Former Salient Editor sorts out smearer

So Peter Rotherham has finally replied to the letters criticising him which were published over five weeks ago in Salient. It is worth noting that in his letter on the question of Solzhenitsyn and the nature of democracy in the socialist countries, Mr Rothcrham called for debate on the subject.

Terry Auld, Don Franks and I have obliged Mr Rotherham by joining the debate. But what have we got in return? Refusal to answer our arguments in a serious fashion, and petty abuse! I can assure Mr Rotherham and his very Young Socialists that his evasive delaying tactics will not wear me out, I am happy to accompany him in this debate as far as he wants to go, but I would like to warn him that the further he goes, the more he is exposing himself as an inept anti-communist.

To rum to Mr Rotherham's latest letter. He accuses me (along with Terry Auld and Don Franks) of a "disgusting display of fabrication, along with the usual apologies for the repressive policies of Stalin, Brezhnev and Mao." Mr Rotherham gives himself away with this silly smear. He knows full well that none of us support the Brezhnev clique of counter-revolutionaries, and that we have made this clear on a number of occasions including this correspondence. So why do you have to resort to lying about our political positions, Mr Rotherham?

Last Friday night I discovered Mr Rotherham hiding in the shadows in the Cuba Mall trying to sell "Socialist Action". He told me, in between his unsuccessful exhortations to the passers-by, that that I (and presumably Terry Auld and Don Franks) were "fellow travellers", just like people in the 1930's in western countries who supported and defended the Soviet Union. Mr Rotherham delights in using this term. At last year's "Socialist (?) Educational (??) Conference" in Wellington Mr Rotherham tried to smear Don Carson and me 2s "fellow travellers" after we had replied to crude attacks on the Vietnamese liberation fighters and their international allies by George Fyson and Keith Locke (who will be well known at present for trying to present himself as the latter-day Jack Lee of the Labour Party).

What does all this "fellow traveller" talk mean? Why does Mr Rotherham use it as a substitute for serious argument? The epithet "fellow traveller" is used by Rotherham because he thinks it will make me and others cringe and blush and run away. A lot of the better known supporters of the Soviet Union in the 1920's and 1930's later changed their positions and denounced it, especially when the renegade Khruschov joined in the imperialist's campaign to blackguard Joseph Stalin as a "butcherer" and "murderer" etc. Furthermore the term "fellow traveller" is most often found in the anti communist tirades of well known supporters of democracy like the late J. Edgar Hoover boss of the American FBI, and professional propagandists for Seato. As used by these people the term "fellow traveller" means a person who is so stupid that he has been sucked in by the horrid communists and acts as their dupes. Mr Rotherham of course uses the term in exactly the same sense as people like Hoover did — and with exactly the same objective in mind — to smear people.

However Mr Rothcrham's smear is misplaced. Neither Terry' Auld, Don Franks or I are "fellow travellers" because we believe in the doctrines of Marxism-Leninism.

I note that Mr Rotherham has now recognised that there is class struggle in socialist societies. But while he admits this point in the abstract he cannot understand it in a concrete fashion because manifestations of the class struggle in China and other socialist countries and revisionist countries are represented by the Trotskyites as mere squabbles within the bureaucracy. The part that the Chinese working class and peasants have played in the great struggles against counter-revolutionary agents like Liu Shao-Chi and Lin Piao is ignored by Mr Rotherham and other Trotskyites, and is effectively written out of history by them.

When I was in the People's Republic of China last year with the NZUSA delegation, a group of us visited a worker and his wife in a new housing settlement in Shanghai. I asked him what the Cultural Revolution had meant for him. As I outlined his answer in an interview in Salient (August 2, 1973): "What he said was that before liberation he and his family had lived in Shanghai in a slum and after the liberation they moved to a new apartment building. They moved from a very poor standard of housing to one which was pretty good even by our standards and he said that that made him tremendously happy and they thought that socialist society was pretty good. But at the same time there were struggles going on within the Communist Party that they knew vaguely about but these struggle weren't subjects for discussion among the working people. He said the difference after the Cultural Revolution was that all the conflicts between the two lines — the capitalist road of Liu Shao Chi and the revolutionary line of Mao Tsetung, which were limited to internal discussion within the Communist Party, came out into the open and people were forced to take an attitude towards this struggle. As a consequence people were spending a great deal more time in political study. It would be wrong to say that there was no political study among the working class before the Cultural Revolution, but the difference was that after the Cultural Revolution political study became absolutely essential as a guide to social practice."

During our visit we saw several other indications of the importance placed on political study of Marxist-Leninist works in China as a part of the deepening class struggle especially in the ideological sphere. Looking back now it seems fairly clear that what we were observing was the Chinese people's preparation for the Tenth Party Congress in late August last year where Chou En-lai exposed Lin Piao's counter-revolutionary role. Since the Tenth Pary Congress the class struggle has further deepened with the movement to criticise Lin Piao and Confucious.

Wilt Mr Rotherham tell me how he would characterise the criticisms of aspect of the Chinese education system by Huang Shuai, a 12-year-old girl who criticised her teacher's authoritarianism and Chung Chih-min, a student who exposed the fact that he had got into Nanking University because his father, a leading political cadre, had "pulled strings"? Both these cases have been widely publicised in the Chinese press. Are they manifestations of the continuing class struggle, Mr Rotherham, or are they examples of Chairman Mao's "repressive" policies?

Now Mr Rotherham, just think back to Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize lecture and his remarks when he nominated Andrei Sakharov for the Nobel Peace Prize. Remember his attacks on the national liberation movements, his lies about the "Hue mass killings", his smears on Ramsey Clarke and his defence of the South African fascists? Please tell me what is the "social essence" of that sort of thinking?

All Right!