Reds Under the Bed

It was not surprising that Muldoon used his old red-baiting tactics to try to discredit the strike. From overseas, he announced that the strike call page break was the work of a small group of communists and should be ignored. The idea is that people will be distracted from considering the real issues by worrying about whether they might be aligning themselves with "communists". (It is worth noting in passing that the SUP is not a communist Organisation, and would have to be pushed very hard before it even tried to pretend it was.)

The response to Muldoon's red-baiting was, in many quarters, to deny that communists were involved in any significant way in the strike call. This was done in such a way as to suggest that if the opposite was true, it would be alright to engage in red-bashing. It is unfortunate that many of the people who claim to abhor Muldoon's tactics actually go along with him at least half the way.