The Sparts: 'Real Leftists'

To the Editors of the Crimson:

At a recent meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, a member of that organization asked me if it wasn't true that the Spartacist League receives all its money from the FBI. In his May 6 letter to the Crimson, "campus radical" Michael Anderson makes a similar "argument."

First he calls the Spartacist League "Stalinist," although he knows full well that they are Trotskyists, and that they call for a political revolution in the USSR to replace the bureaucracy them. Leon Trotsky, he will remember, died in 1940 from a blow to the skull with an ice-pick, delivered by an agent of the GPU. Do Trotskyist organizations like the Spartacist League receive support from Moscow, from the KGB?

No, says Anderson, "the Sports don't even act like real communists...the Spartacists are not real leftists; their organization has got to be come kind of right-wing front to discredit the left." He repeatedly assures me personally that the Spartacist League is a "cop front." Likewise, many would have as believe, Leon Trotsky was an agent of the Germani Emperor, of the Mikado, of Hitler.

KGB? CIA? FBI? Fake-leftists cannot tolerate a revolutionary program which calls for breaking with both the Republicans and the Democrats. The one thing that they really cannot stand is people, like the Spartacist League, who say what they believe at all times, and who mean what they say. It hurts their relationships with the politicians on whom they depend who will not tolerate revolutionary slogans of any kind.

Anderson cannot argue politics, so he is reduced to ridiculous slander, lies about "physical attacks on leftist rallies." The Spartacists are so "ultra-left," he says, that they must be under the control of the right. This sort of stuff is cheap and sensational. Anderson is either incredibly paranoid or just a plain liar. Dean Wareham '85