from the arsenal of Joseph McCarthy. The technique is simple - make the most absurd charge, which no one would believe but then if vou can get a body set up to 'investigate' it the lie is given some respectability and perhaps people will think there is something to it.
We have no intention of giving respectability to a charge whose sole record will be as a dirty and only 'investigation' we suggest for any student of the byways of history is to describe in detail, if anyone has a strong enough stomach, how an organisation like the SLL/WRP, which started as an enemy of the capitalist system, prostituted the highest cause in the world to the methods of the gutter and in so doing led its leaders to utter political and mora degeneraton naris me sore meres or lac Workers Press 'charges' for the working class movement.
IRREPROACHABLE As for Joseph Hansen, he doesn't need anyone to vindicate him - history has already done it. Joe Hansen for four decades and more has served the only cause worth serving - the interests of the working class. For those same decades he has sought to defend the only ideas worth defending - the ideas or revolutonary warx sm. He did so as Trotsky's secretary and through the long years of repression, witch-hunt and isolation of the 1940s and 1950s.
Whether history will judge him right or wrong on any question, he sought to defend revolutionary socialism and the cause of the working class in the only way it can be defended -Enough scrap mous attennon to the ruin unrouen serious study and effort, and through a consistent fight for what you believe to be true. His stature as a revolutionary and a political fighter is irreproachable As for Healy and his bunch of liars they were only too pleased, in saner days, to have the support of Joe Hansen during the 1950s -- сусп диош: proudly the 'accomplice of the GPU" in praise of their organisation. And as for the other guilty party' George Novack, not merely was he working personally for years in day-to-day collaboration with your leadership but you, Mr Healy, put your own signature to public articles which were in reality written by this accomplice of the GPU.
The publication of Healy's attack in a journal claiming to be Marxist, nowever, does not represent the paranoia of a single individual, no matter how powerful he or she mav be within the WRP. It repres ents something much graver. It marks the complete and utter political degeneration of a sect which has claimed adherence to Trotskyism. it is the ultimate logic of sectarian politics, and it should be a terrible reminder to other groups on the left of what can happen when you start political debates by distorting the positions of your opponents and slandering them personally in no uncertain terms.
There were always traces of this in the WRP's predecessor, the Socialist Labour League (SLL), but in the 1950s and early '60s the slanders were milder, ine distortions less outrageous and the mecrnd rc gime of the organisation marginally more flexible. The roots of the present degeneration can be traced back to the events surrounding a major schism in the Fourth International in 1953, the subsequent emergence of two currents, the International Secretariat and the International Committee, and the failure of Healy to participate in the reunification of the two currents in 1963.
Red Weekly 29 January 1976