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

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 




 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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