Date: Fri, 16 May 1997 12:01:03 +0200
Subject: M-G: Re: Boycott provocateurs


Chris B writes:

>Rolf Martens has exposed himself as a security risk on
>this list.
>
>a) he defends his right to report to the security forces
>people whom he considers to be serious political enemies.
>
>b) his logic for identifying serious political enemies is
>arbitrary to say the least.
>
>c) he is seriously provocative.
>

etc etc, and:

>Whether he continues to post on this list, or finds better things to do,
>is of course entirely up to him. I would not be in favour of this
>list censoring him off it. Another Rolf would emerge and we would
>have learned nothing.
>
>But until he has made a genuine self-criticism about his style, and
>demonstrated a sustained effort to change in practice, I would
>call on all other subscribers to boycott him.

The trouble with this call is that Chris himself is about the only person
here in any sort of dialogue with Rolf M, except for the rare occasions on
which people just can't take any more of the pro-plutonium madness and put
in a rejoinder as a kind of token clean-up.

If the lists are like a Chinese wall newspaper, Rolf's contributions are a
bit like graffiti scrawled over the posters -- if anybody bothers to read
them. But the beauty of the Net is that you can make graffiti invisible by
ignoring them. Real meetings are a different matter. Rolf's behaviour --
whether it's hysterical or purchased or just plain old sectarian lunacy --
would be intolerable there and would probably get him thrown out very
quickly.

This isn't to say that Chris should ignore the charges Rolf made against
him -- he's managed that quite well in fact. It's just that internal
Stalino-Maoist bustups don't have much general news interest.

Cheers,

Hugh







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