Sectarianism, violence, and authority

Sectarianism, violence, and authority

When I was involved in the sectarian left in the sixties and seventies the vision then was that we were going to take over control of the state and run society…[in order to] creat[e] equality and all of that sort of thing. There was never any clear understanding of how that was going to happen and the propaganda among those sectarian groups of one kind or another was always that in the Soviet Union everybody's got a place to live, and everybody's got a job, and they’ve got health care, and nobody ever looked at the fact that people were being shot everyday for virtually nothing. I think that most of these sectarian groups were characterized by the Stalin-type leader who was the ultimate authority.