WRP pamphlet: a 60p smokescreen

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Manchester, July 2. For details contact YCND, 11 Goodwin St, London N4. To join YCND, send £1 to 11 Goodwin St. AND STILL they have sued!

The WRP and their suer-inchief, Ms V. Redgrave, have still not acted to wipe off the public record their implied admission that the WRP is subsidised by the Libyan bourgeois government.

They have still not dared sue me for saying and repeating that all the political and circumstantial evidence indicates that they are pensioners of the erratic Islamic despot Col. Gaddafi. Nor have they sued me for saying and repeating that at the time, four years ago, when Newsline endorsed, justified, and defended the shooting of members of the Iraqi Communist Party, there were similar indications that the WRP was receiving money from the vicious Hussein regime that shot them.

As regular SO readers will know, this is not because of a principled reluctance to invoke the courts against a labour movement organisation. The WRP have steadfastly refused our call for a labour movement inquiry, and through Ms Redgrave they have involved Socialist Organiser (through John Bloxam and myself in a costly law suit for, among other things, comparing them to a quasi-religious sect. If they do not sue me now, it is because they do not dare.

It is because they know what I say to be true and indefensible.

Now even those who have so far been inclined to give the WRP the benefit of the doubt have no good reason left for doing so. The WRP's inability to sue is itself the final clinching piece of circumstantial evidence: it' is an admission of guilt.

They don't dare act to try to wipe out this implied admission. Instead they continue to try to bury it. For the last two months they have waged their biggest and most energetic campaign in the labour movement these many years. It is quite a skilled campaign of its - Stalinist - kind. They denounce the BBC's 'witch hunt (the BBC 'Money Programme' said they were subsidised by Libya) - they do not answer the charge. Their message is: The BBC says it, so it can't be true' Such is the hostility to the media in the labour movement that it protects those whose basic 'case' this is. But it is both illogical and irrational.

We have no other source for most of our information about the world than the serious bourgeois media - no more than did Marx and Engels for all their lives or Lenin and Trotsky for most of theirs. It is necessary to read and view critically and with due regard to bias. But to say you don't believe anything the media says would be to say you know virtually nothing about the world you live in! There is no independent working class world-wide information network, and the Stalinist media are qualitatively worse than the liberal bourgeois media.

The cry of 'bourgeois lies' has always helped the Stalinists hide the horrors of their regimes from the labour movement.

50 years after it happened, one could still find Maoists obsessed with the fact that Trotsky contributed an article to the Daily Express in 1929! It is necessary to know how to separate the essential from secondary or even trivial considerations.

The WRP have also skilfully used the Stalinist technique of the 'amalgam' . Socialist Organiser, which has long said what the BBC said about the WRP and Libya, did not denounce the BBC as 'witeh-hunters' for saying what wẹ say and believe lo be truc -for that would be to say either that we ourselves were witchhunters' , or else that the anti working class BBC saying it made it untrue or irrelevant that a sect claiming to be part of the labour movement may be a bought and paid for stooge of one or more bourgeois states.

The WRP cover their guilt and deflect attention from the issue by denouncing the latest accuser - the BBC - and in the same operation try to cover Socialist Organiser in mud.

Arsenic

Now the WRP have put their articles on the BBC - and Socialist Organiser - into a glossy 60p pamphlet. Its cover is appropriately green - the colour alike of Gaddali and of arsenic poison, the physical cquivalent of the politics' that the WRP purveys. It is called The Money Programme Exposed'. What it exposes is that for the WRP SO is the real target. The selection of 'readers' comments' is concerned far more with SO than with the BBC.

That's the name of the game.

Even if the allegations about the WRP and Libya first appeared in the Sun, that would be less important than establishing whether the allegation is true or not. Do they get money from Libya? Are Healy, Banda, Redgrave and Mitchell people whose organisation was being paid by the Iraqi military dictatorship at the time they justified that regime's butchery of Iraqi CPers? These are the Issues.

Of course, Healy, Banda, Mitchell, Redgrave, you could still try to retract your implied admission of guilt by suing me. You don't dare.

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Socialist Organiser May 19 132 1983 Page 14 no.

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