Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
stylegar said:
Your memory is faulty. Perhaps you should jog it by reading back over the relevant section of the thread.
I posted something pointing out that most of the noteable IST sections have declined seriously in recent years. You responded by claiming that I was wrong and gave one example to the contrary. You then claimed that I wasn't letting facts stand in the way of my argument.
My response was to that was to give details of the decline in all of the traditionally strong IST groups and most, but not all, of the other ones which are of any significance whatsoever. You have not as yet made any case that I was wrong on any of this - which rather implies that my original point that the second tier IST groups are weaker than before is correct.
I also said that I don't believe your claim about the size of the Korean group. That does not, by they way, mean that you are lying. I think it's more likely that you, like many IST members, prefer to believe comforting fictions about this kind of thing. I have never met an IST member who can give me an accurate estimate of the size of their own group and most of them accept obvious nonsense on this issue without question. See for example another SWP poster who claimed that the SWP has 18,000 members, when 1,800 would be closer.
I fully accept that the IST claims to have 1,200 to 2,000 members in Korea. I don't believe it for a second, because I have never yet heard an IST membership claim that wasn't wildly exaggerated and because I have never seen the IST group described as that kind of force on the Korean left or within the DLP.
