In defence of principled socialist with realistic views

I READ with bemusement Pat Corkery’s attack on Cork Socialist Party councillor Mick Barry (Letters, August 21) and with much greater alarm the letter by Desmond FitzGerald from Canary Wharf in London, no less.

Mr FitzGerald suggests that ethnic Russians living in Georgia should return to the ‘motherland’. Perhaps he believes they should be repatriated altogether.

Is Mr FitzGerald aware of the history of this kind of reasoning in eastern Europe after the First World War and more recently in the former Yugoslavia? From 1918 the Radeks in the Ukraine claimed that Soviet power in Red Ukraine was invalid because some of the workers who had voted to align themselves to the Russian Federation were ethnic Russians.

These Radeks were the same pro-White forces that massacred 30,000 Jews and have been venerated as heroes by the present nationalist and capitalist-restorationist government in the Ukraine.

Pat Corkery has a point that some of the left operate with double standards, where Russia is concerned, as against their more consistent opposition to US-led policy in Iraq. In opposing the war in Iraq, Mr Barry is in fact one of the more principled of socialists because he doesn’t resort to the Brit-bashing, Israeli-bashing anti-Semitism of some of the Irish left and doesn’t try and present either Saddam Hussein or al-Qaeda as freedom fighters.

He does recognise an illegal imperialist war in Iraq when he sees one. And I can’t see him supporting a Russian nationalist regime that has tried and failed to restore capitalism, endorsed gangsterism and decadent accumulation, as well as state-sponsored murder, embarked on genocide in Chechnya and clearly has cynical motives in Osettia and Georgia.

But what about the fact that NATO enlargement and this defence shield nonsense is cranking up the situation in the Caucasus and the fact that the Georgians first attacked the ethnic Russians of Osetia?

During the war in the former Yugoslavia, the position of most surviving Trotskyist groups from the 1970s and 1980s was none too brilliant. Most of them fought shy of attacking Serbian fascism and genocide because they saw Serbia as a last bastion of the old Stalinist order that they had critically supported during the Cold War.

The Socialist Workers Party even supported the UN arms embargo against Bosnia that disarmed the country in the face of five million Serbian soldiers and irregular killers under arms. The position of the Militant was not so crass, but fell well short of the support for Bosnia that was required. It was reluctance to break with the Cold War certainties of the Fourth International’s Stalinised past that condemned most of these groups to oblivion.

But Croat fascists carried out atrocities in Mostar too and so, today, has the Georgian government.

As for Desmond FitzGerald, is he suggesting that the Bangladeshi community of east London where he lives (or even the Irish) be repatriated?

I hope not.

Roger Cottrell

Rosscarberry

Co Cork