[Marxism] "Gas and Water Socialism"

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The following two items consist of
1.  an article by Eamonn McCann in a Belfast publication *The Blanket*
5 April 2004,
2.  a critical reply I have forwarded to The Blanket for publication.

*******************

1.  "Following the True Tradition"
<http://lark.phoblacht.net/truetradem.html>

I was giving out the other night about one of the lying liars who lie
for George Bush accusing Sinn Fein of not telling the truth when a
Shinner friend warned: "You're not just trying to get at us, are you?"

What had prompted his suspicion was my wondering why they hadn't told
the lying liar to go boil his head in a bucket of shite.

Bush's "special envoy" on the North, fanatical pro-warrior Mitchell
Reiss, had rubbished Sinn Fein's full-page Paddy's Day ad. on policing
in the New York Times as, "at best enormously misleading and at worst
untruthful." Reports had it that the ad cost $25,000---more than half
the sum which Sinn Fein officially spent on their entire Assembly
election campaign back in November. It must have been terrifically
important to them to get their policing message across to the
influential Times readership. In the same measure, I reasoned, they
must have been terrifically angered at Reiss for rubbishing their
effort.

So, why hadn't they blasted him back with both barrels? Responded with
the sort of full-blooded denunciation which would automatically have
been unleased if it had been, say, the SDLP, the UUP or Fine Gael
which had accused them of telling untruths about policing?

What came from Sinn Fein instead was a pained point-by-point reply to
Reiss in Irish American newspapers, and a statement explaining how
"disappointed" the party was at his harsh words. Singing, as always
these days, from the official Sinn Fein hymn-sheet, Fr. Sean McManus
lamented that Reiss had "hurt both President Bush and the Irish peace
process."

We have reached the stage of obesience where an advocate for Sinn Fein
responds to an attack on the party by a Bush staffer not by rounding
on Bush but by chastising the staffer for being "hurtful" to Bush...

Another of the party's committed US supporters, lawyer Ed Lynch, was
"dismayed and disappointed" by Reiss's statement, particularly in view
of the "good work" done by Reiss and the Bush administration to date.

Removing any lingering danger that dismay at Reiss's statement might
be misunderstood as hostility to Bush, McManus added: "I have
consistently praised President Bush on the peace process...Since 1972,
when I first came to the US, the only president I have not criticised
on Ireland is George W. Bush."

Now, the notion of a Bush crony like Reiss calling anybody to account
for untruthfulness is staggering in its effrontery. Bush himself, it
will be recalled, has long been lying like a trooper. (How he learnt
how troopers lie is, like so much else in his parasite past, a
mystery. Drafted at a time when tens of thousands of other young
Americans were dutifully dying or losing their limbs or minds while
massacring villagers in Vietnam, Bush duly reported, took

advantage of the tax-funded dental examination on offer to inductees,
then scarpered before sundown to spend the next two years
drunk-driving around Texas, harrassing women and generally using his
newly-capped teeth to bite every hand which had unknowingly fed him.)

Bush has stayed true, so to speak, to form since. His former top
counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke is just the latest to confirm
that he frauded, faked and falsified evidence to procure death and
misery for millions and plunge the world into danger by going to war
on Iraq. It isn't so much that the Bush gang can't handle the truth as
that when they are contemplating violence they can't be arsed about
the truth.

So, you'd have thought, would you not?, that some spokesperson for
Sinn Fein would have responded to Reiss by reminding him of pots and
kettles and telling him to fuck off. But, as we've seen, not a bit of
it.

Why? The cynical view is that SF leaders so adore being included on
the Washington-gig guest-list, and would find it so devastating to be
dropped, that they accept a slapping around from a well-placed wretch
like Reiss as part of the price to be paid.

But there's something more fundamental going on here, too, which in
its own cack-handed way entitles the party to some slack. It's doing
what comes naturally. Natural to Nationalists, that is. By which I
don't mean Northern Catholics, a disparate lot, but adherents of
Nationalist ideology.

