Campus Coalition

Anti-war is synonymous with uninformed?  Ms. Lee’s point was understood, but her comments seem unfairly slanted, given that I’m sure she recognizes the existence of both sides of the argument.  Perhaps, the magazine should have done something to preserve its otherwise unbiased approach to the story.

Posted by Amartya Basu on Mar 4, 2003 at 5:21 PM

naureen’s awesome

Posted by suj on Mar 6, 2003 at 3:00 AM

Just for the record, a minor correction needs to be made. I was at the conference in Chicago and decisions made there (such as proposals for points of unity, days of action, etc.) were not done “entirely through consensus” as the article suggests. The organizers put a lot of time and effort into making sure it would be as democratic as possible, and this ment that voting was used to reach decisions.

I bring this up because I know at least for a lot of antiglobalization groups that have been active around opposing large financial institutions like the WTO or the IMF recently, consesus based decision making was often used, and in my personal experiance I saw this paralyze and fatally cripple a lot of these groups in the winter of 2001/2002. I think that democratic organizing is key to building a strong, inclusive, and effective fightback, and it is great that CAN embodies this.

Also, I am not sure what the author ment by characterizing our movement as “non-idealogical”. While there is definatley not idealogical continuity across all CAN chapters (nor should there be), I think our strength is that we encourage all people holding all kinds of different ideas to come together and debate them out within our movement, while at the same time we work together towards our common goal of stopping the war. Rather than being fiercely anti-ideaological and seeing differences of opinion as being inherantly bad, I think we draw strength from our inclusiveness and openness.

Posted by Chris on Mar 11, 2003 at 2:43 PM