WRP: Stand Alongside Colonel Gaddafi! Defend Libyan Revolution!

WRP Stands Firm Behind Gaddafi!

Hat-tip to Janine

From the Newsline, organ of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

We print excerpts of Colonel Gadaffi’s speech to the Libyan people made last Tuesday evening to rally them against the internal counter-revolutionary forces and their UK and US backers.

I SALUTE you oh courageous people, I salute you oh Al-Fateh youth, national youths, Al-Fatimiyah youths, the youths of challenge, the generation of challenge and the generation of rage.
More (Yes!) Here.

Yesterday they printed this,

 
WHILE Cameron is in Kuwait seeking to sell more rubber bullets, poison gas and a variety of war machines to the British-trained Gulf monarchies, the Libyan leader, Colonel Gadaffi, remains in Tripoli, fighting for Libyan independence, and making a fool of the British Foreign Secretary Hague,who announced Britain’s real ‘war aim’ when he told the world that Gadaffi was fleeing to Venezuela.

The British ruling class from the 2004 meeting between Blair and Gadaffi in a tent in the desert, where he cooed sweet nothings into Gadaffi’s ear, in order to win big oil contracts, had been treating Gadaffi like a long-lost cousin.

Now with a right-wing reactionary uprising under way, the British hyena is showing its teeth, mustering its media to treat Gadaffi as a ‘mad dog’ who must be put down, spurred on by the hope that some Islamic state of Benghazi, if established over Gadaffi’s dead body, will hand over Libya’s oil to them.

However, Hague has overreached himself. He is now being cautioned to be more careful, since if Gadaffi wins this struggle, oil-obsessed British capitalism may well find that the ‘Blair tactic’ of massive, rear-licking cosiness may not work.

(…)

We urge the Libyan masses and youth to take their stand alongside Colonel Gadaffi to defend the gains of the Libyan revolution, and to develop it.

More (Yes indeed!) Here.

Historical Background from entdinglichung: here.

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The British Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP) was a sizeable organisation up to its implosion in 1985.

From 1976, in order to fund its daily paper, Newsline, the WRP took money from Libya, Iraq and other vicious dictatorships, rewarding its paymasters with anti-Jewish propaganda and support for those regimes, dressed up as “anti-imperialism”.

In 1981, actress Vanessa Redgrave, the WRP’s best known member, sued our comrades John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna for libel for comparing the WRP to the Moonie sect and the Scientologists, and for reporting that the WRP used systematic emotional and physical violence against vulnerable young people.

The WRP tied us up us in an expensive legal case for four years, although they never took the case to court. In response, we launched a campaign for a labour movement inquiry.

We wrote in our paper that there was “circumstantial evidence” the WRP was getting money from one or more Arab governments. We challenged them to sue us on that. They never did. Their paper spoke glowingly of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Libyan despot Qaddafi.

The WRP ran a heresy hunt against us because we told the truth about them. They were able to make some headway. Sizeable numbers on the left accepted the WRP’s public enthusiasm for the Libyan regime as “anti-imperialism”. A WRP-run broad paper, Labour Herald (1981-5), was able to get articles, and speakers for its meetings, from Labour Party dignitaries such as Ken Livingstone, Ted Knight, David Blunkett and even Margaret Hodge.

We were vindicated in 1985 when the WRP expelled its 72-year-old leader Gerry Healy, accusing him of sexually abusing young women members. As the fall-out increased, Healy’s associates admitted that the organisation had, in return for money, spied on Arab dissidents and prominent Jews in Britain. Most shamefully of all they helped to get a number of Iraqi Communist Party members shot by Saddam Hussein.

We were right to stand up for honesty and clean political hands in the labour movement. We were right to stand up against people who had sold themselves and become the mouthpieces for vicious despots. And we were right to say that anti-semitism and self-serving Arab nationalism, dressed up as “anti-Zionism” and “anti-imperialism”, is political poison.

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