Peace through a balance of terror?

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TONY Richardson jesu itically takes me to task for dealing with Stalinism 'as an abstraction".

But, trapped within his own idiosyncratic time warp, in which imperialism has not changed since 1916 and Stalinism not since 1936, Tony Richardson reduces imperialism and Stalinism to frozen categories, with the latter cast as heipless victim of the former.

'The aggressive force on a world scale, are the imperialist powers ... despite what appears sometimes to be the case, the aggressive forces are the imperialists, " he tells us.

So the Communist Party have been right all along! Denying the right to self-determination to the countries of Eastern Europe, crushing the East Berlin uprising in 1953, destroying the Soviets in Hungary in 1956, invading Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979, banning Solidarnosc in 1982, etc., etc - these are not the actions of an aggressive force. No, they are merely the Stalinists using "their own methods of defending the nationalised property relations in those countries."

(And let's gloss over - for Tony Richardson certainly does - the domestic history of the Soviet Union. The figures for victims under Stalin's repression given by David Caute are roughly: 12 million dead in prison camps; two million dead in the forced removal of entire nationalities; 1½ million dead through forced collectivisation; plus also the direct victims of the purges. Anything aggressive about all this? Of course not -even if it sometimes appears to be the case...)

"Unilateral nuclear disarmament in Russia," Tony Richardson then warns us, "would lay it open to nuclear attack." (Andropov made a similar statement not that long ago).

But this endorses the arguments of the reactionary Cold Warriors and multilateralists -namely, that the existence of nuclear weapons is not a threat to peace but a guarantee of it. As long as the balance of terror exists, so too does peace!

To support the right of East Germans to be conscientious objectors "'means" , says Tony Richardson, "disarming East Germany altogether" • He can be assured of full support for such sentiments from the unashamedly Stalinist paper "Straight Left", which claims that supporting independent peace movements in East Germany "means campaigning here for the right of people in the German Democratic Republic to refuse to defend socialism". . The sentiments expressed are exactly the same.

But my cardinal sin be that I "even oppose war toys" • Childhood obviously just wouldn't be complete without your own model Korean Jumbo jet to shoot down, being able to invade Afghanistan in the comfort of your own bedroom, or genuine imitation guns that don't work to send to Spanish anarchists.

Tony Richardson concludes by denouncing as "reactionary" the demand by the unofficial (i.e. genuine, though he studiously avoids the word; given his politics, the only Eastern European peace movements he could endorse are the official, fake, Stalinist ones) peace movements for unilateral nuclear disarmament by the Soviet Union.

Such a demand portrays an infinitely more progressive outlook than that of Tony Richardson. It shows that those who advance it recognise that 'the enemy is in the home camp" and steers then in the direction of overthrowing the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Tony Richardson's arguments, on the other hand, excuse the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the name of a nominal 'anti-imperialism' which subordinates class struggle to power bloc politics.

STAN CROOKE, Glasgow.