FringeWatch: April 11, 2008 Edition

For one thing, it is the first anniversary of the suicide of Ken Kronberg. An excellent overview of the background and circumstances, and what it means, is available here. A considerable amount of material on Kronberg's life and death are posted at the memorial site, though it hasn't been updated in a while.

A remarkable collection of vintage LaRouchiana is being posted by Dennis King here, including an extremely rare and unbelievably terrible collection of poems he wrote back while using the pen name Lyn Marcus. For the true historian and/or masochist, there is even more mimeographia at LaRouche Planet.

All of this stuff went up online in the wake of Kronberg's suicide. Read the Skull/Bones item (the first one linked above) and you'll get some sense why that is.

Meanwhile -- and the coincidence here really is remarkable -- the Revolutionary Communist Party announced a few days ago that April 11 would be the day when it finally responded to Mike Ely and his renegade revisionist clique.

Ely, who was at one point the editor of the party newspaper, wrote an extensive and very thoughtful critique of the cult of Chairman Bob Thought called Nine Letters.

My impression is that -- in spite of three previous efforts to get party members and supporters to stick their fingers in their ears and go "LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU BECAUSE I AM TOO BUSY EXPRESSING APPRECIATION FOR CHAIRMAN BOB AVAKIAN'S BOLD NEW SYNTHESIS, WHICH I DO NOT ACTUALLY UNDERSTAND BUT APPRECIATE ALL THE MORE FOR NOT UNDERSTANDING IT!" -- the Letters have actually had quite an effect in RCP circles.

Suffice it to say that they would not have assigned a special "writing group" trained in the revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Chairman Bob Thought to the task of responding, were the fingers digging in deep enough.

Come what may, the really fascinating thing on both fronts is seeing how the culture of small groups accustomed to controlling the ability of members and supporters to communicate with one another as they try to adjust to circumstances in which it is almost impossible to continue to do so.

UPDATE: The response by the RCP has been posted. (An alternative title might be "I Know You Are But What Am I?") The discussion at Ely's place now begins.