The
Editorial Committee of
The International Journal of
Inclusive Democracy
(April 2012)
David Curtis
takes part in an anonymous mudslinging campaign against Takis Fοtopoulos
(and publicizes it in Agora!)
At the end
of December 2011 an unprecedented dirty personal attack on Takis
Fotopoulos was launched by an anonymous mudslinger under the
name of Omadeon, who even created special webpages within his
blog for this purpose. In fact, most of his blog is devoted to
this scurrilous campaign, which has also involved the creation
of other blogs to allege that Takis has just become a member of
a national socialist organization (whose other members are
well-known fascists).
http://laosydisa.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/blog-post.html
Even Takis’s
supposed death was announced on one of these blogs!
The same
internet persona has created two different user names in order
to distort and discredit Takis’s Wikipedia bio entry by
presenting him as a Stalinist etc., employing exactly the same
"arguments" as were used in his blogs. However, this
campaign ended ingloriously when the wiki administrators had
Omadeon “blocked indefinitely from
editing for persistent disruptive
editing, as [he] did at Takis
Fotopoulos” :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:SentientContrarian
The Editorial Committee of The International
Journal of Inclusive Democracy issued
an announcement describing what happened in
Wikipedia and Omadeon’s leading role in this campaign in Greece.
It is obvious that the campaign
of this anonymous mudslinger, who has clearly spent a tremendous
amount of time carrying out this sustained attack on somebody
whom he does not know personally (nor, of course, did we have
any idea who was hiding beneath his pseudonym until we recently
discovered his real identity - which was completely unknown to
us - on the internet), has been sponsored by other forces. These
forces are presumably mostly systemic, since they in particular
have every reason to discredit Takis and the ID project for
his stand against Zionism, the NATO massacre in
Libya etc. However, we later discovered the additional
involvement of forces belonging to
the Greek reformist Left, whose role has been completely to
disorientate and deceive the Greek people by claiming that the
present economic catastrophe has not been the result of Greece's
integration into the internationalized capitalist market economy
- particularly since it joined the EU, as Takis has shown - but
that, instead, it was the result of the corruption of the
political system and/or its entry into the Eurozone. In fact,
the ID network in Greece has denounced by name some prominent
members of this “Left” who were found co-operating with this
anonymous slanderer, and although challenged by Takis
to dissociate themselves from him, they never did so (see the
full announcement by the Greek ID network on this dirty campaign).
Fortunately, however, significant parts of the Greek
antisystemic Left saw through this dirty attack on Takis and ID
and sided with the ID network, condemning such anonymous attacks
below the belt. Of course, anonymity is sometimes desirable - if
not necessary - when attacking those in power, but it is highly
suspicious when used to attack those fighting power and the
system, as the ID project and Takis have always done!
It is no wonder that the
same anonymous mudslinger hastened to involve David Curtis in
this campaign, a figure well known for his devious attacks on
Takis and ID. Thus, Omadeon revealed one of Takis's personal
emails (without of course asking for his permission before doing
so) in reply to the slanderous allegation by Curtis (repeated by
Omadeon) that Democracy & Nature
had attempted
to censor him when he tried to criticize Chomsky—an
allegation which we showed in detail to be a blatant lie aimed
at defaming the journal.
In this email to Omadeon, Takis wrote,
“you have now reached the lowest level of vagabondage by
invoking Curtis, Castoriadis's well-known sycophant who, as soon
as Castoriadis died, turned against his family because they did
not consent to the exclusive rights in his works which he
demanded". Of course, this 2-line description in a personal
email was not supposed to be a fully comprehensive and
accurate description of a complicated affair; it simply aimed to
express the common view of what actually happened, as presented
by a third party to the dispute (and not by Curtis himself!)
- for instance, in the account given by Scott McLemee and
published in The Chronicle of Higher Education (26 March
2004, Volume 50, Issue 29, Page A14).
In this account, Helen Arnold,
who joined Socialism or Barbarism in 1961 and remained friends
with Castoriadis until the end of his life, wrote the
following about Curtis's real motives in reference to the
foreword to a book by Castoriadis published online
and posthumously - about which the Chronicle writes rather
sarcastically, “whose anonymous author appears to have a very
detailed knowledge of Mr. Curtis's experience and opinions”!
: "What I feel is extremely objectionable is the appending of a
slanderous foreword, the only object of which can be to defend
David Curtis's interests, parading in political attire”.
Another scholar -
Joel Whitebook,
assistant professor of medical psychology at Columbia University
- also put it aptly in another
comment on the dispute between Curtis and the Castoriadis family
(included in the same Chronicle article):
But all the conflict and complications do not come as a
surprise, he says: "As an analyst, I've observed it over and
over again, every time I've seen a death in a family. All the
feelings from childhood -- who got enough, who didn't, and who
never will -- all come up."
The same dynamic works itself out,
he says, in an extended family. "The fact that this was an
important thinker doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter if
what people are fighting over is a million dollars or grandma's
cookie jar. It's always the same."
So, when Curtis was
informed about Takis’s private email by the mudslinger Omadeon, he obviously
saw in it a golden opportunity to launch a new attack on Takis,
not even bothering to find out first who this anonymous
correspondent was. So, he gave Omadeon permission to publicize
his email and he, in turn, proceeded to do so on a massive scale
throughout the internet, adding the catchy and slanderous title:
"David Ames Curtis: Takis Fotopoulos has simply made up an
invidious scenario in his head and stated it as fact, without
any support". And it was slanderous because Takis's
description of events was part of a private email, whereas
Curtis not only consented to have his own statement publicized,
(thus providing Omadeon with the opportunity to promote it
heavily in his mudslinging campaign against Takis Fοtopoulos),
but he did not even have any qualms about degrading the Agora
site that he maintains, by hosting not one but three links to
Omadeon’s slanderous posts with the obvious aim of maximizing
the attempted defamation of Takis, the ID project and the ID
Journal.
As is well
known, Curtis’s
“Cornelius Castoriadis Agora
International Website” supposedly contains “Webpages with Unpublished Texts By/About Castoriadis”. The obvious
question arising concerns the exact relationship between the
work of Castoriadis and the dispute between Curtis and
Castoriadis’s family about “grandma's cookie jar”, as the above scholar
appropriately put it. Even worse, one wonders what the exact
relationship is between Castoriadis’s work and a
scurrilous campaign by an
anonymous mudslinger against another thinker. This is a question
that obviously only David Curtis could answer. Everybody else,
however, who may also be aware of Curtis’s previous sustained
campaign in Agora to defame the ID Journal and Takis Fotopoulos
personally yet again, will be free to assume that the Agora site
is not only what it is supposed to be but also a useful vehicle
for Curtis’s slanderous attacks on other political projects and
thinkers.
April 2012
The
Editorial Committee of
The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy