Will the real Trotskyites please stand up?

In the August 29 Issue of Salient, someone claiming to be a bona-fide non-partisan political studies student at Victoria University vomitted forth in the letter column a frenzied and utterly fabricated attack on the Socialist Labour League.

The political purpose of this attack is an attempt to divert attention from the content of the first meeting held at Victoria University by the Socialist Labour League.

The meeting was on Security and the Fourth International. The Socialist Action League, which figures prominently in the letter, has kept a cowardly and sinister silence, in public, for over two years on the indictment of their American godfather Joseph Hansen as an accomplice of the GPU, the Stalinist secret police.

In the Indictment of January 1 1975 it was proved conclusively that Joseph Hansen has maintained a 37 year cover up of the role of the GPU in the Trotskyist movement. Now it has also been revealed that Hansen formed a secret and personal contact with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in September 1940. This latest revelation has driven fake Trotskyists of the Socialist Action League to desperation in their cover-up attempt.

Trotsky fought continuously to expose the lies and falsifications of Stalin and particularly of the GPU'

The International Committee of the Fourth International continues in this tradition. With the two year investigation into Security and the Fourth International, the International Committee has laid the basis for clearing out of the workers movement the stench of the Stalinist counterrevolution carried over from the 1930's.

The practice of the Socialist Action League, a decaying bankrupt grouping of petty bourgeois democrats, is the opposite. They have nothing in common with revolutionary communism, Their practice is a refusal to set the historical record straight and lies and slander against those who do.

The alleged incident in the litter — of threatened violence and the barring of the letter writer from the meeting — is a fabrication from start to finish.

No one was barred from the meeting and no such incident took place.

One of the completely misused slogans in Hansen's orchestrated campaign of Lies and slander against the International Committee is "For democracy in the workers movement" — What they mean by this is defence of the 'rights' of the GPU, the Stalinist murder machine to operate in the workers movement without being exposed.

Presumably it is also a continuation of their past policy of defending the 'right' of J. Edgar Hoover, the late head of the FBI to speak on campuses throughout America.

I feel sure that "Hasty retreat" — pseudonym of the anonymous letter writer — did not object to the Prime Minister, the Right Honorable R.D. Muldoon speaking at Victoria. This courtesy however does not extend to revolutionary socialists. He or she concludes their letter :

"As a fee paying student my $30 odd Studass fee should. I feel, protect me from harassment on campus from people who had a questionable right to be there in the first place. The morons from the Socialist Labour League appear to be not only racist but act as Brown shirts in the extreme. Please restrict Political Barracking on campus to Bona-fide students !