It's Freaky: Anarchism No Longer a Fringe Passion at the Post
Press Action
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/anarchists12062005/
The Washington Post deserves credit for publishing two articles in recent months that refer to anarchists, without any hint of ridicule or disparagement. That’s truly unusual for a newspaper notorious for running news and commentary that either derides or omits mention of any political movement that falls outside the narrow ideological confines of the Democratic and Republican parties.
Here’s an example of how the Post typically refers to anarchists. It’s a story written by staff writer David Montgomery. The story, headlined “Peace by Pieces; New—and Old—Antiwar Protesters Hope to Turn Momentum Into a Movement,” appeared on the front page of the Style section on Sept. 22.
”Critics cannot easily dismiss this incarnation of antiwar enthusiasm as a fringe passion of anarchists, communists and freaks (though an author still tried to make that case last month at a Heritage Foundation forum). Recent polls say a majority of Americans—as many as 59 percent—think the war in Iraq is a “mistake” and the troops should be brought home. (Brought home when? That’s another question.)”
This passage from Montgomery’s story about antiwar demonstrations in DC represents standard fare from the Post, the nation’s leading media protector of the political establishment.
But then about a month later, the Post published an obituary of Ba Jin, the Chinese novelist and essayist who died at the age of 100. The obituary, picked up from the Associated Press, made reference to Ba Jin’s embrace of anarchism—without any condescension. The obituary read:
“Born Li Yaotang on Nov. 25, 1904, in the western city of Chengdu, he later changed his name to Ba Jin, taking the first syllable in Chinese of the surname of Mikhail Bakunin and the last syllable of Kropotkin, both Russian anarchists.
“Mr. Jin joined the Chinese anarchists as a teenager. He spent his early adulthood writing fiction and editing anarchist publications, and in 1936 joined the Literary Work Society, an organization of progressive young writers headed by Lu Xun. Most of Mr. Jin’s heroes were rebels.”
How refreshing. The Post opted against adding modifiers to the AP feed, such as “self-proclaimed anarchists” in front of the references to Bakunin and Kropotkin. There was no mention of “bomb-throwing” or “chaos” or “discredited political ideology” – let alone “freaks.”
And then this past weekend, the Post outdid itself. It ran a sarcasm-free profile of New Orleans resident Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther Party member and Green Party candidate (see photo above). The Dec. 4 article, written by staff writer Michelle Garcia, reported on the Common Ground Collective, “a grass-roots recovery effort of volunteers parachuting into the city from points across the nation.” Rahim is active in the collective and uses his late mother’s home as a central gathering spot for relief efforts.
Garcia wrote: “Common Ground volunteers in search of a bare-knuckles approach and a movement to inspire them meet up with those who have lost patience waiting for officialdom to help them.”
Later in the profile, Garcia quoted Sam Zellman, one of the collective’s members:
"Sitting at work making food for yuppies and listening to it on NPR—after a couple of days of this I’m like, I gotta come down,” says Zellman, who spent a month at the collective after he gave up on being deployed by the Red Cross. “Some of us want a better world, and this is kinda pushing on the rock together. If it’s us, or anarchists or the church folks, we have common goals, common short-term goals."
Normally, a Post reporter would have something snide to say after inserting a non-judgmental quote about anarchists into her story. But Garcia chose not to use this insidious reporting technique.
She followed the Zellman quote with this simple, yet powerful, sentence: “Inside the kitchen, Rahim traces this mobilization to an era of resistance and rebellion.”
Congratulations to the Washington Post for letting two references to anarchists slip into the newspaper without the obligatory denunciation that we’ve grown to expect from the political establishment’s paper of record.