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Phony "VVAW": Nut Group Around

By VVAW

WARNING: a band of cult followers pretending to be VVAW may have dropped into your newspapers or onto your TV screen in the past several months. You may have heard about them in an abortive attempt to takeover the Washington Monument in early November; burning an American flag for the TV cameras at Washington University in St Louis; holding a National Guard commander "hostage" until they couldn't get him to do what they wanted at an obscure base in Michigan; or sending a supposed member of VVAW to Iran in December.

All of this, and perhaps other things we haven't yet heard about, was the work of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a band of self-styled revolutionaries devoted to the hysterical teachings of their fuehrer, Bob Avakian, son of a San Francisco Superior Court judge. Since 1978 when the RCP decided that VVAW was not fanatic enough for them and their strange tastes, they have used the couple of RCP members who are veterans, supported by assorted flotsam and jetsam, to pimp off the respected name of VVAW to attempt to legitimize their own weird views of the world.

While VVAW ignored this misappropriation of our name for many months in hopes that these people would creep back under their rocks, in the last 8 months or so, their bizarre activities have attracted some attention from the media. Based on the harm that the RCP was doing to the name and reputation of VVAW, we filed court action against their scab organization along with the various other tentacles of the RCP which support this illegal activity (other defendants included RCP Publications, Advantage Printers and the Liberation Bookstore.). While we asked the court for punitive damages, we were primarily looking for an injunction to prevent them from misleading people by using our name for their purposes.

To read the pages of "The Revolutionary Worker," tool of the RCP, it would appear that their VVAW would rely on faith and mass outrage to defend them in their misuse of the name of the organization. Nowhere is mentioned their 5 or 6 lawyers, some from the most prestigious law firms in Chicago. While they will present the front of being beyond the "law," when it comes right down to it, they scurry about to buy the best legal talent they can find.

And they need it. Most of the activities of the sham VVAW over the past several months have been supposedly aimed at support for the people of Iran--but with friends like this, no one needs enemies. Few people are converted to support of Iran by a burning American flag, though our experience has been that, sitting down and talking to individuals can often lead to their understanding why the people of Iran are doing what they are doing. Unfortunately, the RCP misfits, incapable of getting close enough to people to have a chance to sit down and talk with them, are reduced to haranguing passersby at street corners in hopes of shocking them into following the RCP line.

An appearance in court on the 17th of January in Chicago led to the judge's dismissal of all charges against all defendants except the fake VVAW. The RCP once again received grace and mercy from the courts which they pretend to abhor--similar to the RCP loonies who were not prosecuted for pointing guns at the Secret Service in Washington, DC back in November. But mercy from the courts has often been the result in trials of police agents and others whose activities were seen as valuable by the government.

The RCP's "VVAW" sniveled into court promising they would never again use the VVAW insignia, and further that they would use disclaimers whenever they used the name of the organization. Knowing their courtroom tactics so far, how much they will abide by the promises remains to be seen.