Re: Xxxx/Militant on Malvinas

[Philip Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lou Paulsen wrote, in an excellent email to Xxxx L:

>I don't know much about your traditions, but I suppose it also follows that
>you believe that there is an Ulster nation which has the 'right of
>self-determination' as against Ireland as a whole?  That if Israel has
>expelled the inhabitants of a Palestinian village and founded a Zionist
>garrison settlement thereon, a Palestinian state would have no right to
>reclaim the village against the vote of the inhabitants?


The Militant Tendency in Britain had an appalling position and record on
Ireland.  While in 1969 they apparently opposed the deployment of British
troops into ireland, they pretty quickly moved away from this position.
For the rest of the period of struggle in the North of Ireland, Militant
opposed the call for the withdrawal of the British troops.  Within the
Labour Party and LP Young Socialists, they always voted against motions
calling for British withdrawal.

I don't think anyone was surprised when they opposed the call for the
withdrawal of the British war fleet dispatched by Thatcher to put the
'Argies' in their place.  Given their reactionary position on British
troops in Ireland, it was to be expected.

I suspect that anyone who made two piles of Militant articles - one of
stuff attacking British policy in Ireland and one of attacking
republicanism - they would find the anti-republican pile a lot higher than
the anti-imperialist pile.

In fact, they had such a social-chauvinist position that in Ireland itself
they had two separate organisations for many years - one in the South
(esconced in the reactionary southern Labour Party, which perenially went
into coalition with Fine Gael, the most reactionary bourgeois party in the
South) and a separate group in the North (which did the usual 'gas and
water' politics, mainly among the Protestant and loyalist workers, rather
than the Catholic ghettos).  Both sides of the border, they denounced Irish
republicanism and armed resistance to British rule.

Funnily enough, when Taaffe and his friends broke with the historic leader
of their tendency, ted Grant, a whole bunch of them went over to Scottish
left-nationalism.  People who had totally denounced and opposed the right
of the Irish to self-determination suddenly embraced Scottish
independence!!!

Philip Ferguson




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