The article "Adams: `British partition of Ireland means repression and injusticé, " which appeared in Militant no. 37 contained one small fact, which I suspect, few workers knew - the real first name of the prime minister of the capitalist government of the Irish Republic.
His name appears in all the big-business newspapers as "Bertie" Ahern. His actual name is "Bartholomew," which the Militant printed.
In common with capitalist politicians, the world over, Ahern likes to pretend he is an ordinary person. Like "Bill" Clinton and "Tony" Blair, he uses a friendly sounding shortened version of his first name as part of an effort to appear as the friend of working people.
The truth is Ahern speaks for the interests of the exploiting classes in Ireland, and the Militant, which is published in the interests of working people, rightly has no truck with this cover up. The bourgeois party Ahern leads - Fianna Fail - also likes to pose as the defender of Irish national rights - calling itself "The Republican Party." This too is false. It is workers and small farmers in Ireland, under the leadership of Sinn Fein, not the wealthy ruling families Ahern represents, who are the backbone of the advancing struggle to free Ireland and end partition.
When I submitted the article to the Militant editors, they insisted I discover Ahern's correct first name, instead of guessing. At 9 o'clock at night, my phone research took me to the library of the Irish Times, the main bourgeois paper in Dublin.
The librarian explained that in response to earlier inquiries she had spent a lot of time, trying to track down this piece of information. She eventually learned the truth from Ahern's secretary. "But I have never seen it written down anywhere," she told me emphatically. "I don't think you should use it."
Well, unaffected by the hesitations which afflict the servants of the rich, the Militant did print Ahern's name. For me it was an object lesson in how being sloppy about a seemingly small detail can obscure an important political truth.
Tony Hunt
London, England
More on Tibet
The news that the CIA funded the Dalai Lama's movement
(letter by Mark Friedman, October 19 Militant) must qualify as
one of the least surprising "revelations" of the year.
Today the question of "Free Tibet" is raised, along with "prison labor" and the all-encompassing "human rights," as part of a campaign by sections of the capitalist class who face competition from Chinese imports. And perhaps also by capitalists who profit from the trade, but want to pressure the Chinese government for better terms.
Their arguments are echoed by the trade union bureaucracy, who bemoan the loss of "American jobs" to low-paid, or allegedly unpaid, Chinese workers. (These bureaucrats don't call for union scale wages for U.S. prisoners, instead they're trying to raise the wages of prison guards!)
The Dalai Lama also seems to attract an endless supply of alienated middle-class intellectuals, who find Eastern mysticism more appealing than its more mundane Western equivalents. But whether in the U.S. or Tibet, winning workers, farmers, and youth away from such reactionary movements requires a clear Leninist approach to national oppression. As far as I can recall, the last article the Militant ran on Tibet only wrote in passing that the Chinese Stalinists have trampled on Tibetan national rights. We should look at the history of the communist movement on this question.
In his "Open Letter to the Members of the Chinese Communist Party," written in 1967, veteran Chinese communist leader P'eng Shu-tse wrote, "In 1922 the Chinese Communist Party decided to acknowledge the right of self-determination of the national minorities, which meant they had the right to establish their own independent government in such places as Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and the Muslim community in Sinkiang. This decisions was taken in order to win the sincere collaboration of the national minorities and to unify the nation on the basis of equality.
"Since your party took power in 1949, it has yet to solve the problem of the national minorities on the principles practiced by Lenin. Formally the party has established the autonomous regions of Tibet and Inner Mongolia, yet, in practice the national minorities are still ruled in the tradition of the great Han race.... It is for this reason that the old antagonisms still lie just beneath the surface and could possibly foment a crisis of still another civil war."
The Militant article referred to Tibet as today's "poor little Finland."
Leon Trotsky helped to steel the Socialist Workers Party against the bourgeois hue and cry around the 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland.
In that same year, Trotsky responded to Hitler's noises about a "Greater Ukraine," by raising the slogan of "a united, free, and independent workers' and peasants' Soviet Ukraine," explaining that "...but for the rape of Soviet Ukraine by the Stalinist bureaucracy there would be no Hitlerite Ukrainian policy."
Marc Lichtman
Brooklyn, New York
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