Nationalism is, essentially, neither left-wing nor right-wing, radical
nor reactionary, pro- nor anti-imperialist. A Nationalist party like
Sinn Fein tends to occupy whichever point on the political spectrum
best suits its needs as notional embodiment of the nation at any
particular point. As place and time and assessments of the "national
interest" changes, Nationalism shifts position. It will express itself
rhetorically in anti-imperialist terms when this is the best pitch for
pulling in votes or keeping a particular element on-side. On a
different day, facing a different audience, it will hymn praise for
the role and influence of imperialist power. One day, an Ogra speaker
is licensed to tell UCD students that Sinn Fein believes that Bush's
"War on Terror" is a hypocrite's cover for imperialist aggression. The
next day, a Sinn Fein leader on tour in the US will assure a Senator
that the party is wholly in support of the "War on Terror". It's
always been thus.

Re-reading Dorothy Macardle's "The Irish Republic" a couple of weeks
ago, I came across an account of a clandestine June 1920 meeting of
the First Dail, then in its pure phase, prior to the Cosgrave
sell-out, the de Valera sell-out and all subsequent sell-outs. These
were the incorruptibles, or at least the uncorrupted, in the full
flush of political youth, unbesmirched by office, careless of personal
advancement, focused only on national freedom. Michael Collins and
Harry Boland were prominently in attendance.

The delegates voted to empower de Valera, then on a north American
tour, to spend a million dollars held in the US to buy friends and
influence people in Washington. The US was in its post-World War One
anti-Red frenzy, the political class filled with hysteria about
Bolshevik Russia, which it wanted the rest of the world to shun.

Making his bid to win US establishment support, Dev gave a series of
interviews heaping praise on the 1903 Platt Amendment, the arrangement
which handed the US permanent sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay,
guaranteed that Cuba would never enter into an international agreement
without US approval, and allowed the US untrammeled right to intervene
in Cuba if ever it felt threatened by developments on the island. The
Platt Amendement has provided the framework for US policy on Cuba ever
since.

The New York Globe headlined de Valera's endorsement of the Platt
Amendment as marking the moment when Irish Republicanism, for all its
occasionally unnerving rhetoric, spelt it out that it represented no
threat to US interests: "De Valera opens the door!" Republican
traditionalists like John Devoy who attacked Dev for compromise were
dismissed as "zealots...unrealistic" and pushed out to the margins of
the Movement.

The same meeting of the Dail which despatched Dev to reassure the 1920
equivalents of Reiss that Sinn Fein approved of the adminisatration's
"good work," unanimously passed a motion calling for agents to be
despatched to the governments of "several countries," including---the
only country specifically mentioned---"the Government of the Russian
Socialist Soviet Federal Republic, with a view to establishing
diplomatic relations with that Government."

Part of the anti-imperialist struggle on this side of the pond. God
Bless America on the other.

Sinn Fein leaders today are not betraying party tradition when they
authorise a spokesperson out of earshot of Washington to call the liar
Bush a liar---then, the next day, bite their tongues rather than
repudiate one of the liar's lying representatives who has accused them
of untruth. To attack the current Sinn Fein leadership for reneging on
principles is to miss the main point: they are not deviating from but
are following closely along the path trodden by every previous Sinn
Fein leadership.

It's the Sinn Fein tradition, and the Nationalist ideology underlying
it, which needs to be questioned, not the current leadership's
interpretation of it.

*********************************

2.  Reply by James Daly

Reply to Eamon McCann's: Following the True Tradition, 5 April 2004

Eamon McCann's cloacal obscenities are an insult to the reader, and to
the subject, while his rhetoric ("lying liar") is considerably less
brilliant than he obviously thinks it is.

So is his politics. His position is not Connolly (though he gives no
reason for abandoning Connolly) but pure O'Casey, if not Walker. The
universal abstraction "Nationalism" ("an ideology") is the enemy.

Of course leaders of national struggles may be or become
opportunistic. So may leaders of class struggles. It is to a great
extent a measure of the pressures of defeat.

But the seeds of the present debacle are in the internationalised
bourgeois (and, in the Irish context, in effect two-nation) "conflict
resolution" approach to which McCann has been such a significant
contributor over the decades. Its uncritically accepted theatre is
entirely six county, territorially part of the British state due to a
long drawn-out process of imperialism, deceit, sectarianism, and
bestial violence. McCann berates "nationalism" -- but not in its armed
British and loyalist sectarian forms. The successful domination of
both of these has to be accepted as normalcy. Then a six county
nationalist working class must ask permission of a loyalist working
class to come aboard to pursue "bread-and-butter" politics in the
context of a secure United Kingdom.

The Good Friday agreement is logically and historically the result of
McCann's kind of politics.

James Daly

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