McReynolds on “Apology from a Coward”

I don't want to get into a contest about who is the bigger coward (a contest I'd be pretty sure to win) but I do want to point out that a lot of the revolutionary bullshit is just that - bullshit.

Serious mass movements must make room for everyone. The elderly, the ill, and the cowards. Movements only open to the most courageous and youthful souls will usually (not always) be defeated.

The genius of Gandhi was that he mobilized all the peasants of India, the illiterate, and put them up against the British Army. Martin Luther King Jr. showed that you didn't need a gun - you just had to walk, in Montgomery, in order to bring the old order to a standstill.

Serious movements, really revolutionary ones, open the door to all, and it can't be done by coercion.

For some reason there is discussion (too much for me) of the role of Lenin and Trotsky - but very little insight into how Debs was actually able to mobilize people, and almost no interest on the part of our revolutionists in what King was able to accomplish against armed and violent white Southerners.

David