You could be forgived for thinking that the point of joining a Trotskyite political party is to cheerlead for the most vicious and unpleasant of antisemitic and totalitarian political movements.
If you think that, you’ve never come across the Alliance for Workers Liberty.
Sean Matgamna gets it right again here:
“Explain why your attitudes are so perverse on Ireland and on Israel-Palestine”
They are not “perverse”. They are Marxist, Marxist in the sense of Lenin and Trotsky.
In principle, Israel-Palestine and Ireland involve the same question – how do socialists relate to communities or nations which are a minority in their region, whose right to be where they are is questioned, and whose right to assert their own identity is denied?
Nobody uses the expression, but the attitude of the kitsch-left, the attitude we emphatically reject, amounts to the belief that there are “bad peoples” – specifically, Israeli Jews and Northern Ireland Protestant-Unionists. (There are Catholic Unionists and Protestant Irish nationalists, but they are atypical).
Marxism recognises no such thing as a bad people. We look to history to explain both Israel and Northern Ireland Unionists. Where communities and nations exists, we do not say that they must voluntarily abolish themselves, or politically submerge themselves, on pain of being forcibly abolished. They acquire rights by the very fact of existing. Marxist socialists, intent on uniting the working class across the divides, then seek ways of accommodating different rights.
We seek national/communal compromise, and ways for the working classes in those communities and in rival communities to unite, despite the differences, around such “compromises” and mutual recognition of rights.
In all such cases, the only alternative to that approach is advocacy of, or at least support for, the physical conquest of such peoples as the Israeli Jews and the Northern Ireland Protestant-Unionists, a physical conquest that would inevitably involve a large degree of physical destruction.
The seemingly benign versions of the idea that Israel should go out of existence – “secular democratic state”, “bi-national state” – all start with the idea that Israel has no real right to exist, was a “mistake”, a crime of history and of “the Zionists”; and go on, from condemnation of Israel for not abolishing itself or agreeing to be replaced by an (Arab) “secular-democratic” or “bi-national” state, to support for its conquest by people who would conquer and dismantle it. Or, immediately, to support for people who will “make a start” in clearing out the Jews with homicide-suicide bombers in Israel’s buses and cafes.
Marxists such as Lenin have called themselves “consistent democrats”. Consistent and honest democrats, as distinct from the inconsistent and dishonest bourgeois democrats. We believe that minorities such as the Jews (and, for example, the Kurds) in the Middle East, and the Protestant-Irish of north-east Ulster have rights – rights trimmed down and attenuated only by practical possibilities. We reject Arab-Islamic, and Catholic-Irish-nationalist, chauvinism just as we reject Israeli-Jewish and Protestant-Unionist chauvinism.
Matgamna has little difficulty seeing things clearly, and as they are.
Why are other Trotskyite groups so perverse?
hat tip: MoreMediaNonsense