Stop BAMN
Blogger Nathan Newman tells the horrifying tale of the "violent and thuggish" group By Any Means Necessary - who are now part of the April 1 march to protest the removal of affirmative action. Nathan has personal experience with this group, and he tells the story best:
Back in 1995, when the University of California Regents voted to end affirmative action in the university system, an incredibly vibrant, multiracial student-led group emerged called Diversity in Action...However, within weeks of forming, that broad-based student affirmative action group was under assault, not by the cops or the administration, but by a thuggish and violent band called By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), a grouplet created by a Detroit-based sect called the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL). The RWL had sent out a number of their leaders to create their BAMN front group, whose members proceeded not just to disrupt the student-led coalition meetings, but to physically assault the students, snatch the microphone from them at rallies, and bring their own megaphones to drown out their speakers.
In twenty years of political organizing, I have never seen such violent and thuggish behavior, a step beyond the worst sectarian acts I had ever imagined...Fast forward to 2003 and I was horrified to recently hear that By Any Means Necessary, having attacked and destroyed other affirmative action groups in the 1990s, had "mainstreamed" themselves in the last couple of years and gotten broad-based endorsements for an April 1st march in Washington DC tied to the upcoming Supreme Court decision on affirmative action.
Which is what sectarian thugs like BAMN and the RWL count on in their violent strategies. If they can destroy alternative coalitions at the grassroots, they can count on lazy or ignorant national leaders to endorse them as the only available game in town...What is most frustrating it that major progressive groups seem to continually fall into this pattern of endorsing thuggish sectarian groups, instead of building real democratic coalitions of their own. It was only recently, with the major February 15th mass marches against the Iraq War, that mainstream peace organizations formed a real national alternative to the Workers World Party front group, ANSWER, which had seized leadership of peace rallies for nearly a year.
Hopefully, just as ANSWER is being marginalized by new democratic antiwar coalitions, BAMN will be marginalized in the affirmative action movement as mainstream civil rights groups realize what a thuggish organization they have gotten into bed with.
Nathan provides many informative links to back up his claim. A person whose philosophy is that the ends justify any means would rightly be labeled a sociopath by a psychologist; multiply the philosophy by hundreds and you have BAMN. Regardless of your attitude towards affirmative action, it's obvious from past behavior that BAMN is no help to either side.