The letter is directed to and forwarded by another person
(Susan George gives permission in the letter for the original recipient to forward to De Fabel)

It's a shame these people obsessed with ideological purity are making life difficult for you in Holland.

I suggest you convey to them -- use my name if you like -- that

-- in the US, the anti-NAFTA anti-WTO forces of the left defeated fast-track authority for the President [Congress can make no amendments to trade treaties] only with the help of the far right.  It was still a good thing to defeat fast track.  It is not because the right agrees with some of the progressive's ideas that the latter are bad.  I think I agree with the Dutch fascist they cite who says governements do not even want to protect their sovereignty now -- a friend who dined the other night with an important French minister quoted him as having said about our dear European partners that their is a "desire for Empire", meaning they want to acquiesce to the demands of America.  Does this make me a fascist?

-- in France, the anti-MAI campaign avoided the problem of having the National Front and affiliates join the coalition or ride on its coat-tails simply by writing a Manifesto [of 28 April 1998] which hundreds of organisations and individuals have now signed.  It was democratically elaborated and amended by the progressive groups in the coalition and referred specifically to the rights of immigrants, undocumented people etc. etc.  If you agreed with and signed the Manifesto, you were in the coalition, if you didn't you weren't.

-- Noam Chomsky is a wonderful man and an extreme libertarian who believes that all views, however repulsive, should be aired.  He took this to extremes by writing a preface for a fascist in France called Robert Faurisson who wrote a "negationist" book claiming that the gas chambers never existed.  Many French leftists have never pardonned Chomsky for this.  The fact remains that no one else has his anti-imperialist credentials and his encyclopedic command of America's turpitudes throughout the ages.

-- Teddy Goldsmith, a man of 70, has himself suffered from anti-Semitism. He believes in traditional societies along third-world lines based on family, religion and shared values which anchor people to their communities.  You can agree with him or not on this -- I don't entirely -- but you cannot deny that Teddy's magazine has been in the forefront of the fight against MAI, WTO, Global warming, GMOs and a great many other important battles. I remember when in the 70s he [The Ecologist] fought the Industry Cooperative Programme at the FAO which was my own bete noire at the time, on which I had done a lot of research, at a time when no one else would touch the subject.  The programme of  cooperation with TNCs at FAO was subsequently stopped.

I suggest these people of Fabel stop constituting themselves as a cadre of thought-police and get on with the work it is clear we all need to be doing. It is also clear that some people are always going to be naive, some are going to be ignorant, some are going to be stupid.  This is not a reason for condemning them wholesale and splitting the movement. Let us try to learn to give each other the benefit of the doubt. The "reasoning" which says that a Dutch fascist admires the work of Gramsci, leftists admire the work of Gramsci [I myself based a long article specifically on cultural hegemony] therefore leftists are fascists is not worth dignifying with a reply.

Susan