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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol 35 no. 20. 1972

Left Right Wright

Left Right Wright

Sir,

The opponents of the party to which I belong practise the personal smear. For quite a while they have gone around calling me a CIA agent.

Having some pity for this childishness, I mentioned to some one or other of them that if they did their homework they would find that I was once a member of the League of Empire Loyalists, until expelled for being too politically outspoken for them.

I am pleased to say that certain liberals and others who take leading positions in various left-wing movements are now making this fact widely known among students and others.

Let me say to them, why? I conjecture it is part of a concerted campaign to discredit the most advanced and active elements on the left as fascists, such as calling the sitters down in the July 14th Mobilisation fascist hooligans and the Kent Flats squatters lumpenproletarians.

I welcome these idiotic attacks, because they will quickly reveal to all that these so-called liberals and others who take leading positions in various left-wing movements are in fact nothing but a pack of hidden scabs and traitors, who are at work in their underhand way at the same task as the political henchmen of the ruling class, defusing student militancy.

The League of Empire Loyalists was a right wing organisation, but one which gained the support of some working class people because in a distorted way it had working class attitudes. The UDA in Ulster is a similar sort of organisation. Membership of such organisations by working class people is politically short-sighted, but not inconsistent with admirable working class attitudes My working class attitudes were the same when I was in the League of Empire Loyalists as now.

The League used nonviolent and even violent disruption against political henchmen and others. The League was ultra-patriotic. The league stood for the defence of the independence of the nations of the British Commonwealth, and others also, against American and Soviet imperialism. The League opposed the United Nations, at that time an instrument of the super-powers. I was expelled from the League of Empire Loyalists for giving real punch to these attitudes in public statements. I have gone on to see that only in the Marxist-Leninist Parties of Albania, China, N.Z. and elsewhere are these working class attitudes truly upheld.

My opponents clearly show by their attacks that they uphold none of these attitudes, that they are themselves tools of the ruling class, that they are traitors, not patriots, that they serve U.S. and U.S.S.R. imperialism, that they support the instruments of the super-powers. They show this by using my past association with just these sound working class attitudes to attack these attitudes among my present associations.

Neil Wright