivan was ironically calling the bluff by going with a blatant Marxist source for his poem...maybe), Ivan's particular ideology - Marxism - is one that I have trouble associating with "values" of any kind.

That is, I'm not sure how anyone can call themselves a Marxist and at the same time speak of "social justice" or the "evils" of capitalism. Unless you're a watered-down Marxist you should want capitalism to get worse so it can finally flip around, collapse, and turn into socialism. But "want" isn't the right word. It would be odd to say you "want" water to boil at 100 degrees celsius, because that's just what it does. If dialectical materialism leads inevitably to communism, then what role does "wanting", or for that matter "social justice", have to do with it?

Ivan writes in his blog that he believes capitalism cannot be reformed - it must be overthrown by socialist revolution - and that he believes in social justice. I've asked Ivan, and I'll put it out there now: What kind of Marxism is this?

MAWO is at least slightly more consistent with orthodox Marxism, but only in that, like the communists who opposed Bismarck's reforms and worker unionization, they oppose all Western governments' interventions anywhere in the world. In their call for "self-determination for all oppressed peoples" perhaps they are merely hoping that the class-stuggle will be hastened, and that socialism will appear around the corner if only the "natural", "scientific" process of Marx's historical dialectic is allowed to unfold without being slowed. But they, too, make the mistake of attaching the moral values of "peace", "justice" and oppressed people's "autonomy" to a Marxist analysis of world conflicts. As Theodor Adorno put it, Marx wanted to turn the whole world into a giant workhouse.

Well, I'll just stop here and remind anyone who has read this far to check out Ivan's blog (especially his initial confession/exposé post about FTT's vicious inner-politics) and my comments on it, particulartly if you want to post a comment here.

Oh, and Ivan, if you read this, I did enjoy your poem, like I told you. But Tuesday wasn't the time to go into all this other stuff. If you'd have been there for my reading, you'd have the opportunity to critique me as well. I'd be more than happy to send you what I read, if you like. And, of course, I'm curious to see your pending response to my old comments. No pressure, I'm just an impatient and self-absorded guy.