Letter: Town Criers are red-baiting

Letter: Town Criers are red-baiting

Selma Noctis
St Augustine, FL

Dear Editor:

In response to the Tea Party Town Crier’s attempts at discrediting my good friend and Fellow Worker, Terry Buckenmeyer, I feel the need to clear some things up.

To begin with, reading the article, I noticed that Terry’s name was spelled correctly in the first instance of its mention — and then misspelled every other time.

This seems a petty thing to notice, but on top of all the outright slander, it seems quite deliberate and is, therefore, utterly childish.

The conflation of terms in Lance Thate’s editorial leads any well-read reader to believe that he does not understand the ideologies he criticizes any better than he does the ones he defends.

For instance, Communism and Marxism are two different philosophies – certainly Marxism is a specific type of Communism, but Communist philosophies are numerous. Marxism is only a subset.

That said, the Industrial Workers of the World (not “International,” Mr. Thate) is explicitly non-political. Labor issues are socio-economic and the IWW, on principle, does not support any one political or religious philosophy.

It may be true that there have been Communists in the IWW, just as there have been Libertarians, Socialists, Democrats and Republicans. Union organizing is not about what ideology one follows, it’s about better conditions and treatment for the working class, end of story.

Finally, I would like to offer a bit of constructive criticism to Mr. Thate: listing a number of quotes taken out of context does nothing for your argument. All it does do is shove some ideas down the throat of a reader who can’t fully digest what is being said because there is nothing grounding those quotes into an intelligible context. In essence, it’s bad writing.

Next time the Tea Party needs an excuse for a red-baiting campaign; I suggest only that they do some more thorough research.