Letters

Poor defence

It is a shame that Steve Hedley could not direct his anger towards the union bureaucrats and their supporters in ‘the left’ rather than someone who provided so much assistance to him in the period 1995-98. Instead he employs the best traditions of his hero, Mr Stalin, to indulge in a litany of smears, innuendoes and outright lies (Weekly Worker September 16).

I am not a boss. I work in a community centre which includes a creche. Last year, at 39, I earned just over what Steve Hedley currently earns. I do not have a middle class lifestyle. I live in an asbestos-ridden, one-bedroomed flat on an estate in Hackney. Steve Hedley knows this, as he stopped at my place on many occasions.

As regards claims that I am prone to “delusions of grandeur bordering on megalomania” or a “crazed individual”, then clearly these are recent illnesses, because on July 6 I was asked by Steve Hedley to attend the picket line the following morning. He said, “It would be good if you came, as we need people with experience.”

I did attend and Steve Hedley shook my hand and thanked me for coming. I will only be too pleased to work with him at any time, but I will not be willing to keep quiet if I have any criticisms to make. Incidentally I have been going to building workers’ picket lines for 30 years, during disputes my dad was involved in.

I will not indulge in smearing Steve Hedley’s character. Indeed in my article I wrote, “Steve Hedley has much greater standing than most people” - an assessment I still stand by despite his attacks on me!

Steve is largely unable to challenge the main points in my article and when he does he presents a poor defence. For example, his claim that in regard to signalworkers at Euston it was only a “rumour spread by ourselves in order to panic management” about them taking strike action, then how come at a meeting on August 5 1998 he agreed to approach the signalworkers about taking action? Why didn’t he say there was no chance of anything happening? How come at the Strike Support Group meeting I was invited to attend he said in front of 20 witnesses that “only two of the five” were prepared to take action? Incidentally, at the August 5 meeting Steve agreed that ‘mistakes’ had been made.

Regarding my claim that I advised him to get an education when he was sacked. Pardon me, but he was already studying part-time at college for a degree! Good for him, I say: working class militants should utilise all opportunities to educate themselves, and my original advice was given because I feared he would get sacked and be permanently unemployed.

I did not bring Brian Higgins into anything - Steve asked him to speak at a meeting. Steve also asked for his advice when he was sacked and in the first few weeks after then. He largely ignored the advice.

Mark Metcalf
London

All Irish

I have been following the debate in your paper concerning the theses, ‘Ireland and the British-Irish’, and would like to commend Jack Conrad and the other contributors.

While there is much in the theses I would agree with, I believe Jack has erred in creating a new semi-nation, “the British-Irish”. Loyalists, republican socialists, RUC, nationalists have one thing in common - we are all Irish. Unfortunately, one section of our people have been encouraged, by virtue of a more privileged position, to see themselves as somehow distinct from the rest of the Irish nation. This myth has been reinforced by the likes of Thatcher, who said that the Six Counties were as British as Finchley, by the manipulation of a British-dominated media, and by base sectarianism.

Apart form the rights or wrongs of point 15 in Jack’s theses, it is also impracticable. I come from a republican area completely surrounded by loyalist areas. Would my community have the right to opt out of any new “British-Irish” statelet? This thesis allows for the repartitioning of Ireland with a large proportion of the population opposing the very existence of the statelet. This would not be a solution.

The future does not lie in repartitioning our country, or indeed through the failed Good Friday agreement, but through working for the establishment of a 32-county socialist republic. Some of our people remain to be convinced of the benefits of a united Ireland, never mind a socialist Ireland. However, that does not mean socialists should advocate solutions where the most reactionary elements could opt out and create another sectarian state to dominate. This would be like socialists agreeing to the pro-Indonesia militias carving out a piece of East Timor for themselves.

Socialists should insist on the British government announcing an intention to withdraw from Ireland. Only when this happens can progressive forces in unionism/loyalism have the opportunity to come to the fore.

Ruairi McCallan
IRSP Long Kesh

Panacea

When I read Michael Malkin’s article about Kosovo and East Tibet (Weekly Worker September 16), it gave the strong and worrying impression that for the CPGB the right of nations to self-determine is the only question communists should be worried about. Of course, comrade Malkin was being polemical and perhaps ‘bending the stick’ to expose inconsistencies.

It does however seem to me that the many in the CPGB are beginning to regard the right to self-determine as a democratic panacea for bringing the working class closer together and are beginning to see the question where it does not exist.

Jack Conrad’s approach seems to be to correctly observe the cultural cohesion of Irish Protestants and then to look for a geographical area in which they are dominant. The problem with this approach is that it is difficult to imagine the British-Irish themselves finding it particularly democratic, as it divides their own community into areas which are British-Irish and Irish-Irish. Some of them are free to become independent and some of them are ‘chillingly herded into catholic Ireland’. That is not to mention the Catholics who are ‘chillingly herded into protestant Ireland’.

The impression the Conrad thesis gives is to have solved the problem of the divided community in Northern Ireland. I do not believe this can be done using only formal democratic rights, although the minimum demand for a united, secular, republican Ireland is surely correct.

Andrew Cutting
St Andrews

Reactionary KLA

The CPGB is correct in supporting the independence of East Timor and Kosova while opposing Nato/UN intervention, but is wrong in characterising both the progressive Fretilin and the reactionary KLA as national liberation movements who should be supported.

Fretilin emerged as a legitimate anti-imperialist guerrilla movement inside a backward capitalist colony which courageously fought against the Portuguese empire and later on against the genocidal occupation of the US-backed dictatorship that crushed one million leftwingers and annihilated one third of the East Timorese.

The KLA never fought against imperialism. On the contrary, it was armed and financed by the west and it was the main imperialist local puppet. Kosova was not a colonial capitalist enclave, but an oppressed province inside a former degenerated workers’ state that had been transformed into a new bourgeois state. For workers all over the world it is decisive to defend post-capitalist relations against bourgeois restoration. The KLA was in the forefront of the social counterrevolution and wanted Kosova to secede in order to transform it into a western, free-market, semi-colonial enclave. KLA leaders participated in the ethnic cleansing of an entire republic (Krajina) and today are driving out the gypsies and Serbs.

Indonesia peacefully accepted the intervention of UN troops in an occupied territory which has just voted for independence. Imperialism, which initially supported Indonesia’s annexation, now sought to take advantage of the fact that reaction wiped out several radical pro-independence activists immediately after the referendum, and is preparing to guarantee the transformation of East Timor into a normal capitalist semi-colony.

Yugoslavia, on the other hand, was heavily attacked by all the imperialist powers. It is Europe’s only former multinational ‘socialist federation’ which does not accept its dissolution and has continuously had a government based on the old Stalinist party. United Germany emerged promoting the division of Yugoslavia. At least one million Serbs were ethnically cleansed from lands in which they were the majority population for centuries. The economy and infrastructure of all Serbs areas have been severely damaged by the combination of the most terrible bombardments and economic blockade.

Marxists defended Kosovar rights to secede from capitalist Serbia, but when Nato launched its attack we needed to defend the whole oppressed country against the planet’s bosses. The KLA was a direct imperialist tool.

John Stone
London

Key silence

Ian Hamilton (Letters, September 16) is very indignant that I appear to have “suggested” that he “no longer supports the right of nations to self-determination”.

Yet around the issue of Kosova, he goes on to do just that. His support for the right of self-determination is a bit like Alice in Wonderland - jam tomorrow. Comrade Hamilton dredges up the obligatory quote from Lenin to excuse his denial of Kosovar rights today and asks, “Does comrade Donovan deny that getting Nato out of the Balkans is a far larger part of ‘the general democratic world movement’ than supporting the KLA?”

So what “general democratic world movement” are we talking about, comrade? The forces that were actually fighting Nato and the KLA - in the real world, as opposed to comrade Hamilton’s imagination - were the most debased fascistic and extreme racist excrescence of Stalinism and Serbian nationalism. Many of them were those who have been agitating for the ‘final solution’ of the ‘removal’ of the ethnic Albanian population from Kosova for the whole of Milosevic’s period in office. Does this “general democratic” movement include Milosevic’s fascist deputy prime minister, Vojislav Seselj, one of the most notorious advocates of the wholesale expulsion of the ethnic Albanians, who gained notoriety in the earlier period of the break-up of Yugoslavia for his call to “cut the Croats’ throats with rusty knives”?

This goes unmentioned in comrade Hamilton’s letter. He states: “at no time have I counterposed the Albanian national struggle to a socialist federation, but I have argued that these two struggles should be interlinked”; and “only on the basis of breaking Serb nationalist illusions in the working class can Kosova be granted the self-determination it desires”.

There is something missing from all this abstract verbiage, is there not? It may have escaped comrade Hamilton’s notice that there was a shooting war over the question of Kosova. One can criticise the KLA for its military bloc with Nato as much as one likes, but that will cut no ice with those several hundred thousand ethnic Albanians who were driven out of Kosova during the war, and who have now been able to return thanks to the victory of the military bloc of Nato and the KLA. Abstract verbiage aside, which side was comrade Hamilton on in the war between the Albanian people of Kosova and the Serbian forces? Not some imaginary Albanian people in some other parallel universe, but those that were being persecuted, massacred and driven out of their homeland earlier this year.

Without taking a clear position in defence of this people’s democratic right to exist irrespective of their illusions in Nato imperialism, comrade Hamilton’s claim to stand for Kosova self-determination is utter twaddle, and thus the biggest political gift to the Nato ‘liberators’ imaginable. A people that has been annihilated cannot exercise the right to self-determination, within or without a ‘socialist federation’.

Comrade Hamilton’s silence on this key question bespeaks his implicit position. For all his ‘theoretical’ gloss about the need for a socialist federation “without Milosevic, Nato and the KLA”, his unspoken position is that the Serbian forces - Chetnik pogromists and fascists and all - are part of some ‘anti-imperialist’ “general democratic world movement”.

Truth is concrete - the nationalism of the KLA under Serb rule was the nationalism of a desperately oppressed people against a racial tyranny in Kosova that had more in common with the policies of Adolf Hitler than anything associated with democracy.

Ian Donovan
London

Stalin’s genius

The people who denigrate Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, those who berate the Morning Star because it gives praise where praise is due, are obviously under the influence of the SWP or have not studied history.

In 1918 70% of Russians were illiterate. By 1932, illiteracy was all but abolished. As a result, the people became politically aware and educated, and embraced socialism, collectivisation and the abolition of capitalism.

That the citizens of the Soviet Union fully supported socialism is shown by the fact that during the Great Patriotic War they made such incredible sacrifices. They drove the nazis out of the Soviet Union and in 1945 hoisted the red flag over the Reichstag. All this was achieved under the leadership of Joseph Stalin.

Khruschev’s vile and poisonous attack on Joseph Stalin was followed by the rise of groups that were corrupted by power and privilege. In 1991, the counterrevolutionaries used Gorbachev to dissolve the CPSU and declare that socialism in the USSR was dead. The Soviet people resisted to such an extent that Yeltsin declared war on the soviets, shelling the White House, killing at least 2,000 comrades who had come to defend it.

Despite this treachery, the sell-out of the Soviet Union to western imperialism, communism still lives. People are fighting back, but with no one with Stalin’s calibre, his genius, to lead them, it will be an uphill task to re-establish socialism in the land of its birth. But, as Joseph Stalin declared in 1941 on the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, “Our cause is just. Victory is certain”.

William Benton
Birmingham

Stalin’s terror

Having witnessed several of the countless numbers of capitalist injustices first-hand, it has puzzled me that more people are not dedicating themselves to our noble cause.

I have come to the conclusion that people fear a brutal, Soviet-like regime in which all opposition is violently crushed. We must begin a campaign to reassure people that, far from being oppressive, communism is in fact the purest form of democracy. Above all, comrades, we must renounce Stalin and his reign of terror and distance ourselves as much as possible from the violent acts of this brutal dictator, who destroyed the lives of millions of hard-working Russian citizens.

Victor Davies
Ipswich